C hapter 1 · D eveloping a M issile :t he p ower of a utonoMy anD l earning 47 by the time we got to the last review, everybody knew who was going to win. "The company that lost also had another big problem. Eventu- ally they overcame it, but by then it was too late. Their suppli- ers complained that the prime was unwilling to give them the money to build prototypes. Somebody should have asked, `How do we convince ourselves that we know how to build this in an affordable way?' You do prototyping up front and then see if something works like you think it will. Sometimes it will, most of the time it won't, but then you learn from that. The company that won was not afraid to learn from its mistakes, and prototyp- ing was an essential part of their strategy. "Prototyping is a wonderful way of learning, yet we don't do enough of it because we would like to believe that if we sim- ply get enough smart people together, we can run through the