Skunk Works
Insider account of Lockheed's advanced projects unit.
Summary
Ben Rich succeeded Kelly Johnson as head of Lockheed's Advanced Development Projects, known as the Skunk Works, and this memoir covers the organisation from the U-2 through the SR-71 Blackbird to the F-117 stealth fighter, which Rich led.
The organisational principles are the substance. The Skunk Works operated with a very small team, complete authority delegated to the programme manager, physical and administrative separation from the parent company, minimal documentation and reporting, direct access to the customer without intermediate layers, engineers located next to the shop floor so that design and manufacturing conversations happened immediately, and a deliberate limit on the number of people allowed to touch a programme. Kelly Johnson's fourteen rules, which Rich reproduces, state these explicitly.
The technical narrative covers the specific programmes: the U-2's development in under a year, the SR-71's titanium airframe and the sourcing of titanium through intermediaries from the Soviet Union, and the F-117's origin in a Soviet mathematical paper on radar cross-section that a Lockheed engineer found in translation and that no one else had acted on.
Rich also covers the deterioration: the procurement reforms, documentation requirements and oversight layers that made the original model impossible to operate within the defence acquisition system as it developed.
The book is a memoir and is favourable to its subject. It is nonetheless the primary source on an organisational model that has been copied continuously and rarely reproduced, because the copies retain the label and not the conditions.
Key takeaways 7
- A small team with complete delegated authority and minimal reporting produced aircraft in timescales that large programmes could not approach.
- Physical and administrative separation from the parent organisation was necessary, since the parent's processes would otherwise have applied by default.
- Locating engineers next to the shop floor made design and manufacturing conversations immediate, which removed the largest source of delay.
- Direct access to the customer without intermediate layers meant requirements changes were resolved in conversations rather than through documentation.
- Deliberately limiting the number of people allowed to touch a programme was a design decision rather than a resource constraint.
- The F-117 originated in a Soviet mathematical paper on radar cross-section that was publicly available and that nobody else acted on.
- Procurement reform and oversight requirements made the model impossible to operate, which is why organisations copying the label rarely reproduce the conditions.
Who should read it
Operators building small autonomous teams for hard technical work, in the primary account of the model everyone cites and few reproduce.
Where it sits in the reference 2
Who recommended it 1
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