Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis

Author:Warren Bennis [WARREN BENNIS PATRICIA WARD BIEDERMAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-23T16:00:00+00:00

THE SKUNK WORKS

It was an evil-smelling plastics factory next door that inspired the name of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, a term that has become synonymous with secret, groundbreaking technological work.

In their autobiographies, both Skunk Works founder, Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, and his successor, Ben R. Rich, tell essentially the same story. Johnson was already a legendary designer of airplanes when, in 1943, he was asked to develop the first U.S. jet fighter to counter the formidable jets of the Luftwaffe. Arguing that it was the only way to get the job done and done quickly, Johnson persuaded his Lockheed bosses to let him create a top-secret department within the company, staffed by a small group of hand-picked engineers and mechanics. Kelly got the go-ahead to set up a hush-hush experimental operation that sidestepped the corporate bureaucracy and was beholden only to Lockheed’s top management and its customers, notably the Army Air Corps. At the time, Lockheed’s Burbank plant was filled to bursting with the workers and equipment required for around-the-clock production of military planes. But Johnson managed to find a bit of space next to the plant’s wind tunnel for his elite cadre of twenty-three engineers, including himself, and thirty support people. They built their makeshift quarters out of wood from discarded engine boxes and roofed them with a rented circus tent. Their work was so secret they had neither janitors nor secretaries. Children whose fathers were in the Skunk Works grew up without ever learning exactly what Daddy did.

The name came from the funny papers. Politically savvy cartoonist Al Capp, the Garry Trudeau of his day, had recently created a character named Injun Joe for his popular comic strip, Li’l Abner. Injun Joe cooked up a particularly potent form of moonshine, called Kickapoo Joy Juice, from skunks, old shoes, and other unorthodox ingredients. The still was called the “Skonk Works.” One day soon after Johnson’s group was born, member Irv Culver answered the phone, “Skonk Works” (no secretaries, remember). The irascible Johnson, who had overheard, fired Culver for the offense, but the name stuck (and Culver continued to work in the Skonk Works he had named). Headed by thirty-three-year-old Johnson, that original Lockheed Skonk Works set out to design the first U.S. jet fighter in 180 days. Working furiously against its deadline, the group managed to produce a prototype of the P-80 Shooting Star with 37 days to spare. World War II ended before the plane could be produced in large numbers, but the P-80 was the U.S. fighter of choice in the Korean War.

Seventeen years after Johnson’s people named themselves the Skonk Works, Capp’s publisher balked at Lockheed’s use of the term. In 1960, the group changed its name to the Skunk Works and registered both the name and its logo, a rakish skunk with an upturned nose. When Johnson died at the age of eighty in 1990, after a long decline that included the loss of his imposing mental powers, Lockheed ran a full-page memorial in its in-house magazine that read, “So long, Kelly,” and showed the skunk with a tear running down its face.

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