Apollo 8 was planned as a test of the lunar module in Earth orbit. But the lunar module would not be ready before early 1969. On Friday, August 9, 1968, the NASA manager George Low proposed sending Apollo 8 to the Moon instead. That same afternoon, he and three colleagues flew to Huntsville to discuss it.
NASA then had only four months to prepare. The flight in December 1968 became the first human voyage to another celestial body.
“It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Franklin D. Roosevelt said this on May 22, 1932, at the commencement of Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.
Roosevelt was governor of New York and was running for president. In the same speech he said: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.” He won the election that November.
On November 14, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told a defense conference: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” He said he had heard it “long ago in the Army.” His reason: “the very definition of ’emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.”
Another version, “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable,” appears in Richard Nixon’s book Six Crises (1962). Nixon was paraphrasing Eisenhower.
The USA PATRIOT Act became law on October 26, 2001, six weeks after the September 11 attacks. Senator Patrick Leahy later recalled that he and House Majority Leader Dick Armey “insisted that we add a sunset for certain governmental powers.” Those provisions would expire at the end of 2005 unless Congress renewed them.
Leahy said the sunset “ensured that we would revisit the PATRIOT Act.” In March 2006, Congress made 14 of the 16 expiring provisions permanent. The other two received new sunsets of four years.
In 1932 the Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law that required a license to sell ice. Justice Louis Brandeis dissented. “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”
Americans now speak of the states as “laboratories of democracy,” an idea that takes its name from this dissent. One example is the health care law Massachusetts passed in 2006. It became the model for the federal Affordable Care Act.
An American television series usually begins as a pilot, a single episode made to sell the show to a network. In the traditional cycle, each network hears about 500 pitches every summer, orders about 20 pilots, and chooses four to eight of them as series. By one estimate in Variety, only a little over a quarter of all pilots made for American television go on to become series.
The first pilot of Star Trek, “The Cage,” did not sell. NBC agreed to a second pilot, and that one became the series.
In 2011 Eric Ries published The Lean Startup. The book named a practice already common in new companies. It is the minimum viable product.
Ries defines it as the fastest way to get through the build-measure-learn loop. His example was Zappos. The founder posted photos of shoes from local stores online. When an order came in, he bought the shoes at full price.
The test answered the real question. Would anyone buy shoes on the web? The website cost almost nothing, and it produced a real answer.
American software ships in beta and says so. Gmail carried the label for years while being used by millions. The product is released unfinished, on purpose, with the unfinishedness advertised.
American organizations run a small version first, in one region, one store, one department — and write the procedure afterwards from what happened. The rollout follows the pilot. The rule follows the rollout.