How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  The man who led the team to counter the threat of the Messerschmitt was Clarence Johnson, an engineer known to all as “Kelly.” The urgency and complexity of the challenge were not Johnson’s only problems—the United States government was also sure that German spies were listening to its communications. Johnson had to build a secret lab using old boxes and a tent rented from a circus and hide it next to a wind tunnel at the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California. He could not hire secretaries or janitors, and his engineers could not tell anyone, not even their families, what they were doing. One engineer called the place the “Skonk Works,” after a factory that ground skunks and shoes into oil in a popular comic strip called Li’l Abner. The name stuck until long after the war, and when the secrecy lifted, the comic’s publisher made Lockheed change the name. From then on the operation, technically Lockheed’s advanced projects division, was called the “Skunk Works.”

  The circumstances forced on Kelly Johnson seemed adverse but turned out to be fortuitous—he discovered that a small, isolated, highly motivated group is the best kind of team for creation. The United States military gave Johnson and his team six months to design America’s first jet fighter. They needed fewer than five. The P-80 was the first plane developed by the engineers at the Skunk Works, and they went on to invent the supersonic F-104 Star Fighter; the U-2 surveillance plane; the Blackbird surveillance plane, which flew at three times the speed of sound; and aircraft that could evade radar detection. In addition to creating planes, Johnson created something else: a model organization for achieving the impossible quickly.

  2 | SHOW ME

  Kelly Johnson started working at Lockheed in 1933. It was a small airplane manufacturer with only five engineers, restructuring after bankruptcy and struggling to compete with two much larger companies: Boeing and Douglas (later McDonnell Douglas). Johnson’s first day at Lockheed could have been his last. He had been hired in part because, as a student at the University of Michigan, he had helped test Lockheed’s new Model 10 Electra all-metal airplane in the university’s wind tunnel. His professor, Edward Stalker, the head of Michigan’s department of aeronautical engineering, had given the Electra a good report. Johnson disagreed. On day one at Lockheed, the twenty-three-year-old, who had only just received his graduate degree in aeronautics and had been hired not as an engineer but to make technical drawings, said so:

  I announced that the new airplane, the first designed by the reorganized company and the one on which its hopes for the future were based, was not a good design, actually was unstable. They were somewhat shaken. It’s not the conventional way to begin employment. It was, in fact, very presumptuous of me to criticize my professors and experienced designers.

  There are few companies today where this would be a good career move. In the 1930s, there were probably even fewer. What happened next almost explains Lockheed’s success all by itself.

  Johnson’s boss was Hall Hibbard, Lockheed’s chief engineer. Hibbard’s aeronautics degree was from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then and now one of the world’s greatest engineering schools. He wanted what he called “new young blood”—people who were “fresh out of school with newer ideas.” Hibbard said, “When Johnson told me that the new airplane we had just sent in to the university wind tunnel was no good, and it was unstable in all directions, I was a little bit taken aback. And I wasn’t so sure that we ought to hire the guy. But then I thought better of it. After all, he came from a good school and seemed to be intelligent. So, I thought, let’s take a chance.”

  Instead of firing Johnson for impudence, Hibbard sent him on his first business trip, saying, “Kelly, you’ve criticized this wind-tunnel report on the Electra signed by two very knowledgeable people. Why don’t you go back and see if you can do any better with the airplane?”

  Johnson drove twenty-four hundred miles to Michigan with a model of the Electra balanced in the back of his car. He tested it in the wind tunnel seventy-two times, until he solved the problem with an unusual “twin” tail that had a fin on each side of the aircraft and nothing in the center.

  Hibbard’s response to the new idea was to work late writing Johnson a letter:

  Dear Johnson,

  You will have to excuse the typing as I am writing here at the factory tonight and this typewriter certainly is not much good.

  You may be sure that there was a big celebration around these parts when we got your wires telling about the new find and how simple the solution really was. It is apparently a rather important discovery and I think it is a fine thing that you should be the one to find out the secret. Needless to say, the addition of these parts is a very easy matter; and I think that we shall wait until you get back perhaps before we do much along that line.

  Well, I guess I’ll quit now. You will be quite surprised at the Electra when you get here, I think. It is coming along quite well.

  Sincerely,

  Hibbard.

  When Johnson returned to Lockheed, he found that he had been promoted. He was now Lockheed’s sixth engineer.

  The story of the Skunk Works, America’s first jet fighter, its supersonic aircraft, stealth technology, and whatever may follow that started with this one act. In almost any other company, or talking to almost any other manager, Johnson would have been laughed out of the room, and possibly out of his job. That was Hibbard’s first instinct, too. But Hibbard had a rare trait: he was intellectually secure.

  Intellectually secure people do not need to show anyone how smart they are. They are empirical and seek truth. Intellectually insecure people need to show everyone how smart they are. They are egotistical and seek triumph.

  Intellectual security is not related to intellect. People who are more skilled with their hands than their minds are often intellectually secure. They know what they know and enjoy people who know more. Brilliant people are usually intellectually secure, too—and for the same reason.

  Intellectual insecurity is most commonly found in the rest of us: people who are neither nonintellectual nor extremely intellectual. Not only are we the vast majority—we are also the people most likely to be made managers. People who are mainly skilled with their hands are no more interested in management than are Nobel laureates. As a result, most managers and executives are intellectually insecure. Hall Hibbard was unusual, and he was in the right place at the right time.

  Hibbard’s response to his new employee’s bold claim that Lockheed’s plane was a lemon was the perfect one. One of the most powerful things any manager can say is “Show me.”

  Frank Filipetti, a producer for musicians including Foreigner, Kiss, Barbra Streisand, George Michael, and James Taylor, uses “show me” to manage creative conflict in the recording studio:

  When you’re dealing with a creative process, there’s always ego involved. I have one philosophy: I never want to get into an argument about, or discuss, how something is going to sound. I’ve had people sit there and tell me why putting the backgrounds in the first chorus isn’t going to work, and they’ll expound on that for thirty minutes, when all you’ve got to do is play the damn thing, and then you’ll hear it. And more times than not, everybody agrees, once they hear it. But they’ll sit there and they’ll argue this thing out without listening to it. You can intellectualize all this stuff until you’re blue in the face, but the end result is the way it sounds, and that can really surprise you sometimes. There have been times when I thought I was absolutely right, and then I listen to it, and I have to admit, “That actually sounds pretty good.” Once you get to that stage where you say, “Let’s just play it,” it’s really amazing how everybody kind of hears the same thing all of a sudden. And it takes that ego thing out of it, too.

  Hibbard’s letter was the equivalent of “That actually sounds pretty good.” It meant so much to Johnson that he kept it his entire life.

  3 | OF TRUTH AND GLUE

  In November 1960, Robert Galambos figured something out. He said out loud, to no one in particular, “I know how
the brain works.”

  A week later, Galambos presented his idea to David Rioch, his manager for the past ten years. The meeting went badly. Rioch did not say, “Show me.” Instead, Galambos’s idea made Rioch angry. He ordered Galambos not to talk about it in public, or to write about it, and predicted that his career was over. And it nearly was: within months, Galambos was looking for a new job.

  Both men were neuroscientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, in Silver Spring, Maryland. They had worked together closely for a decade, trying to understand how the brain works and how to repair it. They and their colleagues had made Walter Reed one of the world’s most respected and prestigious centers of neuroscience. Galambos, then forty-six years old, was more than just an accomplished neuroscientist—he was also a famous one. When he was a researcher at Harvard, he had for the first time conclusively proved, with collaborator Donald Griffin, that bats use echolocation to “see in the dark”—a radical finding that was not immediately accepted by experts but that we now take for granted. Despite this pedigree, and their long history of successfully working together, Rioch quickly forced Galambos out of his job because of his new idea. Six months later, Galambos left Walter Reed forever.

  Galambos’s idea was apparently simple: he hypothesized that cells called “glia” are crucial to brain function. Forty percent of all brain cells are glia, but in 1960 it was assumed that they didn’t do anything but hold the other, more important cells together and perhaps support and protect them. This assumption was built right into their name: the word glia is medieval Greek for “glue.”

  Rioch’s problem with Galambos’s idea dates back to a nineteenth-century Spaniard, Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal was a Nobel Prize–winning scientist and a central figure in the development of modern brain science. Around 1899, he concluded that a particular type of electrically excitable cell was the critical unit of brain function. He called this type of cell a “neuron,” after the Greek word for “nerve.” His idea became known as “Cajal’s neuron doctrine.” By 1960, everybody in the field believed it. As with glia, the idea was right there in the name—after Cajal, the study of the brain became known as “neuroscience.” Robert Galambos’s idea that glial cells had an equally important role to play in making the brain work challenged what every neuroscientist, including Dave Rioch, had believed for their whole careers. It questioned the foundations of the field, risked causing a revolution, and threatened the empire of the neuron. Rioch sensed the risk and tried to shut Galambos down.

  Since this confrontation, Galambos’s idea has become widely accepted. Scientists do not get fired for having ideas about glia anymore. They are more likely to be promoted. There is an increasing body of evidence that Galambos was right and that glial cells play a vital role in signaling and communication within the brain. They secrete fluids with purposes as yet unknown and may have a crucial influence on brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s. One type of glia, star-shaped cells called astrocytes, may be more sensitive signalers than neurons. Fifty years after Galambos’s confrontation with Rioch, one scientific review concluded, “Quite possibly the most important roles of glia have yet to be imagined.”

  The fact that Galambos eventually turned out to be right is beside the point. Organizations are not supposed to work this way. Brilliant, innovative thinking is meant to be encouraged. Galambos and his idea should and could have made a beachhead on a whole new continent of fertile research opportunities. Instead, important discoveries about glia and the brain were delayed for decades. We are learning things today that we could have found out in the 1970s. So why would a distinguished scientist like David Rioch be provoked to anger by an idea proposed by an equally distinguished scientist like Robert Galambos?

  The problem was not Rioch. Robert Galambos’s story is typical—it happens in almost every organization almost all the time. Kelly Johnson’s is not. Both men are examples of what management scholars Larry Downes and Paul Nunes call “truth-tellers”:

  Truth-tellers are genuinely passionate about solving big problems. They harangue you with their vision, and as a result they rarely stay in one company for very long. They are not model employees—their true loyalty is to the future, not next quarter’s profits. They can tell you what’s coming, but not necessarily when or how. Truth-tellers are often eccentric and difficult to manage. They speak a strange language, one that isn’t focused on incremental change and polite business-speak. Learning to find them is hard. Learning to understand them, and appreciate their value, is even harder.

  Truth-tellers are a bit like the glia of organizations: long overlooked, yet essential for regeneration. They may not be popular. The truth is often awkward and unwelcome, and so are the people who tell it.

  As we have seen in our discussions of rejection, confrontations about ideas are hardwired into human nature. The hallmark of a creative organization is that it is much more receptive to new thinking than the world in general. A creative organization does not resent conflicts over concepts; it resolves them. But most organizations are not like Lockheed—they are like Walter Reed. So most truth-tellers are not treated like Kelly Johnson—they are treated like Robert Galambos. We do not walk in a welcoming world when we are given the gift of great thoughts. Great thoughts are great threats.

  4 | BE QUICK, BE QUIET, BE ON TIME

  Kelly Johnson’s motto was “Be quick, be quiet, be on time.” This was never more important than when he was asked to build Lulu Belle, America’s first jet fighter. Lulu Belle not only flew more quickly than other planes; she was designed and developed more quickly than other planes, too. She had to be: the future of the free world depended on her.

  During World War II, planes became faster until they hit a mysterious limit: when they reached 500 miles per hour, they either went out of control or broke apart. Lockheed first experienced the problem in its P-38 Lightning fighter plane, which was so effective that the Germans called it the “fork-tailed devil” and the Japanese called it “two planes, one pilot.” Several Lockheed test pilots were killed trying to take the P-38 beyond 500 miles an hour. Tony LeVier, one of Lockheed’s greatest test pilots, said that when a plane reached that speed, it felt like “a giant hand shook the plane out of the pilot’s control.” The problem was so severe that it could not be explored experimentally: at high speeds, model planes were thrown about so forcefully that they could damage a wind tunnel.

  As Johnson and his team worked to understand the problem, they uncovered something alarming: the Nazis had already solved it.

  On August 27, 1939, four days before World War II began, a plane called the Heinkel He 178 took off from Rostock, on Germany’s north coast, and flew over the Baltic Ocean. The He 178 was remarkable because it had no propellers. Instead, it had something no plane before it had ever had: a jet engine.

  Planes create waves in the air. The waves travel at the speed of sound. The faster the plane goes, the closer the waves become, until they start to merge. In aerodynamics, this merging is called “compressibility.” Compressibility creates a brick wall that planes fly into at around 500 miles an hour—but only if they have propellers.

  Jet engines pull air through a funnel. When the air is forced out of the back of the engine, an equal and opposite reaction thrusts the plane forward. Jet planes do not fly into the wall of compressibility; they push off from it. Germany’s new jet-powered Messerschmitts, the descendants of the He 178, would be able to outmaneuver, and probably destroy, every other plane in the sky, unless the Allies could develop a jet fighter, too.

  Kelly Johnson had wanted to build a jet plane for the U.S. Army Air Forces, the predecessor of the United States Air Force, as soon as he found out about the He 178, but the USAAF told him to make the existing planes fly faster instead. It was only much later, when they discovered Germany’s imminent introduction of the jet-powered Messerschmitts, that America’s air commanders understood that building a jet plane was the only way to make planes fly faster.

  The British h
ad developed a jet engine, but attaching it to an existing airplane was ineffective. Jet engines needed whole new aircraft. And so, on June 8, 1943, at 1:30 p.m. exactly, the United States Army Air Forces gave Lockheed a contract to build a jet fighter, and only 180 days in which to do it.

  Even Kelly Johnson was not sure he could meet this challenge. Lockheed was already building twenty-eight planes a day, working three shifts every day except Sunday, when it did one or two. The company had no extra engineering capacity, no extra space, and its equipment was in constant use. Lockheed’s president, Robert Gross, told Johnson, “You brought this on yourself, Kelly. Go ahead and do it. But you’ve got to rake up your own engineering department and your own production people and figure out where to put this project.”

  These apparently impossible constraints gave us the model creative organization.

  Johnson believed that engineers should be as close to the action as possible, so he used Lockheed’s lack of spare capacity as an excuse to build a “lean” organization, where the muscles of his team—the designers, engineers, and mechanics—had direct connections to one another, without the fat of managers and administrative staff keeping them apart.

  The lack of extra space, as well as the need for high security, gave him an excuse to build an isolated, insulated organization. No one else was allowed into the Skunk Works’ box-and-tent “building.” This was not just to keep the project covert. It had another benefit: shared secrets and an exclusive workspace gave the team a unique bond.