#419 Kelly Johnson: Skunk Works
5/16/202650 min
Kelly Johnson’s “14 Points” read like a SpaceX operations manual — 60 years before SpaceX was founded. Kelly Johnson created Skunk Works, which he defined as: “A concentration of a few good people solving problems far in advance—and at a fraction of the cost—of other groups by applying the simplest, most straightforward methods possible to develop and produce new projects. All it is really is the application of common sense to some pretty tough problems.” Kelly Johnson was a great engineer and system builder with genius for organizational design. His autobiography which he wrote when he was 75 years old is full of hard-earned wisdom from his 44 year career. This episode is what I learned from reading Kelly: More Than My Share of it All by Kelly Johnson. Made possible by: Ramp: https://ramp.com Axon by Applovin: https://axon.ai/founders Vanta: https://vanta.com/founders
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Senra· Host0:00
So a few weeks ago, I made this episode called How SpaceX Works, and while I was reading about the way SpaceX operates, I came across this very interesting sentence. I wanna read this to you. It says, "Many of these ideas are not even new. Lockheed's Skunk Works ran similar approaches sixty years ago. Founder Kelly Johnson's fourteen rules reads like a SpaceX operations manual." So that made me wanna read Kelly Johnson's autobiography, which is called More Than My Share of It All. He wrote it when he was seventy-five years old. And the first thing I wanna tell you about in the book, I actually wanna jump towards the end of the book. It's one of the last chapters. The chapter's called It's No Secret, and it breaks down how he built and how he ran Skunk Works. But before I jump into the book, there's this list of twenty ideas. I wanna give you an overview of basically how he ran this operation, and I think telling you this list of twenty ideas upfront will make it easy to remember and understand everything that comes after. So number one, a breakthrough program is an organization before it's a design. So this is one of he-- maybe the greatest designer of aircraft of all time. In the case of the plane, the SR-71, which Kelly designed all the way back in the 1960s, it still holds to this day, sixty years later, it still holds the record for the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft. When Elon Musk is telling his team about the importance of speed and how speed is a massive competitive advantage for a business, he uses the SR-71 as an example. Let me read you this quote from Elon about this. He says, "The best offense and defense is speed. The SR-71 Blackbird," again, a design from Kelly Johnson