
Doing a Job (1982) - lcuff
https://bebekim.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/doing-a-job-by-admiral-hyman-g-rickover-u-s-navy-retired/
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pjmorris
I've talked with two people who had worked in Rickover's organization, both of
whom respected him greatly, They each had a story to tell. One had an
interview with Rickover as part of his hiring process. Rickover asked him to
define and evaluate an integral for a conic section, to find the volume of a
cone. Another worked in Rickover's offices long enough to discover that
Rickover deliberately kept a chair in his office that had one leg slightly
shorter than the others, so visitors who sat in it would feel deliberately
off-balance. As I see it, he was always testing people to see what was in
them, as part of his drive to build an organization that did great things.

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_yosefk
Wow - an army guy, "the Father of the Nuclear Navy," who gets things about
management that half the tech industry doesn't, instead using supposedly army-
like command-and-control methods!

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pdonis
_> an army guy_

Rickover was never in the army as far as I know. He was in the navy. At least
in the US, the army and the navy are very different organizations (although
these days all of the military branches in the US are being eaten by the Borg
of "Joint" organizations).

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foobarian
Do you have any pointers about this? As someone on the outside they always
seemed two of the same to me except for the kind of equipment they had access
to.

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pdonis
_> Do you have any pointers about this?_

There are certainly similarities, since they are both military organizations,
but at least in my experience, a couple of key differences are:

(1) The equipment the Navy operates is much more complex, so there is more
emphasis on technical expertise in the equipment and less emphasis on the
kinds of skills that you need in, say, an infantry unit.

(2) Ships at sea are much more self-contained operations than anything the
army does. (This is even more true of submarines, which might be out of
communication with the rest of the world for days, weeks, or even months at a
time.) This affects the workings of ship crews in many ways: for example, the
captain of a ship at sea has more of what might be called absolute power than
the commander of an army unit. Also, officers standing watch on ships at sea,
particularly at night, have a very grave responsibility that doesn't have any
obvious counterpart in peacetime in the army. (One illustration of this is the
collisions in the Pacific, which show what happens when those watch officers
make mistakes.)

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marktangotango
A couple of more things; traditions and cultures are vastly different. The US
navy was around long before a standing army. Also there’s a notion of distance
to the people pulling the triggers; point of the spear. In the navy and Air
Force relatively few people pull triggers, in the army and marine nearly
everyone does which leads to the old saying; the marines are a department of
the navy, the men’s department.

Their missions are different to clearly. Naval operations center around force
projection and protecting aircraft carriers ie aircraft carrier battle groups.
The army conducts either low intensity peace keeping or counter insurgency ops
or high intensity ops, like countering a soviet invasion of Western Europe
during the Cold War ie maneuver and heavy army.

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mujoco
There are several good points in the speech that many of today's companies
could benefit from: Help the best employees grow so they don't leave and take
your organizational memory with them; build processes for long-term success
instead of optimizing short-term financial metrics; let managers "go and see"
the details of the problems that rank-and-file workers are having; favor
leaders who are expert in the field over professional managers.

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josephpmay
Anyone have a mirror? The site contains a malicious ad that hijacks my browser
on iOS.

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Etheryte
[https://gist.github.com/Etheryte/014fc39d251ee9b23914fceeb08...](https://gist.github.com/Etheryte/014fc39d251ee9b23914fceeb08ef24c)

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isostatic
Full of spam adverts redirecting my phone

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masonic
(2011)

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dang
He died in 1986. It's an earlier talk.

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masonic
The article was submitted with no date; I commented on the _article_ date.

