Failure Is Not an Option: Leadership, Decision-Making & Virtue Under Pressure

Three days in April 1970, a crippled spacecraft, and a room full of people who refused to lose the crew. In six short scenes from Apollo 13 — set beside the real mission — this course studies how good decisions actually get made when the stakes are total and the clock is running.

Each lesson reads one crisis moment through two lenses: Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive on leadership and decision-making, and the Catholic tradition of virtue — prudence, fortitude, justice, and hope. You’ll follow the arc every leader and helper knows: see the reality, decide under uncertainty, set the one priority that matters, improvise within real limits, turn the plan into action, and endure what you cannot control.

Along the way you’ll learn something most people get wrong — including what Gene Kranz actually told his team instead of the famous movie line. Two Further Reading paths in every lesson, one psychological and one spiritual, carry the material into your own formation and practice.