Trust Networks

Keep the teams small. In order to progress, the designers need to share the same vision. ... Before that point, too many cooks spoil the broth.

Inside the Skunk Works, we were a small, intensely cohesive group consisting of about fifty veteran engineers and designers and a hundred or so expert machinists and shop workers. Our forte was building a small number of very technologically advanced airplanes for highly secret missions.

Heart’s knack for putting together effective engineering teams had made him a highly regarded and valuable project manager. He looked for people who would be committed to a common mission rather than a personal agenda. He preferred to keep teams small so that everyone was always talking to everyone else. Heart chose the kind of people who took personal responsibility for what they did. And while Heart tolerated idiosyncrasy, he shied away from egocentric “head cases,” no matter how smart they were.

It was trust. “Trust is risk, and risk avoidance is the name of the game in business,” West said once, in praise of trust. He would bind his team with mutual trust, he had decided. When a person signed up to do a job for him, he would in turn trust that person to accomplish it; he wouldn’t break it down into little pieces and make the task small, easy and dull.

None of us ever doubted that we were going to succeed. And none of us ever stopped to question whether or not we trusted the other. We never had to look at our back.

but taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.

Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another. People who would feel obligated to be honest somehow feel freer when asked for their candor; they have a choice about whether to give it, and thus, when they do give it, it tends to be genuine.

Another participant, Ivan Sutherland, remembers his first meeting in 1964: “These people met, period. The group had no charter, no responsibilities, no budget, no purpose—but it was a great thing. We would discuss what was important, what was current, and what was going on. Precisely because the group had no charter, it was a wonderful way of getting information flow between the agencies.”