The NASA janitor never said that
The most quoted line in corporate-culture decks turns out to be invented — but what a Wharton professor found instead is better.
You've heard the story in a keynote somewhere: JFK visits NASA, asks a janitor what he's doing, and the janitor says, "I'm helping put a man on the moon." It's a great story about purpose. It's also, according to Wharton management professor Andrew Carton, who traced it back through primary sources, apocryphal — nobody can locate the original moment.
What Carton actually found while digging through NASA's 1960s archives was more interesting than the myth. He documents real testimony from secretaries, machinists, and technicians during the Apollo program who described their unglamorous jobs in exactly that register — not because an inspiring anecdote got told to them, but because Kennedy's team had spent years deliberately narrowing NASA's sprawling mission down to one sentence anyone could repeat: land a man on the moon and bring him home safely.
Carton calls this process "sensegiving," and his four-stage model of how it happened is the part that's actually reproducible in a company that isn't going to the moon.
The janitor quote is fake. The mechanism behind it wasn't.