Hyman Rickover celebration hour

Loving this deep dive on Hyman Rickover by ChinaTalkand Charles Yang. A couple quotes:

Rickover spent an inordinate amount of time focused on interviewing personnel — he made the final hiring decision for every naval officer who applied to serve on a nuclear submarine until he retired

Another Rickoverian approach was his famous “Quaker meetings”. When disputes arose between the Naval Reactors and the contractor, or when trust had become frayed over too many disagreements and miscommunications, Rickover would send his staff and the contractor staff to a retreat location for a weekend, a week, or however long as needed. They would meet with no parliamentary procedures or formal meeting agenda and simply talk out their issues until they could “deal with each others as individuals, not as spokesman for either organization” and come to a consensus on a path forward and build mutual trust.

Some other themes that stood out:

• Parallel tracking wherever there is risk (technical risk, bureaucratic risk)

• A focus on consensus building

• Focused on finding talent

• Demanding of that talent

• High trust relationships

I’m repeatedly struck by how the leadership style of the generation of Americans that lived through the Second World War. It seems more pragmatic, demanding, and less hierarchical / political.

2025-03-28