#419 Kelly Johnson: Skunk Works

So a few weeks ago I made this episode called How SpaceX Works. And while I was reading about The way SpaceX operates. I came across this very interesting sentence. I'm going to read this to you. Says many of these ideas are not even new. Lockheed's skunkworks ran similar approaches sixty years ago.

Founder Kelly Johnson's fourteen rules reads like a SpaceX operations manual. So that made me want to read Kelly Johnson's autobiography, which is called More Than My Share of It All. He wrote it when he was seventy five. Years old. And the first thing I wanna tell you about in the book, I actually want to jump towards the end of the book. It's one of the last chapters. The chapter's called It's No Secret and it breaks down

How he built and how he ran Skunkworks. But before I jump into the book There's this list of twenty ideas. I want to give you an overview of basically how he ran this operation. I think telling you this list of twenty ideas up front will make it easy to remember and understand everything that comes after. So number one. A breakthrough program is an organization before it's a design. So this is one of maybe the greatest designer of aircraft. Of all time.

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