The Russians used a pencil

Today I'm sending a few pencils to a few friends. This is by no means a Valentine's Day inspired fit of romantic generosity (I'm not prone to these) but rather an acknowledgement of their role in the development of my thinking about management. The pencils are standard implements, made in Taiwan and bought from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They are stamped and labelled with the legend 'Russian Space Pens'. As museum shop memorabilia they pay tribute not so much to the ingenuity of some nameless Soviet cosmonautical designer as to the subsequent wash of Western management literature which has fed off this delightful and doubtless apocryphal story for years.

The story for whatever it's worth is that when NASA began sending manned satellites into space they needed to equip their astronauts with handy data recording devices which could work perfectly on any surface, at extreme temperatures and under zero gravity conditions. The standard ball point pen failed all these tests. Several years and millions of dollars of research time later, some bright spark at NASA asked the "I wonder where this might have been done before?" question and discovered that, faced with the same challenge, the Russians had simply used their pencils.

So when my friends receive their immaculately packaged pencils through the post this week, they might well exclaim, "Aha, time to think outside the box again" or "Keep it simple, stupid" or "Back to the Future time" or any of the other well worn management maxims that they have skilfully used the Russian space pen story to support over the years. Or maybe they'll just pop it behind their ear on their way to work without thinking too much about it - the way my grandfather did.