Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. . . . Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.1
I have waited some years after Admiral Rickover’s death to write this book. The practical reason was that I was employed in a job that left little time for reflective writing. I also thought the passage of time might help me approach the subject with refreshed insight.
During the years after his passing, I worked with hundreds of senior leaders who advocated a number of different management styles. Following Rickover’s memorial service, I sequentially held three jobs within the Navy not associated with the submarine force. After retiring from the Navy, I spent another two decades in work divorced from the Navy—as a director on various public company boards, in executive roles with two major companies, and, in succession, as a political appointee in the Clinton administration, as an owner of a small business, as the senior adviser to the minister of finance in Iraq, and then back to business as the chief operating officer of a large organization performing both defense and commercial work.
In each of these roles, I drew on the lessons I had learned from my personal interactions with Admiral Rickover. Each time circumstances tested me, I became even more convinced that the admiral’s leadership and management techniques could aid any manager. His principles were out there for all to see but tended to become lost in the amazing story of his career.2 I finally realized that residual resentment in the Navy and defense industry revolved around the cultural changes he forced. This situation was not helped when the good admiral, himself an expert at distinguishing pearls from dross, was too busy after he had finally retired to ever get around to writing his own autobiography.
But, second only to the establishment of the nuclear-submarine force,3 Rickover’s most important achievements were the management innovations he gave the world. My personal interactions with him led me to three observations:
• Hard work and focus can succeed for anyone,
• Humans can manage process control as well as continuous change at the same time, and
• An extraordinary leader can see well “beyond the horizon.”
Hard Work
I never met anyone who worked harder than Rickover. No one. And he was a member of a tough crowd, for unlike some leaders, Rickover did not surround himself with lesser intellects and personalities. Instead, he preferentially selected younger Type A personalities and let it be known that he valued and rewarded dedication. Still, no one I met ever outworked him.
I think he remained driven because this characteristic was what best discriminated him from his peers. Rickover’s early professional life did not show the same signs of brilliance we have grown to expect to see in young people who will change the world. Yet, after a slow twenty-five-year professional start, Rickover altered everything he touched.
He had two personal characteristics working mightily against him: his introversion and his lack of command presence. It is difficult to determine the more limiting trait, but let’s take the introvert issue first. His dislike of social engagements he couldn’t control led him to be classified as a loner by his peers. It also limited his effectiveness. Management (and leadership) is made effective by using others’ hands and minds to enhance and accomplish one’s own vision. Rickover permitted his natural shyness to constrain his ability to establish political and professional alliances. Consequently, he was unsuccessful in some of his endeavors, and other achievements required more effort than they might have.
Being an introvert is a perfectly acceptable trait in many career fields, but by choosing to attend the Naval Academy, Rickover had become part of a profession in which introversion was a handicap. Naval officers were expected to share bonhomie with others from all cultures and walks of life. An officer needed to develop relationships with military officers and government officials from other nations. The Navy anticipated that as an officer progressed through different jobs and grew more senior, those cold-call friendships could lead to informal or formal alliances for the good of the United States.
The Navy officer corps has historically been an important adjunct to the U.S. ambassadorial effort. For example, during Rickover’s attendance at the U.S. Naval Academy, sons of important individuals from each ally also attended. After graduation these young individuals returned to their home countries to serve as officers and political officials. Given the millions of dollars our government invested in establishing the framework for development of these high-level contacts, junior officers were expected (and graded upon) their ability to continue to build on these relationships. Rickover refused to make any attempt to do so and ridiculed those officers who did.
Since Rickover was by nature profoundly uncomfortable in social settings and with most personal relationships, it was painful to be in his presence.4 This was not itself a fatal flaw, but management is always accomplished by working with people, and when staff members are uncomfortable, less gets done. The admiral appears never to have been sufficiently at ease and confident to experiment with altering his management and leadership style. He thus had difficulty getting more from the less-capable individuals who make up the bulk of every organization. Rickover worked well with the supremely confident, brash, intelligent, articulate, and outspoken personalities he sought to recruit. But those numbers are always limited (thank goodness). As the nuclear-submarine force grew, Rickover needed more people, and many of those, although very bright, were not completely comfortable with Rickover’s “in your face” approach. While the nuclear-submarine force needed all these personnel, Rickover often did not relate as well to the “purer souls” as he did to the “aggressive bastards.”
For all of his accomplishments, there is no evidence that Rickover sought to alter his personal management style to accommodate the wide range of personalities working for him. A reading of the accounts of his own time on board submarines (where the extremely small size of submarine crews makes the growth of interactive people skills imperative) indicates that Rickover’s undeveloped personal skills marred the experience for him as well as for his shipmates.5
As he rose in seniority within the Navy, his introversion may have been part of his larger challenge with command presence. No one has ever been able to explain why one particular individual is considered to have command presence while another is found wanting. Perhaps it is just the way one holds one’s mouth. If so, Rickover did not hold his the right way. In reviewing the literature and oral histories of his peers, as well as speaking to those who worked for or with him, I have found few, whether or not they admired Rickover, who thought the admiral had the intangible presence and bearing of a leader. He was without peer as a manager, but the leadership mantle tended to slip from his thin shoulders. I always believed this was personally devastating to him. Rickover wanted to be known as a leader, not as the most superlative manager of his century.6
It is similarly difficult to tell what caused him the most anguish during his command tour in his thirties on board the minesweeper USS Finch, another small, intimate ship.7 Nevertheless, a short time after he had arrived in Finch to assume command, Rickover left the role naval officers are culturally predisposed to savor above all others—command at sea—to become an engineering duty officer, no longer eligible to command anything at sea. It was a good decision given that he wanted to continue a career in the Navy, for many naval officers did not believe command presence was essential in the engineering-only field.
Although his engineering expertise was respected, Rickover was never ordered into the war zones during the nearly five years of World War II8 but was instead sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the war’s completion, in charge of literally no one.9 It is normally a professional disaster for a captain in the Navy to have no staff.
At the time he arrived at the hastily constructed wooden buildings that were Oak Ridge, Captain Rickover was nearly fifty years old. During his career he had not been shot at in battle, he had not been successful in operations at sea, and he had not been successful in senior billets at sea. Already there were admirals serving in the Pacific who had graduated from the Naval Academy later than he. Yet a short eight years later (January 11, 1954), the entire cover of Time magazine would be devoted to Captain Rickover’s stern visage.
At Oak Ridge Rickover did not suddenly become a new man. He was not immediately different from what he had been for the first half of his life. Instead, he found himself assigned to a situation that, to use a baseball expression, was in his personal capabilities’ “sweet spot.” Like the immortal Lou Gehrig, given a chance at bat, Hyman G. Rickover hit it out of the ballpark—and continued doing so for more than three decades.
While others initially yearned to be in charge of the Navy’s nuclear effort, none were able or willing to devote their life and health solely to this one goal. Fitting the first nuclear reactor in the world into the small round hull of a submarine demanded a manager with the ability to understand both science and engineering. The manager needed not only to observe process guidelines but also to simultaneously innovate—and possess more than a handful of chutzpah.
The final hurdle Rickover leaped—another his peers couldn’t match—was that he possessed the energy required. Rickover had spent his entire life working at an extraordinary pace. Others had permitted their life to become distracted by such things as families, church, and recreation. Rickover had never diverted his focus from work. The right problem at Oak Ridge had found the right man.
Process versus Innovation
Most successful organizations attribute their triumphs to the good processes they have instituted and inculcated. Processes are the tools that enable inexperienced and less-capable employees to fight well above their weight. Repeatable processes allow an organization to retain lessons learned.
Admiral Rickover insisted that the nuclear-submarine force become the advocate within the Navy for strict process control. Not only did the majority of the Navy not follow his lead, but some surface officers led a countermovement. The counterweapon of choice was to ridicule submariners as unthinking robots (i.e., surface officers did not need processes because they thought through their problems rather than relying on authoritarian guidance). This was a powerful emotional argument. Its flaws were often not understood, especially by individuals not terribly interested in engineering knowledge becoming construed as essential to naval professionalism. Submariners were thus pushed by their officer peers, as well as many public figures, to denigrate and ignore Rickover’s standards. Peer pressure is a strong weapon in enforcing conformity.
But Rickover was mentally tougher than the sum of his critics. By sheer force of personality, he refused to permit his small group of submariners to relax their standards (and goodness knows we all had weak moments when it seemed easier to join rather than fight the much larger group of officers who were our social friends and peers). However, Rickover was adamant about his standards and dismissed anyone who showed weakness. At the same time, he was more willing than anyone I have ever known to adopt new ideas and change if a hitherto approved process were subsequently demonstrated incorrect. It did not matter to him if he had personally conceived the idea that was being dragged through the mud and ridiculed. Rickover lived his life by the measures he had publicly listed during his U.S. Naval Postgraduate School address in 1954, and one of those was that rules limit progress.10
By insisting on strict process control for routine evolutions yet concurrently encouraging individuals to challenge his system and his processes, Rickover was able to institute a scheme in which individuals did not have to choose between process and innovation.11 The nuclear-submarine force would value both.
Beyond the Horizon
His other demonstrated talents aside, I have personally always been in awe of how Admiral Rickover could see so clearly far into the future. He initially demonstrated this valuable talent during his assignment to Oak Ridge in the late forties. His different biographers speak of all the various tactical actions Rickover undertook in order for the program to succeed (and for his own professional aspirations to thrive). In this early process he made three immensely important strategic decisions:
• He decided to gain simultaneous control of the AEC or Department of Energy aspects of their maritime program and the Navy nuclear program.
• He decided, counter to the recommendations of his entire team, to increase the radiation shielding (and lower the radiation exposure of the crew).
• He decided the first nuclear reactor in the world would go into the immensely more confined spaces of a submarine instead of the planned (and much more engineering-friendly) surface ship.
I have previously discussed the critical importance to America of the first two decisions. To recap, gaining control of both the AEC and the Navy nuclear program by hook or crook prevented bureaucratic sluggishness when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War. At the same time, establishing low radiation limits may well have been one of the key factors in the outcome of the Cold War.
Rickover’s insistence on placing the first reactor on board a submarine (instead of a surface ship) hasn’t been discussed in this book simply because I was not present, as others were, when Rickover reversed the Navy’s decision to go with a surface ship as the pilot project platform—and consequently changed history.12 Rickover understood, while many did not, that blending essential submarine characteristics with a nuclear power plant was as revolutionary a change as if, after having landed their World War I German Fokker propeller-driven biplanes, U.S. airmen had walked directly across the beaten-down grass of a French meadow, handed their leather helmets to a beautiful mademoiselle, and climbed up a steel ladder directly into the cockpits of Stealth F-117 Nighthawks. I cannot even conjure a ground-force analogy, unless it would be as if a warrior on the front lines facing an enemy had passed a broken medieval bow and quiver of arrows back over his shoulder and received in return a Spencer repeating rifle.
The diesel submarine had previously been among the least-capable ships in the naval fleet, most useful as a scout or for hit-and-run tactics against merchant ships.13 By putting nuclear power on board submarines, Rickover truly transformed the U.S. Navy and altered the balance of naval warfare between the two superpowers.
Consolidating bureaucratic control of the nuclear-power program, strictly limiting the radiation exposure of the crews, and deciding the first reactor would go on board a submarine were important, but Rickover also made three other key decisions that bundled together comprise his personal “crystal-ball six-pack”:
• Long before there was any public outcry to do so, Rickover decreed that nuclear vessels would not permit any radioactive contamination to be released into the environment.
• He decided that the culture of the submarine force would emphasize engineering competency as a priority over any other skill.14
• He focused on safety, safety, safety.
Release of Radioactivity
Those who live in an environment of mature and regulated industries often do not appreciate how new technologies begin. It is difficult to later go back and reproduce the conditions at the creation, when enthusiasm was high and before (often subtle) dangers were fully recognized or appreciated. Often, when a new technology is initially being exploited, the perceived threat of failure mitigates a proper appreciation of the risks.
When I began serving in submarines, our standard process permitted discharging primary coolant, the water that flowed through the reactor and gathered radioactive corrosion by-products during its journey, directly out of the ship (in my particular case into the Thames River in New London) on outgoing tides. Once off the ship the coolant was theoretically diluted to a harmless mixture by all the other water and swept past the boots of the early rising men fishing from the Groton pier butts into Narragansett Bay. Discharging radioactive coolant overboard seemed to me like a necessary and natural practice. I didn’t question it, nor do I recall anyone having second thoughts at the time. Doing so was even a technical necessity, for the ships couldn’t start up without discharging coolant. There was simply no place to put the excess water when the reactor primary plant was heated up several hundreds of degrees. In addition, many of the systems supporting reactor operation were designed to leak.
Remember that Rickover only had control of the systems immediately supporting reactor operation. The myriad other support systems were designed and built by the Bureau of Ships (which was never under Rickover’s control, no matter how much he desired it to be). Rather than devote the effort to designing original valves for this new underwater application, the bureau often adapted previously designed valves intended for high-pressure surface-ship steam engineering plant applications. As a consequence, these valves typically relied on a small leakage of water from the inside, past the stem,15 to ease the friction of the valve opening and closing.16 But when these valves were installed in nuclear submarines, the lubricating water leaking by the stem of each valve contained a small amount of radioactive fission products. Because of this design, on the first several classes of nuclear ships, a constant trickle of contaminated water dripped into submarine bilges.17 Not only were the bilges being contaminated in the process, but as natural evaporation occurred, a small amount of radioactive particles became airborne.
It wasn’t that much radiation, and those of us serving in the older nuclear submarines had become accustomed to it. Rickover, however, recognized the situation for the real danger it posed—if not to sailors, to principle. Whether large or small, the trickle of water was uncontrolled and caused unnecessary radiation exposure. Rickover had a simple standard: radioactivity was either under control or not. It did not matter whether the radioactivity released was significant. But it mattered a great deal that the leakage was a violation of his principle of controlling unnecessary exposure to humans.18
And while he was at it, Rickover worried about the general public and the unanticipated dangers that might result from the water discharged overboard. In the early seventies he surprised me—and, I think, most of us who were operating his ships—by, without warning, simply dictating that we would no longer discharge any radioactive liquids into the sea. It did not matter that submarines had been designed in a manner that required pumping radioactive waste overboard. He did not care about past mistakes or the more than fifteen years that the submarine Navy had been discharging contamination overboard without ill results. He was not moved by claims of constancy. He was not swayed by professional embarrassment. Rickover had come to the conclusion that the old practice was wrong. We who were operating the ships were not given a new solution. We were only made responsible for determining how to forever cease discharging radioactivity overboard.19
Smart people thought and adapted. The first systems were labor and supervisory intensive. Later, more elegant designs replaced our first rough efforts. Some nuclear operators did not adapt or accept how important Rickover thought this change. Those individuals were, by definition, less flexible than safety required, and they were replaced with people with greater imagination, initiative, and drive.
Years later it became evident that “the organizational we” had greatly underestimated the danger of the insidious buildup over time of radioactive contaminants in the seabeds adjacent to our common ships’ moorings. By the time the facts were in, because Rickover had taken early action, the danger was already decaying away. Rickover had not spent years agonizing about the consequences of a change in policy. He had not had numerous teams analyze the data. He did not worry about the cost of change (or spend hours listening to lawyers harp about the possible costs of consequential lawsuits). He simply trusted his gut and changed. By doing so, he stopped the submarine force from discharging radioactivity into the environment long before the issue ever crystallized in the public eye. We stopped solely because Admiral Rickover could perceive the inherent principles and see where the facts would eventually lead a reasonable person (or at least one with the admiral’s insight).
Submarine-Culture Change
From his own experience as a younger officer, Rickover knew that the Navy had an inordinate respect for the admirals who had served in command at sea.20 These admirals ultimately controlled the Navy. Since they had been selected in part because they possessed command presence, they believed in the importance of that characteristic.
The same power structure valued command at sea above all other achievements. Consequently, Navy culture denigrated engineering. The officers in the seagoing Navy who rose to admiral rank had seldom served as engineers. Gunnery was the common path to flag rank. And people on the way to flag rank believed they did not have the time to serve as engineers. Like most of us, they also frequently did not have the inclination. Rickover recognized that the existing Navy power structure would never value the engineering knowledge he believed was essential. He could either change the culture of the Navy’s entire power structure—one that had managed to last for two hundred years—or he could do something more innovative. Since the first was impossible, even for Rickover, he selected the latter.
He chose to assemble a corps of men who were mentally agile enough to assimilate nuclear engineering during their first eight to ten years. At the same time, he recruited driven men who he judged would be willing to spend the second ten to fifteen years of their careers working extra hard to successfully compete as conventional “operating” admirals.21 Rickover managed this, not by recruiting individuals like him to follow in his own footsteps, but by choosing individuals who could be more than he. The men who had judged Rickover’s early career had driven home to him that he could not be a successful warrior—the most respected label in the Navy—but was “only” qualified to be an engineering manager. Rickover knew he needed men within the operating Navy who understood the principles of nuclear safety as well as he—and who were in positions of power. Those positions are filled with admirals.
So, he selected men for nuclear power who had the innate ability to be warriors and leaders. To establish the culture of engineering excellence he needed, he insisted that every officer who aspired to command a nuclear submarine first qualify as an engineer (and for many years every nuclear-submarine officer selected to be promoted to admiral had previously served as an engineer). By ignoring conventional wisdom and establishing a new pecking order, Rickover thus subordinated the navigations, operations, and weapons officers assignments to the individual assigned as engineer (the Navy previously allotted much higher status to these billets than to the engineer assignment). And then Rickover stayed in place in the Navy to ensure that his new culture of engineering management would flourish. He thus established a completely unique and different subculture within the naval culture.
Safety, Safety, Safety
It is important to review the impact Rickover had on the concept of safety. Going to sea in submarines is inherently dangerous. Nuclear power also has its dangers. Yet the United States has not lost a submarine since the 1960s, and America has never had a reactor accident, while our peer competitor in this area, the Soviet Union/Russia, has both lost submarines and suffered many reactor accidents.
Why the differences? Is it because Russia produces fewer scientists than America? No, Russia produces more scientists in absolute numbers as well as in college percentages. So the difference is not education. I can personally assure you it is also not talent. The Soviets have directed some of their finest young men to their submarine programs, and these men have served with distinction, performing many brave and selfless acts.22 The difference between the two countries was and remains one of culture.23
Rickover recognized that safety was the most important aspect of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear power program. He installed principles to ensure all nuclear-trained Americans recognized their personal responsibility to protect the public from any adverse effects of nuclear power. He then devoted the rest of his life to ensuring this cultural change was embedded into the nuclear-submarine force.