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I loved Kelly's memoir; reading his story and how he did what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling; looking at the many billions wasted by companies tr

I loved Kelly's memoir; reading his story and how he did what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling; looking at the many billions wasted by companies trying to get close tells you -- not so fast. I learned in that book that he actually returned money to the government for, I think, the U-2 project -- they made a few extra planes and had money left over. Amazing. I'd love to read a longitudinal retrospective of failed skunkworks setups and see why participants thought they failed -- I bet it's a diverse list of reasons.

WalterBright 2y ago
Of the ones I learned about, it was because they were going to replicate Skunkworks "only better". The latter broke it every time.
- vessenes 2y ago
  Kelly had a subversive quality to him that is probably almost impossible to institutionalize; I think it's unusual to find that mixed with some nationalist pride -- in that way, I see him as a product of the war, and the postwar boom. That plus his broad multilateral intelligence -- seeing design and implementation as one thing that one could expect to understand and possibly master -- stood out for me, reading about him. Anyway, if a leader like Kelly is needed for a skunkworks, that itself may be quite difficult. I'd guess most large companies would take a functioning "almost as good as" Skunkworks any day, if they could tolerate the guy/gal running it.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Kelly was famous for telling the CEO of Lockheed to butt out whenever the CEO called him to ask him what he was doing. He was tolerated because he got results. With the size of his budget, it would be a very, very rare CEO who would tolerate that.
WalterBright 2y ago
> what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling I recently did a presentation on how genius code is code so simple that people dismiss it with "anyone could have done that!"

WalterBright 2y ago

Of the ones I learned about, it was because they were going to replicate Skunkworks "only better". The latter broke it every time.

vessenes 2y ago
Kelly had a subversive quality to him that is probably almost impossible to institutionalize; I think it's unusual to find that mixed with some nationalist pride -- in that way, I see him as a product of the war, and the postwar boom. That plus his broad multilateral intelligence -- seeing design and implementation as one thing that one could expect to understand and possibly master -- stood out for me, reading about him. Anyway, if a leader like Kelly is needed for a skunkworks, that itself may be quite difficult. I'd guess most large companies would take a functioning "almost as good as" Skunkworks any day, if they could tolerate the guy/gal running it.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Kelly was famous for telling the CEO of Lockheed to butt out whenever the CEO called him to ask him what he was doing. He was tolerated because he got results. With the size of his budget, it would be a very, very rare CEO who would tolerate that.

WalterBright 2y ago

> what he did makes it seem so simple in the telling I recently did a presentation on how genius code is code so simple that people dismiss it with "anyone could have done that!"