Management According to Skunk Works
Listen, don't talk, make decisions, and kill problems. That's all there is to it.
A short post today.
I realised that I’ve never written about one of my favourite books. Skunk Works is the story of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, the top-secret engineering shop that produced (in secret, and sometimes under budget) some of the Cold War’s most incredible pieces of aerospace innovation—the U2, the SR-71 Blackbird, and the F-117 Nighthawk.1
If you’re interested in an insight into that period of defence history it’s a pretty fascinating read, but it’s equally instructive as a book about management and organisational design.
The team could be characterised as having high agency, but high responsibility, and the amount of initiative that designers, engineers and assembly staff used is continually surprising to a reader used to the micromanagement inherent in the modern corporate workplace.
“You’ll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision.”
Managers were consistently able to provide what I’ve seen described as ‘air cover’—insulation from interference by stakeholders and bureaucracy—while delivering against the real objectives of a project and the outcomes that mattered.
The book covers what (necessarily for the narrative to work) is framed as a golden age, from shortly before the development of the U2, to the operational deployment of the F-117 during Operation Desert Storm.
Anyway, you should absolutely read the book, it’s great, but there’s a passage in it which I go back to a lot, have described to other people, and I gather is valuable.2 So here goes.
In it, the author Ben Rich speaks to his boss, the legendary aeronautical engineer Kelly Johnson, and says he’d like to attend a course at Harvard Business School. Kelly writes him a “glowing recommendation” and gets Lockheed to pick up the bill, even as he declares it “a waste of time,” giving Rich instead three concise rules for leadership:3
“You don’t need Harvard to teach you it’s more important to listen than talk.”
“You’ll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision.”
“Don’t half-heartedly wound problems - kill them dead.”
“That’s all there is to it,” Kelly concludes. Of course, Rich goes to business school anyway, finds it somewhat useful, but ultimately values Kelly’s argument enough to include it in the book.4
Hopefully you find these rules useful.
Or ‘wobblin’ goblin,’ if you prefer.
At least one person I know has these points on a post-it on their desk, and my wife and I use them in conversation all the time.
His promise of, “I’ll teach you all you need to know about running a company in one afternoon, and we’ll go home early to boot,” is more accurate a sales pitch than most non-fiction books I’ve read. These are, I would guess, the most valuable words I’ve ever read in terms of dollar value per word.
“I had persisted, and when I returned home from Cambridge, wearing a new crimson tie, Kelly asked me for my appraisal of the Harvard Business School. To accomodate him, I wrote out an equation: 2/3 of HBS = BS. He roared with laughter, had my equation framed, and gave it back to me for Christmas.”