From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 11:
Admiral Hyman Rickover was the Father of the Nuclear Navy — and one of the most effective bureaucrats in the history of the U.S. government. He also thought it was impossible to teach management by writing about it, but that didn’t stop him from trying.
In the two years between the Watergate scandal of 1972 and Nixon’s resignation in 1974, American trust in government cratered. Public confidence, already battered by Vietnam and inflation, spiraled to historic lows. In the 1976 election, Democrat Jimmy Carter ran on an agenda to restore trust. A “government as good as the people” became his campaign refrain, along with a government efficiency platform which included civil service reform and zero-based budgeting as key planks.
Carter worked with Congress to pass the 1977 Reorganization Act, which gave the executive branch greater authority to restructure federal agencies. He also launched the Personnel Management Project, which assembled a team of interagency experts to provide recommendations on civil service reform. The final recommendations from that project include ones that might be familiar today, like the need for more flexibility in hiring and relating federal pay to performance. These efforts culminated in the passage of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which created the Office of Personnel Management and centralized executive branch control over federal workforce policy. It was the most significant overhaul of the civil service since the New Deal, ushering in reforms and institutions that last to this day.
As part of its public mandate, OPM began publishing Management, a federal periodical for “insiders who need to know what's happening and how to get things done in the Federal Workforce.” This was part of the Carter administration’s effort to highlight best practices and promote efficiency across the federal bureaucracy. In their inaugural issue, the editors invited Admiral Hyman Rickover, the legendary founder of the U.S. Navy’s Naval Reactors nuclear propulsion program, to contribute.
Over a four-decade career, Rickover oversaw the design, deployment, and management of the Navy’s nuclear fleet. He personally drove the development of the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine (USS Nautilus) and the first commercial nuclear reactor (Shippingport Atomic Power Station). But more importantly, he built a lasting organizational system around them: one capable of operating high-risk, high-complexity technology for decades without a major incident.
In his piece, Rickover expressed a deep skepticism for the management consulting principles that were in vogue at the time. He argued that there are no tweaks that will magically fix systems. Instead, he emphasized the necessity of motivated and committed technocrats who develop intangible skills and possess an internal drive that cannot be taught in a seminar or a glossy magazine.
The piece reflected Rickover’s entire philosophy to managing Naval Reactors. A few months before the publication of his piece, he had testified in front of Congress following the Three Mile Island incident. Rather than talking about principles of management or regulatory fixes, he spent the majority of his testimony detailing the careful selection and continual, practical training for staff across the naval reactors enterprise he built. Indeed, Rickover interviewed every officer that went into his program until the end of his career, even when Naval Reactors spanned thousands of personnel, multiple training sites, and dozens of nuclear submarines....
....MUCH MORE, including Admiral Rickover's essay.
One of the members of Rickover's organization:
"That time the US President, an expert in nuclear physics, heroically lowered himself into the reactor and saved Ottawa, Canada’s capital?"
