This oped of mine first appeared in the National Board Bulletin, here.
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Alongside a dock in Groton,
Connecticut, is a floating museum piece: Nautilus, the world’s
first nuclear-powered submarine. It entered service more than a half
century ago. Are there any useful lessons from something so far back
into the Eisenhower era?
Visitors passing through the galley
will see, prominently displayed, a list of the “Ten Commandments of
Damage Control.” These are principles such as keeping cool and
doing one’s duty in an emergency.
The quarters are tight, but there’s
space for at least ten more commandments about how to avoid
catastrophic accidents from high-energy technology. Here’s one I’d
recommend for that list of bonus commandments: “Have a written,
legal form that the inspector signs at the bottom: I hereby
certify by my signature that I have actually observed or performed
the step that I have checked off or initialed.”
That commandment is from The Man
himself, Admiral Hyman Rickover, the man the nation knew as the
Father of the Nuclear Navy.
Across the entire history of
technology, Rickover set the standard for quality: not just for
equipment but for people. Who else could have climbed out from a
dead-end postwar job, to marshal the power, money, and talent to
create a nuclear powered submarine in six years? And more than that:
to create a durable, quality-driven organization that persists long
after his retirement. Naval Reactors has built more than 200 power
plants and operated them with zero meltdowns: no small achievement
considering the ugly string of meltdowns and lesser radiation
incidents in the Russian Navy.
In every talk I’ve given about my
book Inviting Disaster since 2001, I’ve closed with a
reference to Rickover and what he called the “Discipline of
Technology.” Over those years, dozens of veterans have come up to
share stories about their interviews with Rickover. In his 63 years
of active service in the Navy (a record), Rickover interviewed more
than 5,000 midshipmen for officer positions.
Those brief encounters were famous for
the tricks he used to throw job applicants off their game: like the
slippery, off-kilter chair for candidates, and the broom closet to
which he banished middies he felt weren’t responsive enough to his
barked and often unfair questions. Drawn from Ted Rockwell’s study
of Naval Reactors, Rickover once explained it to an associate this
way: “What I'm trying to find out is how they will behave under
pressure. Will they lie, or bluff, or panic, or wilt? Or will they
continue to function with some modicum of competence and integrity? I
can't find that out with routine questions. I've only got a few
minutes with each one, half an hour at most. I've got to shake 'em
up.”
While stressing out the candidates was
clearly part of his method, there was more at work. Recently I took a
new look at submariners’ recollections about their “Rakeover”
ordeals. He looked for what might be called breadth and depth of
character. He favored those who had made their way in the world
without family wealth or political connections. He favored those who
won their grades at the US Naval Academy through persistence and
hard work, rather than breezing through on natural talent. Having
arrived as a young immigrant from Poland, and having spent his
adolescence in near-poverty, he knew nothing but hard work.
Rickover didn’t ignore paper
achievements. Before each interview he had a full folder showing the
candidate’s class rank, grades by major and minor, and the results
of screening interviews. In today’s human resources lexicon, that
manila folder captured a good picture of what today we call the
applicant’s KSA– his knowledge, skills, and abilities. Such info
can be scored and weighted quickly by HR people or their trusty
computers, and that’s important now that so many jobs need to be
filled, and any one jobseeker can post hundreds of applications via
the internet.
So it’s not that Rickover was
oblivious to the importance of “KSA” strengths. Rather, he was
adding another letter to that acronym: “I” for inclination.
Admittedly, inclination can be a hard
thing to detect. But it’s worth the effort when people in
leadership positions have the power to make catastrophic mistakes.
Rickover wanted to know, for example, if a stressed applicant was
going to blame others for his own shortcomings.
I believe that three questions, drawn
from the content of quality-driven leaders like Rickover, can shine
light into an applicant’s inclinations:
What are your goals, and what
are you doing to get there?
What do you fear the most? In
other words, what risks do you avoid?
Who are your peers, the people
whose opinion you value?
Goals, fears, and peers are best
indicated by actions and choices, not words. People in public view
often claim to value a set of high-minded goals, while pursuing a
very different set of selfish goals.
To get at peer connections, we have to
go beyond the résumé listing of membership and professional groups.
Is the applicant most drawn to like-minded people, or to those who
challenge his opinions with critical thinking and skeptical
questions?
Rickover’s early years in Naval
Reactors show how a look at goals, fears, and peers can reveal
inclination.
Rickover’s goal, which certainly
seemed like a long shot in 1947, when his office was a remodeled
bathroom and he lacked any staff or a budget, was to build a highly
compact, safe, and efficient reactor for submarines. He’d served on
diesel-electric subs during World War II and came away convinced that
such boats, slow and short of range when submerged, couldn't survive
anti-submarine attacks.
But just how much did he value success
in hitting the nuclear power goal? What risks would he undertake on
behalf of the program? That’s where a look at the fear angle tells
the story. Rickover’s fear was that reactor accidents and leaks
would shut down this promising technology.
Testing was one way he coped with that
fear. In 1953, he prepared to test an exact duplicate of the reactor
planned for Nautilus. Rickover wanted realism, so he had it
mounted inside a section of submarine hull, complete with a
propulsion system, to simulate the load on the steam plant. The
location was a test facility in Idaho. The “Submarine Thermal
Reactor, Mark I” (STR-1) ran fine in the first few hours: so well,
in fact, that he could have stopped and called the test a success.
Instead, he told the test crew he wanted to keep the reactor running
long enough to simulate a voyage from North America to Ireland.
Halfway through that span, the plant was making loud and worrisome
noises.
Against much opposition from his team,
he insisted on completing the four-day test, because it was better to
learn fatal flaws on land than at sea. A teardown showed that the
reactor did everything it was supposed to; it was the drive train that
needed work.
Bureaucratically speaking, continuing
with the full test was foolish, since Rickover’s file happened to
be in front of an admirals’ review board that was strongly inclined
to kick him into retirement. It would have been smarter to turn off
STR-1 early and hush up any problems.
Instead, this story shows that
Rickover’s fear was not about career or even his own hide. It was
fear of releasing a flawed and dangerous technology into the world.
Throughout the Nautilus project he not only sought out bad
news, he demanded it.
When leaders are being picked to
develop risky but promising technology, in which the margin of safety
will be very slim, we will need more Rickovers.
Will the selection process find these
needles in the haystack? If I had to think of a single trait that
distinguishes Rickover of Naval Reactors from the much larger crowd
of narcissistic, self-glorifying leaders, I'd suggest looking at risk
tolerance. What risks have the candidates taken up to now, and why?
Rickover repeatedly took on big risks.
But his life and times show that the goal he pursued by taking such
risks wasn’t to stave off boredom, to ingratiate himself, or to
pave the way for a cushy contractor job after retirement. His goal
was nothing less than excellence: “No disasters on my watch – not
on anybody’s watch.”
