7 ms·

Doing a Job – The Management Philosophy of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover

99 points by wheresvic4 5y ago

prox 5y ago
I really liked this article, many things that still ring true, yet are not adopted. I worked in a few organizations where no one was responsible, so no one wanted it to succeed. The resulting product was a mediocre example at best. Nothing to put on your resume.
physicsgraph 5y ago
For people not familiar with Rickover, videos of his interviews like [0] are useful for understanding his personality. [0] https://vimeo.com/56270169 https://vimeo.com/56270169
- mabub24 5y ago
  He sounds like an asshole. But, he also sounds like an extremely effective leader. His conviction and directness weren't for making friends. He wanted to do and finish hard things.
dctoedt 5y ago
FTA: "In my work, I probably spend about ninety-nine percent of my time on what others may call petty details. Most managers would rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when the details are ignored, the project fails. No infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then correct the situation."
- hef19898 5y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Also, this is not micromanagement, quote the opposite IMHO. For a manager, especially those from larger orgs, this approach is just hard so. Larger orgs tend to be very political, and thus policy heavy.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    You can navigate that environment without tons of policy, but it requires investing in clear values and a solid culture. That's much harder than adding a new policy at the end of every incident.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      The very best managers I ever had were those that managed to play the politics, were good in whatever they managed, provided clear goals and had an eye for details. Obviously, those are few and far between. I remember two, maybe three in my life so far.
      - barrenko 5y ago
        Yup, there are managers so good, I'd go to war with them if asked at 3AM. Others I wouldn't trust with getting groceries.
dctoedt 5y ago
I remember a quote attributed to the KOG* about certain high-ranking civilian managers: "There but for the grace of God goes God." * KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman
- dctoedt 5y ago
  Tangentially relevant, from The Atlantic: "Say Goodbye to Your Manager | The pandemic has exposed a fundamental weakness in the system." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/manager-work-life-changes/620096/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=masthead-newsletter&utm_content=20210918&silverid=%25%25RECIPIENT_ID%25%25&utm_term=Subscriber%20Only%20Weekly%20Newsletter https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/manager-wo...
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory. My fave. My favorite Rickover story may be an urban legend. It is said that, when salespeople showed up at his second-floor office with sample kit, he'd grab the sample, walk over to his window, and drop it. He would then say "If it still works, we'll talk."
- austincheney 5y ago
  Software is the antithesis of that philosophy. The word I hear most from developers when evaluating an approach: easy. Not simple, but easy. Then comes all the memorized patterns, a laundry list of tools, thousands of dependencies, and their favorite pet framework they cannot live without. You take any of that bullshit away the immediate response is some form of crying or hostility. Most things in software are never that challenging, but then that is a matter of perspective. Everything is challenging the moment an adult comes in and cuts off the nonsense.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I ran a shop, that, when we were finally disbanded, after 27 years, the person with the least tenure had a decade. Our work was far from easy. It was developing cross-platform image processing pipelines in C++. Lots of whacky stuff, like leveraging hardware threading, cache optimization, etc. Each engineer had strengths in various areas, and we were able to work together to develop some stuff that worked nicely (it wasn't always packaged especially well, by the application implementation team, but our stuff was great). We were a US shop that fed into a Japanese organization, and the Japanese wouldn't even acknowledge my engineers, until they had been there at least a year. I'm not really a fan of "Programming by Dependency." I understand that it can allow relatively unskilled and inexperienced programmers to create some pretty ambitious works, but I feel the cost in quality, performance, resource usage, licensing, and future maintainability are too high, in many cases.
  - dasil003 5y ago
datavirtue 5y ago
Where does this policy of rotating people out of jobs come from? I saw what Rickover was describing at GE and the poor outcomes that result. Everyone had adapted to having new managers every two years...your new manager is always another "lifer." It created a thick layer of pessimism that was hidden from the managers that rotate in. Employees learned to just do what they are told and sit there with their hands folded if no one gives them "direction." They are resolved to the idea of managing a manager that does not know what is going on and never will. All the managers think they are hot shit.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  In the military, there is a practical justification for this constant rotation: it prevents officers from establishing fiefdoms that can undermine the unconditional adherence to orders from above. Of course, this idea is firmly rooted in the operational demands of military organizations, which is not really the same kind of work as, say, developing new weapons systems.
  - SkyMarshal 5y ago
    I assume it’s also because the military assumes that during wartime, some officers will be killed, thus the organization needs redundant people who know multiple roles and can rotate in as needed. That’s obviously less of a concern in corporations.
    - HarryHirsch 5y ago
      In competent militaries that problem is solved by training people beyond what their role requires and promoting from below. If you want results, especially in a crisis, you just can't parachute strangers in from outside who have never seen the problem field.
      - SkyMarshal 5y ago
        ...redundant people who know multiple roles...
jkhdigital 5y ago
> Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience. I really like that phrase: courageous impatience.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory. I wonder what he would say about today’s corporate environment.
j7ake 5y ago
Rickover had an interesting discussion on the size of the team. He suggests that the optimal size depends on how much time each member needs to discuss details with their superior. Larger size occurs when most people are highly independent and only need short meetings with the boss. I always thought the size of the team was only a function of the preferences of the boss. His passage adds nuance to this topic.
flyinglizard 5y ago
I found a lot of this very relatable, but from the sound of it, Adm. Rickover built organizations which are structured around him, rather than creating "more Rickovers" which provide some delegation. This kind of organization is not for everyone, definitely not for people who'd like to grow in their capability and responsibility. I think it have worked better during Rickover's times than today, as people's expectations of their careers have shifted. This also applies to keeping people in the same role indefinitely, which simply won't fly in many companies and societies today. Managing 40 direct reports, each probably (given the scale the US military industrial complex operates) representing an operation of tens to hundreds more is not just difficult from a time management perspective; you're going to need to context switch between so many disciplines and activities that your head would spin. Finally, your "bus factor" with a central manager like that would be through the roof. Still the parts about ownership, accountability and details are all very true.
- dctoedt 5y ago
  > from the sound of it, Adm. Rickover built organizations which are structured around him, rather than creating "more Rickovers" which provide some delegation. One might reasonably conclude otherwise, judging by the nuclear Navy's track record — not only on Rickover's watch, but also since his (forced) retirement in 1982.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Aged 82
deltasixeight 5y ago
This type of philosophy is good but not scalable or efficient. Scalability and efficiency requires well defined specialized roles. Additionally the more specialized and "stupid" each compartmentalized role is... the more efficient and scalable the organization becomes. Heavy Specialization is in fact the root reason for the complexity of civilization in the modern world. Therefore, if the objective is growth and efficiency, management of every organization must seek to organize the hierarchy in a way where each role becomes small and extremely well defined. See McDonald or similar for the huge scalability and efficiency that is brought on by the opposite philosophy of Rickover. Rickovers' philosophy optimizes for flexibility and creativity at the huge cost of basically zero scalability. This type of philosophy is good for labs and R&D work. In terms of software I currently work at a company that affords this level of flexibility, freedom and ownership. Software Engineers at my company "own" their product and are given full autonomy. But they have to deal with all the politics from other stakeholders and generally spend less time doing actual software. A software engineer allowed to deep dive on a stream of tickets/tasks while being defended from non-software related issues by a manager is by far more efficient than one given the responsibility of "ownership." Literally software engineers at my company are expected to push products to production and cat herd all the required people to make it a reality. What in your mind is a better setup? One where a manager does the cat-herding and the software engineer is given the very small task of just coding? Or One where the software engineer has ownership and responsibility of the entire product and has to manage it all the way to production?
- snth 5y ago
  I understand the desire, but there's a reason "product ownership" has become a trend. Similar to what's mentioned in the article, development and deployment and working with customers aren't independent. I would rather "own" my software than attempt to work on a stream of "isolated" tickets. And I think the real task of delivering value to stakeholders is more efficient without over-specialization.
  - deltasixeight 5y ago
    Consider the fact that when complexity of the system rises to a point where no human can comprehend it, the project must lean more and more on specialization rather than a bunch of jack of all trades ownership type organization. Ideally, personally and professionally we prefer autonomy but there hits a point where logistically it becomes fundamentally impossible due to complexity. Society itself must segment itself into specialists due to immense complexities it has to deal with. Eventually organizations within these societies must do the same as they grow bigger and begin to assimilate and represent a bigger portion of the society itself.
black_13 5y ago
This is a country of nothing but transients. A company I worked for converted every dev it politically could to 1099s it turned even admins to 1099s. I did a stint at AMD and it did everything it could to turn seasoned people to seasoned people to orange badges. No one has ownership of their lives or their work.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Dept of labor probably has something to say about that.
dctoedt 5y ago
I just found this: Rickover's only son's eulogy for him, putatively at Yom Kippur 2008. (Rickover died in 1986.) Sounds like the man had a human side and really was kindly — at least toward some. Excerpt: "He was certainly thrifty, but my father could also be extremely generous with his money as well as with his time. He donated all the profits from his books and the honorariums from his many speaking engagements to a Jewish orphanage in Chicago. When one of his staff died during surgery, he made sure his widow had enough money to tide her and her family over and went to great lengths to find her a good job with the civil service." http://www.rickover.com/ http://www.rickover.com/
mLuby 5y ago
A detailed video about how Adm. Rickover maneuvered through bureaucracy to bring into existence America's smallest nuclear submarine: https://youtu.be/2XoPPXQYGXU?t=73 https://youtu.be/2XoPPXQYGXU?t=73
jgamman 5y ago
I am not against business education. A knowledge of accounting, finance, business law, and the like can be of value in a business environment. What I do believe is harmful is the impression often created by those who teach management that one will be able to manage any job by applying certain management techniques together with some simple academic rules of how to manage people and situations. ©1982 H.G. Rickover
user_named 5y ago
Sounds like reverse-management to me: a clueless manager who makes you do his job, while he focuses on the details of your day to day work. https://www.fiveeasypieces.xyz/p/five-easy-piecesthe-reverse-management https://www.fiveeasypieces.xyz/p/five-easy-piecesthe-reverse...

99 points by wheresvic4 5y ago

prox 5y ago

I really liked this article, many things that still ring true, yet are not adopted. I worked in a few organizations where no one was responsible, so no one wanted it to succeed. The resulting product was a mediocre example at best. Nothing to put on your resume.

physicsgraph 5y ago

For people not familiar with Rickover, videos of his interviews like [0] are useful for understanding his personality. [0] https://vimeo.com/56270169 https://vimeo.com/56270169

mabub24 5y ago
He sounds like an asshole. But, he also sounds like an extremely effective leader. His conviction and directness weren't for making friends. He wanted to do and finish hard things.

dctoedt 5y ago

FTA: "In my work, I probably spend about ninety-nine percent of my time on what others may call petty details. Most managers would rather focus on lofty policy matters. But when the details are ignored, the project fails. No infusion of policy or lofty ideals can then correct the situation."

hef19898 5y ago
I couldn't agree more. Also, this is not micromanagement, quote the opposite IMHO. For a manager, especially those from larger orgs, this approach is just hard so. Larger orgs tend to be very political, and thus policy heavy.
- groby_b 5y ago
  You can navigate that environment without tons of policy, but it requires investing in clear values and a solid culture. That's much harder than adding a new policy at the end of every incident.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    The very best managers I ever had were those that managed to play the politics, were good in whatever they managed, provided clear goals and had an eye for details. Obviously, those are few and far between. I remember two, maybe three in my life so far.
    - barrenko 5y ago
      Yup, there are managers so good, I'd go to war with them if asked at 3AM. Others I wouldn't trust with getting groceries.

dctoedt 5y ago

I remember a quote attributed to the KOG* about certain high-ranking civilian managers: "There but for the grace of God goes God." * KOG = Kindly Old Gentleman

dctoedt 5y ago
Tangentially relevant, from The Atlantic: "Say Goodbye to Your Manager | The pandemic has exposed a fundamental weakness in the system." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/manager-work-life-changes/620096/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=masthead-newsletter&utm_content=20210918&silverid=%25%25RECIPIENT_ID%25%25&utm_term=Subscriber%20Only%20Weekly%20Newsletter https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/manager-wo...

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

> Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory. My fave. My favorite Rickover story may be an urban legend. It is said that, when salespeople showed up at his second-floor office with sample kit, he'd grab the sample, walk over to his window, and drop it. He would then say "If it still works, we'll talk."

austincheney 5y ago
Software is the antithesis of that philosophy. The word I hear most from developers when evaluating an approach: easy. Not simple, but easy. Then comes all the memorized patterns, a laundry list of tools, thousands of dependencies, and their favorite pet framework they cannot live without. You take any of that bullshit away the immediate response is some form of crying or hostility. Most things in software are never that challenging, but then that is a matter of perspective. Everything is challenging the moment an adult comes in and cuts off the nonsense.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I ran a shop, that, when we were finally disbanded, after 27 years, the person with the least tenure had a decade. Our work was far from easy. It was developing cross-platform image processing pipelines in C++. Lots of whacky stuff, like leveraging hardware threading, cache optimization, etc. Each engineer had strengths in various areas, and we were able to work together to develop some stuff that worked nicely (it wasn't always packaged especially well, by the application implementation team, but our stuff was great). We were a US shop that fed into a Japanese organization, and the Japanese wouldn't even acknowledge my engineers, until they had been there at least a year. I'm not really a fan of "Programming by Dependency." I understand that it can allow relatively unskilled and inexperienced programmers to create some pretty ambitious works, but I feel the cost in quality, performance, resource usage, licensing, and future maintainability are too high, in many cases.
- dasil003 5y ago

datavirtue 5y ago

Where does this policy of rotating people out of jobs come from? I saw what Rickover was describing at GE and the poor outcomes that result. Everyone had adapted to having new managers every two years...your new manager is always another "lifer." It created a thick layer of pessimism that was hidden from the managers that rotate in. Employees learned to just do what they are told and sit there with their hands folded if no one gives them "direction." They are resolved to the idea of managing a manager that does not know what is going on and never will. All the managers think they are hot shit.

jkhdigital 5y ago
In the military, there is a practical justification for this constant rotation: it prevents officers from establishing fiefdoms that can undermine the unconditional adherence to orders from above. Of course, this idea is firmly rooted in the operational demands of military organizations, which is not really the same kind of work as, say, developing new weapons systems.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  I assume it’s also because the military assumes that during wartime, some officers will be killed, thus the organization needs redundant people who know multiple roles and can rotate in as needed. That’s obviously less of a concern in corporations.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    In competent militaries that problem is solved by training people beyond what their role requires and promoting from below. If you want results, especially in a crisis, you just can't parachute strangers in from outside who have never seen the problem field.
    - SkyMarshal 5y ago
      ...redundant people who know multiple roles...

jkhdigital 5y ago

> Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous impatience. I really like that phrase: courageous impatience.

MattGaiser 5y ago

j7ake 5y ago

Rickover had an interesting discussion on the size of the team. He suggests that the optimal size depends on how much time each member needs to discuss details with their superior. Larger size occurs when most people are highly independent and only need short meetings with the boss. I always thought the size of the team was only a function of the preferences of the boss. His passage adds nuance to this topic.

flyinglizard 5y ago

I found a lot of this very relatable, but from the sound of it, Adm. Rickover built organizations which are structured around him, rather than creating "more Rickovers" which provide some delegation. This kind of organization is not for everyone, definitely not for people who'd like to grow in their capability and responsibility. I think it have worked better during Rickover's times than today, as people's expectations of their careers have shifted. This also applies to keeping people in the same role indefinitely, which simply won't fly in many companies and societies today. Managing 40 direct reports, each probably (given the scale the US military industrial complex operates) representing an operation of tens to hundreds more is not just difficult from a time management perspective; you're going to need to context switch between so many disciplines and activities that your head would spin. Finally, your "bus factor" with a central manager like that would be through the roof. Still the parts about ownership, accountability and details are all very true.

dctoedt 5y ago
> from the sound of it, Adm. Rickover built organizations which are structured around him, rather than creating "more Rickovers" which provide some delegation. One might reasonably conclude otherwise, judging by the nuclear Navy's track record — not only on Rickover's watch, but also since his (forced) retirement in 1982.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Aged 82

deltasixeight 5y ago

This type of philosophy is good but not scalable or efficient. Scalability and efficiency requires well defined specialized roles. Additionally the more specialized and "stupid" each compartmentalized role is... the more efficient and scalable the organization becomes. Heavy Specialization is in fact the root reason for the complexity of civilization in the modern world. Therefore, if the objective is growth and efficiency, management of every organization must seek to organize the hierarchy in a way where each role becomes small and extremely well defined. See McDonald or similar for the huge scalability and efficiency that is brought on by the opposite philosophy of Rickover. Rickovers' philosophy optimizes for flexibility and creativity at the huge cost of basically zero scalability. This type of philosophy is good for labs and R&D work. In terms of software I currently work at a company that affords this level of flexibility, freedom and ownership. Software Engineers at my company "own" their product and are given full autonomy. But they have to deal with all the politics from other stakeholders and generally spend less time doing actual software. A software engineer allowed to deep dive on a stream of tickets/tasks while being defended from non-software related issues by a manager is by far more efficient than one given the responsibility of "ownership." Literally software engineers at my company are expected to push products to production and cat herd all the required people to make it a reality. What in your mind is a better setup? One where a manager does the cat-herding and the software engineer is given the very small task of just coding? Or One where the software engineer has ownership and responsibility of the entire product and has to manage it all the way to production?

snth 5y ago
I understand the desire, but there's a reason "product ownership" has become a trend. Similar to what's mentioned in the article, development and deployment and working with customers aren't independent. I would rather "own" my software than attempt to work on a stream of "isolated" tickets. And I think the real task of delivering value to stakeholders is more efficient without over-specialization.
- deltasixeight 5y ago
  Consider the fact that when complexity of the system rises to a point where no human can comprehend it, the project must lean more and more on specialization rather than a bunch of jack of all trades ownership type organization. Ideally, personally and professionally we prefer autonomy but there hits a point where logistically it becomes fundamentally impossible due to complexity. Society itself must segment itself into specialists due to immense complexities it has to deal with. Eventually organizations within these societies must do the same as they grow bigger and begin to assimilate and represent a bigger portion of the society itself.

black_13 5y ago

This is a country of nothing but transients. A company I worked for converted every dev it politically could to 1099s it turned even admins to 1099s. I did a stint at AMD and it did everything it could to turn seasoned people to seasoned people to orange badges. No one has ownership of their lives or their work.

dboreham 5y ago
Dept of labor probably has something to say about that.

dctoedt 5y ago

I just found this: Rickover's only son's eulogy for him, putatively at Yom Kippur 2008. (Rickover died in 1986.) Sounds like the man had a human side and really was kindly — at least toward some. Excerpt: "He was certainly thrifty, but my father could also be extremely generous with his money as well as with his time. He donated all the profits from his books and the honorariums from his many speaking engagements to a Jewish orphanage in Chicago. When one of his staff died during surgery, he made sure his widow had enough money to tide her and her family over and went to great lengths to find her a good job with the civil service." http://www.rickover.com/ http://www.rickover.com/

mLuby 5y ago

A detailed video about how Adm. Rickover maneuvered through bureaucracy to bring into existence America's smallest nuclear submarine: https://youtu.be/2XoPPXQYGXU?t=73 https://youtu.be/2XoPPXQYGXU?t=73

jgamman 5y ago

I am not against business education. A knowledge of accounting, finance, business law, and the like can be of value in a business environment. What I do believe is harmful is the impression often created by those who teach management that one will be able to manage any job by applying certain management techniques together with some simple academic rules of how to manage people and situations. ©1982 H.G. Rickover

user_named 5y ago

Sounds like reverse-management to me: a clueless manager who makes you do his job, while he focuses on the details of your day to day work. https://www.fiveeasypieces.xyz/p/five-easy-piecesthe-reverse-management https://www.fiveeasypieces.xyz/p/five-easy-piecesthe-reverse...