Leadership Lessons from Oppenheimer to Google: Navigating Success and Setbacks
Today's TL;dr explores Oppenheimer's unexpected management prowess, the pitfalls of Google's Gemini, and the shifting dynamics of post-pandemic work life
I love movies. And I really love movies that make me think. So, I was thrilled when “Oppenheimer” won Best Picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday. After watching the movie last summer with my wife and 24-year-old son, we drove home in silence, processing what we had just watched, then sat down in the living room and talked about it for an hour and a half.
There’s lots we could unpack from the film, but today we’re going to focus on management lessons we can learn from the movie’s namesake. J. Robert Oppenheimer was 38 years old, had never managed more than a collection of graduate students, yet figured out how to successfully run the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory that produced the world’s first atomic bomb that effectively ended World War II. So, yeah, there are some real insights for managers.
We can learn from jobs not well done, too. Thus, today’s TL;dr will look at a recent high-profile product flop and explore some management “don’ts”. Finally, we’ll look at changing attitudes toward work in general and what that means for managers.
Three, two, one … here we go!
Oppenheimer Couldn’t Run a Hamburger Stand. How Did He Run a Secret Lab?
The March 8 article in the Wall Street Journal by Ben Cohen explores Oppenheimer’s leadership qualities. Despite his lack of management experience and the initial opposition to his appointment, Oppenheimer transformed into one of history’s most effective leaders.
As good as the 3-hour movie is, Cohen did a deeper dive into Oppenheimer’s management genius by interviewing the surviving authors of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books1 about Oppenheimer, “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin and “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes.
“They helped me understand (the) elements of his success that apply to any sort of project—even the ones that don’t involve gigantic explosions,” Cohen writes.
Here are my three takeaways.
Recruitment and Team Building: Oppenheimer prioritized assembling a talented team for the Manhattan Project. He implemented a policy of “unscrupulous recruiting,” ensuring he gathered a diverse group of brilliant minds. “When the physicist Richard Feynman turned him down because his wife was sick with tuberculosis, for example, Oppenheimer found a sanatorium close enough to Los Alamos that he could visit on the weekends,” Cohen writes. “It’s a revealing story not because Feynman was a star but the opposite: The future Nobel winner was still merely a graduate student, ‘not anybody famous at all,’ as he put it, and yet Oppenheimer still went above and beyond.” There is no substitute for good people. Do what it takes to get them on your team.
Effective Communication from Top to Bottom: Known as a “supercommunicator,” Oppenheimer excelled in saying just the right thing at just the right time. He found connections among the various disciplines that needed to come together to build something extraordinary in a compressed time frame at Los Alamos (everyone was terrified the Nazis would build the bomb first). And it wasn’t just the physics superstars he connected with. “Oppenheimer had close personal relationships with hundreds of the 10,000 people who came to work at Los Alamos,” Cohen writes. “Even the ones that didn’t know him felt like he knew them. That made them want to work harder for him. ‘Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing,’ Hans Bethe, the head of the project’s theoretical-physics division, told Rhodes. ‘He made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project.’”
Collaboration Over Compartmentalization: Oppenheimer challenged the military’s preference for compartmentalization, advocating for a more collaborative environment. He understood the value of cross-disciplinary interaction and fought for the institution of a weekly colloquium where scientists could share ideas. “Very often a problem discussed in one of these meetings would intrigue a scientist in a completely different branch of the laboratory,” Bethe once wrote, “and he would come up with unexpected solutions.” Cohen added the meetings also improved morale at Los Alamos, “providing a weekly reminder that everyone on the Manhattan Project had a role to play.” GGF is a huge believer in the value of breaking out of silos.
Google’s Culture of Fear
Mike Solana of Pirate Wires spoke to “a flood” of Google employees following the disastrous rollout of Gemini, its AI chatbot, for a March 4 article that attempts to answer this question: “How is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?” Here are three takeaways.
Leadership and Innovation Crisis: Solana depicts Google as a company in disarray, lacking clear leadership and direction. He suggests the company is facing, first, the Innovator's Dilemma, “in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.” The situation is exacerbated by a culture of fear that stifles innovation and prevents the shipping of good products. Collaboration is great, but someone’s got to make the hard decisions when push comes to shove.
‘Political Dogma’ Combined with Lack of Vision Cripples Product Development: The diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at Google, particularly in the development of the Gemini tool, led to the erasure of white people from generated images and contributed to the product’s failure. Worse, according to employees Solana interviewed, is a lack of vision. “(E)mployees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team,” he writes. “The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma.”
Lack of Accountability, Soft Culture: The culture within Google is characterized by a lack of accountability. The buck stops nowhere for critical failures like that of Gemini. “The phrase ‘culture of fear’ was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company’s craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world,” Solana writes. “… Even now, priorities at the company skew towards the absurd rather than the practical, and it’s worth noting a majority of employees do seem happy. On Blind, Google ranks above most tech companies in terms of satisfaction, but reasons cited mostly include things like work-life balance and great free food. ‘People will apologize for meetings at 9:30 in the morning,’ one product manager explained, laughing.”
Americans Don’t Care as Much About Work. And It Isn’t Just Gen Z
The issue of work-life balance is front and center in a March 9 Wall Street Journal article by Greg Ip. Changes wrought by the pandemic in how work is perceived and valued are likely to have lasting effects on the American labor market and organizational culture. “Historically, the fruits of economic growth are split between capital and labor, with labor taking some of its share in the form of amenities: less hours, more benefits, safer, more-pleasant work conditions,” Ip writes. “Those amenities are increasingly central to the labor market of today, in what employees expect and what employers must offer.” Here are my three top takeaways:
Pandemic as a Inflection Point for Work Priorities: “Like the wars that previous generations lived through, the pandemic was a milestone in the evolution of the workplace, shaping both the lives and livelihoods of today’s generation,” Ip writes. The forced transition to remote work, along with the health and caretaking challenges presented by the pandemic, led to a reevaluation of work’s role in life. This shift is reflected in a decline from 24% to 17% of people who view their job or occupation as very important to their identity between 2017 and 2021, suggesting that work is no longer the central focus for many.
Shift Towards Work-Life Balance Across Age Groups: Although popular narratives often attribute changes in work attitudes to Generation Z, the desire for a better work-life balance transcends age groups. “Oldsters started complaining about entitled, unserious youth with Aristotle, and haven’t let up since,” Ip writes. “For another, Gen Z faces burdens their parents never did, such as the hassles of Covid. Many a young parent has been forced to stay home with a feverish toddler because of zero-tolerance policies at schools and daycares.” This broad generational shift indicates a widespread reevaluation of work priorities, where flexible working conditions, remote work, and personal well-being have become increasingly valued over traditional workplace achievements.
Economic and Organizational Implications: The changing attitudes toward work have tangible effects on the economy and organizational practices. Companies face challenges in filling roles, particularly those requiring in-person presence or fixed hours, leading to a shift in the employer-employee power dynamic. This has compelled employers to not only offer competitive wages but also prioritize quality of life factors in job roles. Moreover, the article suggests the current trend toward remote work and the ensuing demands for flexibility may lead to more profound changes in job structure and outsourcing practices in the future. “Employees first saw remote work as an exigency, then an amenity, and now a right,” Ip writes. “Some have quit rather than give it up. One bank chief recalls drafting countless memos ordering employees back to the office only to have them vetoed by the human-resources department.” I’m curious what the policy is now at your workplace. Let me know in the comments.
In Other’s Words
Thanks to friend and SGR colleague Mike Mowery for passing along this quote from Bruno Rumbelow, City Manager of Grapevine, Texas.
Hire the right person and they’ll do a thousand things you can’t predict. Hire the wrong person and they will do a thousand things you can’t prevent.
Charles Krauthammer, the late Pulitizer Prize winning columnist of The Washington Post, on being true to yourself.
You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.
I need to hear that every now and again. And I need the following quote as well, courtesy of the late novelist Toni Morrison.
I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case.
The startle and the wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty—some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance—is an absolute necessity. I don’t think we can do without it any more than we can do without dreams or oxygen.
Source: The Paris Review (hat tip to Maya Popa via James Clear)
Onward and Upward.
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Will,
How I would love to have heard
your post Oppenheimer powwow!
Your summary of his leadership principles
is highly valuable to me.
I love to learn how great leaders lead.
How they define problems,
create avenues for their solution,
and inspire their team to rise to the challenge.
I continue to learn
from the many great government leaders
you have written portraits of in GGF.
Thank you for celebrating and sharing each one.