The Lockheed Skunk Works was pretty good at getting innovative products out the door. From Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (Ben Rich, 1996)…
some of our inventions: the P-80, America’s first jet fighter; the F-104 Starfighter, our first supersonic jet attack plane; the U-2 spy plane; the incredible SR-71 Blackbird, the world’s first three-times-the-speed-of-sound surveillance airplane; and the F-117A stealth tactical fighter that many Americans saw on CNN scoring precision bomb strikes over Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm.
How did they do it? The style of the top manager changed pretty dramatically over the years:
[Kelly Johnson] was the toughest boss west of the Mississippi, or east of it too, suffered fools for less than seven seconds, and accumulated as many detractors as admirers at the Pentagon and among Air Force commanders. But even those who would never forgive Johnson for his bullying stubbornness and hair-trigger temper were forced to salute his matchless integrity. On several occasions, Kelly actually gave back money to the government, either because we had brought in a project under budget or because he saw that what we were struggling to design or build was just not going to work.
With [Kelly Johnson’s] chili-pepper temperament, he was poison to any bureaucrat, a disaster to ass-coverers, excuse-makers, or fault-finders.
I began by loosening the leash on all my department heads. I told them what they already knew: I was not a genius like Kelly, who knew by experience and instinct how to solve the most complex technical problems. I said, “I have no intention of trying to make all the decisions around here the way that Kelly always did. From now on, you’ll have to make most of the tough calls on your own.”
So the productivity wasn’t due to a particular personal management style at the top. What about the physical set-up?
Designers lived with their designs through fabrication, assembly, and testing. Engineers couldn’t just throw their drawings at the shop people on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and walk away.
Our designers spent at least a third of their day right on the shop floor; at the same time, there were usually two or three shop workers up in the design room conferring on a particular problem. That was how we kept everybody involved and integrated on a project. My weights man talked to my structures man, and my structures man talked to my designer, and my designer conferred with my flight test guy, and they all sat two feet apart, conferring and kibitzing every step of the way.
The office space allocated to Kelly’s Skunk Works operation was a narrow hallway off the main production floor, crowded with drilling machines and presses, small parts assemblies, and the large assembly area which served as the production line. There were two floors of surprisingly primitive and overcrowded offices where about fifty designers and engineers were jammed together behind as many desks as a moderate-size room could unreasonably hold.
All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor. A stone’s throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions.
Twenty designers were stashed away in choking work rooms up on the second floor. The windows were sealed shut, and in those days nearly everyone smoked.
Except for the smoking, not too different Facebook-style Open-pit Coding!
[The “engineers have to be close to the factory” principle seems to indicate a poor long-term prognosis for U.S. engineering employment (the E in STEAM!). If the engineers need to be close to the factory and the factory needs to be in Mexico or China then eventually the engineers will have to be Mexican and Chinese as well.]
Related:
Gimlet’s StartUp is doing a podcast series about the rise & fall of American Apparel. The company was famous for doing all of its manufacturing locally in the US, rather than overseas. The founder insisted on this simply because he could control quality and respond to fashion changes much faster than waiting for shipments from Vietnam. This easily compensated for the difference in labor costs.
Unfortunately, other aspects of the CEO’s unconventional behavior didn’t work out so well.
Similar to the Toyota Production System, Genchi Genbutsu, roughly go and see.
The maker movement has mostly ended, with all the 3D printer, quad copter, arduino widget startups shifting back to old fashioned web development because of this reason.