In his autobiography 'Wings of Fire', A.P.J.Abdul Kalam, himself an ISRO rocket scientist & program director who later became a highly popular President of India (he draws crowds to this day, several years after office), quotes Gen. Patton: "A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week." That could well summarize the ISRO style.

Kalam also highlights the leadership-by-open-discussion style of Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan who successively headed ISRO in its formative years. If that sounds commonplace, bear in mind this was in a civilian government organization of the 1960's. People like Sarabhai (a Cambridge Tripos and inheritor of a family business empire) and Dhawan (a double PhD in math and aerospace from Caltech) could have played the part and been overbearing - but they deliberately chose to build a "startup culture" where people were encouraged to speak up.