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Hyman Rickover celebration hour

2025-03-28

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.

Remembering Frances Hesselbein

2022-12-31

When I saw that David Epstein (who’s writing I love) was writing about Frances Hesselbein again, I sort of rolled my eyes. She is at the center of his book Range (which I love — probably the book that impacted me most in the past 5 years).

But his remembrance of her is too good not to share. My favorite nuggets:

  • Her life philosophy as: “doing what’s needed at the time.”

  • She repeatedly declines offers to move up through the ranks of the Girl Scouts, ultimately becoming the CEO and turning the organization around; reading between the lines, it seems like in some ways declining advancement gives her more space to maneuver as she isn’t invested in protecting her reputation.

  • The ending quote: “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do.”