Apollo and the Manhattan project were both executed by fairly new bureaucracies that had people in key leadership roles who weren't selected by their ability to

Apollo and the Manhattan project were both executed by fairly new bureaucracies that had people in key leadership roles who weren't selected by their ability to get promoted from within large bureaucracies. It is possible to have institutional mechanisms or culture that keeps rot to a manageable level but nobody really knows how to do that deliberately - it's always a matter of luck. That's why it's important to allow organizations to fail. I wish we had some systematic way of allowing that for government departments the way we do for corporations.