| | One of the highlights of my college experience was getting to see Lockheed's Kelly Johnson, designer of such outstanding aircraft as the P-38, F-80/T-33, F-104, U-2 and SR-71. On Monday afternoons Caltech had an aeronautics seminar (and still does) that often brought in some pretty talented folks to talk about their work.
Johnson was already a hero of mine, and the Mach 3 SR-71 had long been my favorite airplane, even before its world record speed runs in 1974 and 1976, though it wasn't easy to learn much about it.
By the early 1980s, Johnson was retired from the legendary Skunk Works (officially known as Lockheed Advanced Development Projects) operation that he had founded. Like Thomas Edison's Menlo Park lab, Johnson's Skunk Works lean development concept has been copied by many companies, so that in recent years, despite being a Lockheed trademark, the term has entered the English language as synonymous with a high-risk advanced, fast-paced, covert small-group research effort.
I'm not going to try to go into a long history of Johnson's work, but if you're in the aerospace field, or really any industry involved in technology development, it's important to know about the Skunk Works techniques he developed. Not all of them can be applied in every situation, but an awareness of them can keep an engineering program manager out of a lot of trouble.
Johnson was legendary for producing highly-advanced top-secret aircraft in record time on modest budgets, and he did this by using fewer staff, not more. He broke down communication barriers wherever possible, by putting people close to each other and demanding complete honesty.
The Skunk Works generally used a rapid prototyping approach to development, with a goal of getting an aircraft designed and flying quickly. Johnson hand-picked top engineering talent from across the company and made sure people were rewarded for their contribution, and not just for the number of people under them.
Johnson discusses his Skunk Works techniques and 14 Rules in Ch. 16 of his autobiography, Kelly: More Than My Share of it All. While well worth reading, a lot more insight into its operating history and philosophy is provided by his successor Ben Rich in his excellent book Skunk Works. The rules by themselves don't really bring out the philosophy behind the Skunk Works' success.
Besides lean techniques, Johnson is also a good example of the benevolent dictator theory of technology development. This is basically the view that the best product development generally comes about as a result of a single strong leader, generally with a combination of strong technical and management skills. Other examples of this in the aerospace field include Wehrner von Braun and Sergei Korolev, architects of German/American and Soviet rocket development, respectively.
Johnson demanded a great deal of control over a project from his government customers, indeed more than would be possible today. Perhaps this is why today most skunk works-type operations are being started for commercial markets, though McDonnell-Douglas did launch a more virtualized Phantom Works operation in 1992.
Despite the increasing complexity of technical products, industry experience continues to show that smaller, highly-talented, independent but close-knit engineering staffs out-perform larger ones. On the commercial side, Steve Jobs is another great example of a benevolent dictator, who at Pixar was able to assemble a small staff of highly-talented folks and give them the creative freedom and steady financial backing needed to produce outstanding results.
Jobs, of course, has repeated this success since rejoining Apple Computer, but many may not realize that he did this by cutting the R&D budget, not raising it, and again bringing in top talent. In the auto industry, Bob Lutz has played a similar role, both at Chrysler with the low-cost development of products such as its Viper sports car, and more recently at GM, where he is now in charge of revitalizing its product design.
While Kelly Johnson wasn't a visionary on the level of von Braun, Korolev, or Jobs, he was able to see key technical trends and customer needs and keep focussed on the big picture when it came to the projects at hand (usually he was dividing his time among several) and then do what was necessary to keep everything progressing. Sometimes he also had to admit something wasn't going to work and go back to the drawing board. Once he ended up just giving the government its money back.
Besides the books noted above, Walter Boyne has also written a good article about Johnson. There are many books on the A-12/YF-12/SR-71 series, Johnson's crowning achievement, of which several of Paul Crickmore's may be among the most technically detailed. Aviation Week Video also produced SR-71: The Secret Vigil, which includes enlightening interviews of not only Rich but a number of key people involved with the program.
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| | Posted 6/8/2006 12:35 AM - 2537 Views - 2 eProps - 6 comments
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