Wernher von Braun delivered this speech to the Sixteenth National Conference on the Management of Research in 1962. Management remains the weakest link in the path to success for the NewSpace Industry. It is one of my favorite transcripts found in NASA archives 14 years ago. This does not dismiss his involvement in the slave labor during World War II that manufactured V2 rockets and presenting this is not meant as a validation of his life. This speech offers insight to his approach to achieving his greatest success — building of the Saturn V and sending the first humans to the Moon.
Dr. Wernher von Braun, Director, George C. Marshall Space Flight Center National Aeronautics and Space Administration Huntsville, Alabama
The Sixteenth National Conference on the Management of Research French Lick, Indiana September 18, 1962
When I was invited to talk with you today about management, I accepted the invitation quite readily. It isn’t often that I get the opportunity to meet seven experienced and distinguished managers. Just for the privilege or telling you the same thing everybody else does; namely, that no matter how you are running your organization, you are doing it all wrong and you should do it our way.
Of course nothing is given more generously than free advice. And usually it is worth just about what it costs. Such unsolicited advice is not always as valid as that given by the mother who warned her little boy to keep his distance from green apples. He ignored her and suffered the consequences.
The doctor who came asked the little boy: “Now do you see what happens when you eat green apples after your mother tells you not to?” the boy said: “I didn’t eat them because I liked them, but I ate them to find out why she told me not to.” This same kind of reasoning on the part of some employees may give managers, if not a stomach ache, at least a headache.
My remarks tonight will be brief, because any discussion of management, as you all know so well, of course, is dull. And the more you talk about techniques, the duller it gets.
It’ s when you apply management techniques to people that things begin to get lively.
Management itself presents no problem. The problems pop out when people get tangled up in things.
It takes a manager with a rare sort of ability to get a lot of work out of people and still keep them happy or at least keep them from fighting in the halls. And it is the same rare manager who can pass out the money, assign functions, allot office space, authorize carpets, and reorganize the entire outfit without anyone losing face, quitting or getting drunk on the job.
It also takes a real managerial talent to pacify employees who often are harassed by Headquarters, sometimes out-witted by industry, and who possess an unshakable conviction that management long ago lost its collective mind.
But it is the greatest manager of all who can keep reasonable peace in the family after he has split all the annual resources among all the department heads…each of whom knows positively and absolutely that if he gets one fewer person or one less dime than he asks for, the whole program will immediately fall apart at the seams.
This great manager is sort of like a mother who has to divide five cherry tarts among eight children, with every child in the bunch hollering for his share, whether he likes cherries or not.
Like yourselves, I’ve seldom seen a department head yet — whether in industry or in Government or in a university — who wasn’t desperate for more men, money, materials, maintenance, mathematicians, mind readers, magicians, and just plain miscellaneous. They are equally fervent in their desire for fewer memos, fewer meetings, and — -above all else — -less management from on high.
As a manager who has always been out in the field, and not an expert in Headquarters, I believe I can testify with reasonable authority about what is sometimes called Management by spoon-feeding.
But when I see a Headquarters…any Headquarters…that tries to keep too tight a rein on managers out in the field, I’m reminded of a remark by a man who was developing an electric space engine.
“Everythings going fine with the engine, he said, but its that darn extension cord thats giving us trouble.
But still, somehow or other…sometimes thanks to good management and probably sometimes in spite of it…the space boosters get built, the pads get erected, the spacecraft get designed, the instrumentation checks out, the launchings are successful, and everything falls into orbit…as it should, or, on occasion, falls flat on its face…as it should not.
Why are we placing such emphasis these days on good management?
Again, you know why. Because the job of placing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth is the most challenging peacetime undertaking in our history. It is also the most complicated. Manned space flight costs money. Lots of it.
It also involves the lives of brave men.
So, those of us running the various phases of the moon exploration program have no choice but to use all the resourcefulness, inventiveness and ingenuity available to us.
The technical complexities facing us are immense. Our timetable is tight. Now, more than ever before, our planners must plan precisely, and our decision-makers must respond immediately.
If otherwise, our losses in money and talent would be staggering. But no matter how effective we might be in organizing the management of our program, we still must remain flexible. We must be able to give. Every day we learn something we didn’t know the day before or some smart guy comes up with a new idea or points out a problem we didn’t know existed. Such new information often demands a change of plans, so along with every decision we must bear in mind that we may have to alter, it somewhere along the way.
And we frequently have to remind ourselves, as shocking as it may be to some managers, that today’s ideas may be out-of-date by sundown.
If we are going to the moon and back in this decade, we must have rapid decisions. It is good to have all the facts in before you make a decision, but many times a good manager has to decide when he doesn’t have all the facts at all. And he may make a better decision because he can focus on the essential information.
There is such a thing as cluttering up your mind with too much trivial information.
Some executives deal exclusively with details details which may be important at operating levels, but which are irrelevant at the top management level.
These executives are like a man that I once knew well. He had a veritable passion for minutia. He fretted over the little problems. But he almost never got the big picture or saw the problem as a whole.
As one of his more perceptive employees once described him: “the pachyderms and dinosaurs don’t bother him, but the grasshoppers drive him crazy.”
This type manager is a far cry from the reckless executive who likes to take a chance, who jumps to a conclusion without considering all the readily available facts. And who sometimes sticks his neck out so far he loses his head.
This decision maker reminds me of the victims of a custom practiced by the people in one section of ancient Greece. Whenever one of their leaders tried to ram a new program down their throats, they made him submit his proposal from a platform…with a rope around his neck.
If his proposal worked, they removed the rope. If not, they removed the platform.
Before anyone moves the platform — or turns off the microphone — I had better engage my subject.
I have been asked to discuss, “Changing Patterns in Leadership of a Research Team,” putting into focus some of the principles of operation which have contributed to the existence of the research and engineering team which makes up the Marshall Space Flight Center today. Mr. Siepert has asked me what changes, accommodations, tactics, and organizational arrangements have evolved over the years to maintain satisfactory working relationships among members of the research team — — and with higher headquarters.
Mr. Siepert assures me that you managers of research appreciate the difficulty of keeping any research or engineering group fully challenged and productive over more than half a decade.
What have you and your deputy, Eberhard Rees done to keep your group from going dead? He asks me.
If I assail you with a recitation of personal experiences, I realize that I run the risk of being dubbed an old-timer who is living in the past, or thought pompous and egotistical, or worst yet, boring you all evening. Again, I promise to be brief.
As I have reflected over the past 30 years for answers to Mr. Siepert’s questions, two facts have stood out. First, our team has always been a fluid, living organization, responding to and often shaped by outside influences and events. Second, in spite of consistent changes, there has run through the past three decades a thread of consistency, and a singleness of purpose which have probably been our salvation.
There have been changes in personnel, nations, geographic locations, organizational structures, higher headquarters, projects, and immediate objectives. But many of our methods of operation have remained unchanged. And most important of all, our long-range objective has remained the same — -the continuous evolution of space flight.
Ever since I joined a group of young rocket enthusiasts of the “raketenflugplatz reinlckendorf” on the outskirts of Berlin, Germany, we have been obsessed by a passionate drive to make space flight come true. In those young, idealistic days, we were ready to hop in a rocket and blast off for the Moon or Mars right then.
This task has proven far more difficult and far more costly than we then imagined. At times we have made swift progress toward our goal, and again we have seemed stymied or sidetracked. But all the time we have been working, studying, and advancing the technology of rocketry, which, of course, is the backbone of all flights through space. I could rationalize and say that some of the delays that at the time were exasperatingly frustrating, when we were chomping at the bit to go ahead, were actually beneficial.
It takes time and effort to transform theoretical work into hardware. During the past two decades research has mushroomed and engineering applications have multiplied. New materials have been formed and discovered, better fuels developed, electronics advanced, and guidance and tracking techniques improved. Advances were necessary on a thousand different fronts to reach our present stage in rocket science and technology.
And going to the moon is still a tremendous task — the most difficult engineering challenge which man has ever undertaken. The team that accomplishes it will number in the hundreds of thousands.
When I speak of the team at Marshall today, I like to identify it by the name of the project on which we are working, and it includes everyone in Government, industry, and universities. Let me review briefly a little history, and I believe you will agree with me that there have been many teams.
After the first year of experimental work sponsored by the German society for space travel, and executed on the humble facilities of our rocket field Berlin, it was evident that rocket research was so costly and could offer so few immediate commercial applications that it could only be financed with government funds. This fact has not changed until this very day.
It is true that industry, realizing that rocketry is here to stay, has greatly expanded its research budget, but even in the free enterprise system, the government has been the only institution that could provide and justify the huge funds needed for rocket work to its stockholders; it is regrettable that the funds that laid the groundwork for man’s greatest undertaking — peaceful exploration of outer space — have been provided most readily under the impetus of the needs for war or defense.
But was it different in the history of aviation?
The changes in our organizations and projects have seemed to come about every five years. When, after one year of privately sponsored work for the German society of space travel, I joined the German ordnance department in 1932 to work on liquid fueled rocket development. I started out with one mechanic. By the spring of 1937 the small development station at Kummersdorf army proving grounds about 30 miles south of Berlin had grown to about 80 people. We successfully test launched during this time two rudimentary liquid-fueled rockets of the A-2 type, which reached altitudes of about a mile and a half.
In April of1937 — five years after going to Kummersdorf — our activities and personnel were transferred to Peenemuende on the Baltic. Five years later, in 1942, we had about completed the development of the V-2. Then we began concentrated development of the anti-aircraft guided missile ‘Wasserfall,” performing 44 successful launchings. The Peenemuende team had grown to 10,000 people by the end of World War II.
The next five year period came at Fort Bliss, Texas, from September 1945 to April 1950, where we worked for the U.S. Army. About 120 handpicked members of the V-2 team were gradually supplemented by about 400 civilians and soldiers of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps. Our first year here was a period of adjustment and professional frustration. Distrusted aliens in a desolate region of a foreign land, for the first time we had no assigned project, no real task. Nobody seemed to be much interested in work that smelled of weapons, now that the war was over. And space flight was a word bordering on the ridiculous.
We spent the time in study and teaching, and assisted with the V-2 evaluation firings at White Sands, New Mexico. In addition to rocketry, the German-born members of our team studied the American language, American Government, and the American way of life. These were our years of wandering in the wilderness.
In April 1950, the army’s rocket activities were transferred to Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama, and when we crossed the Mississippi, things began to happen. The 500 persons transferring from Fort Bliss were rapidly augmented by hundreds of others. Under the pressure of international events and the Korean War, development of the short range Redstone Ballistic Missile was begun. Then on February 1, 1956, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was formed to field the Redstone Missile as quickly as possible, and to develop an intermediate range ballistic missile, the Jupiter.
About 1600 people were transferred from the guided missile development division of Redstone Arsenal to form the nucleus of ABMA. Our years at ABMA were as hectic as the ones at Fort Bliss were halcyon. The strength of our organization grew rapidly to about 6,000, and under the urgency of high national priorities, the pace of development quickened. We worked hard to make up for lost time, and the army supported us in depth. Here we received our first true space exploration assignments. Using modified Redstone and Jupiter missiles, we succeeded in launching within one year the western world’s first satellite around the earth and the sun.
Development of the huge Saturn space rocket was started. In a little less than five years this time, on July 1, 1960, the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center was formed. About 4400 people and 100 million dollars worth of laboratories and equipment were transferred from the Army to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to activate the Marshall Center. Our strength now is about 7,000.
Although we are still working for the Government, for the first time our bosses are civilians. We are still using public funds, but the amounts are greater than ever. And for the first time we have numerous projects, while in the past we have for the most part had one main project at the time, phasing out of the completed development of one while starting another. Some of the past five year periods were turbulent years, crammed with hectic work projects. While there were periods of famine as far as projects, money, and personnel go, through vicissitudes — and successes — we have struggled for a certain degree of stability.
We owe much of our success in management to the fact that we have been extremely lucky with our products. We have managed so far to produce the right firing at the right time. This helps to keep people around.
We have produced a product, and our people have always regarded a product more important than a research paper — though we did manage to write 110 technical papers last year.
Some companies today have a blank on their application forms for information about the technical papers the applicant has published. Again, our hard-driving Eberhard Rees says, “leave the writing to the experts. We have work to do.
A team is made up of many individuals. The more individualistic, the better. When putting a team together, the manager should not try to find people whom he can outsmart, but people who are smarter than he is in their particular fields.
The smarter the people at the working level are, the better the team. I think nothing hurts a team effort more — and the exploration of space is the greatest of team efforts — than what you might call the “pappy knows best” attitude on the part of top management. Pappy just doesn’t always know what is best. He gets the best answers if he asks the man who is to do the job.
The better the team, the fewer formal meetings you need, and the more business you can handle over the squawk box.
As a successful scientist moves up the ladder, he becomes more of a specialist, his field of interest usually narrows, and he gets to know more and more about less and less. As a successful manager moves up the ladder, his interests must broaden. Conversely, it seems that he must know less and less about more and more.
Now the ideal scientist-manager of a complex research and development project must broaden his interests in width and depth. He needs a broad background and experience in Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering. He must understand the relationships among the various disciplines, and their interface in applications to his project. Each specialist sitting around the table must feel that the director understands the problems in his particular field. The director must be able to discuss the problem in the language of that discipline.
Then comes a test of leadership. All the people around the table are experts in their own field. Each one should be a strong individual, with strong feelings, capable of thinking problems through on his own — or he should not be there. When a conflict arises, the director must be able to find a compromise solution that is best for the satisfactory accomplishment of the mission, and get willing agreement from the dissenters.
Our pattern for approaching a new development project has changed but little over the years.
During the first phase of the new project, the reins are loose. Many ideas are considered and pursued. A large number of studies are made. Different designs are investigated. Ideas of others are analyzed and compared, and opinions are requested from many outside sources. Every possible facet of the new project is discussed in technical meetings. Then schedules are established and revised.
When the analytical phase of the project is completed, the transition is made into the project synthesis. Some of the team members reduce or terminate their contributions to the project at this point, while the efforts of others become more vigorous.
The director stays in the project, but re-orients his efforts. Objectives are delineated, designs are frozen, project engineers are named, and responsibilities are assigned. A systems management is organized, and a development and test schedule is established which, from then on, is the holy gospel of the project. The process is like well-defined crystals precipitating from a super-saturated solution: each part of the project is clearly defined, each seamline becomes visible from beginning to end. The reins are now drawn tighter over each phase of the project, both within the in-house group, and the many companies contributing to the project.
As work progresses, cross contacts between all the members of the project team provide an ample and continuous flow of information.
Normally, fundamental decisions need to be made during this phase only when unforeseen difficulties arise. The careful and conscientious organization of the engineering phase of a well-conceived and well-planned rocket or spacecraft project makes it relatively easy to establish and maintain prime schedules. The schedules are established so that they can be promised with a clear conscience. Whenever this is not the case, there is usually something wrong either with the engineering concept or with the ratio between implementation plan and the resources committed thereto. Almost throughout my life with rockets I have always worked with public funds, although they have come through different forms of government, from dictatorship to democracy, and through different governmental channels, from war and defense departments to the civilian space agency. In the forties, my former Peenemuende associates and I were called a bunch of opportunists, willing to work for any government. But I think the action of the group that came to America willingly from Peenemuende, and the international events of the fifties, have adequately refuted that charge.
Peenemuende, in East Germany, during the closing weeks of World War II, was about to be run over by the advancing Red Army. Russia was an ally of the United States and the Soviet Government was trusted by most Americans. But we had a choice to make: stay put or leave while there was time. We had our fill of dictatorship and didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives under another. So we moved much of our material and personnel into western Germany in the hope that we could come to the United States to pursue our real dream: space flight.
No top research manager today can ignore the economic, political, and even the social interface of huge national programs. He cant hold himself aloof from politics and say he doesn’t care for it. It matters. And it matters most in a free country. In a democracy, the amount of politics is in direct proportion to the amount of the budget and there’s a lot of money in space.
I believe that much of our success can be credited to a public awareness and hence support of our programs. I know that my colleague, Eberhard Rees, was often irked by what he called “all this talking in public.” but he learned fast that that’s where the money comes from.
Democracy, with its system of checks and balances, is not the fastest reacting form of government in the world today. But as it has often been said, the public, once informed and aroused can be trusted to make the right decision.
It is essential that the team members understand the system of government under which it works, and does not stay aloof from nonscientific members of the community.
In the Peenemuende days there was little opportunity to practice ideal management technology. The atmosphere was too hectic and after all, there was a war going on outside our laboratory gates. But in one respect our basic management philosophy depends on the total, effort of each individual as a member of a team. That philosophy remains our basic philosophy today.
Human beings are complexand fascinating. No computer can solve our problems in human relations. No machine, no method, no management technique can substitute for a warm personal touch in dealing with human beings.
The success of the team is a composite of the contributions each individual can…and will…make through his particular knowledge, experience, and skill. Each individual can be counted upon to do his best only if he feels that he is important and necessary in the total scheme of operations. Cooperation cannot be commanded. Top management cannot operate from a lofty ivory tower, sending our directives, demanding 100 per cent unquestioning obedience. One of the keys to management’s success is its ability to communicate with all employees. As the ad for a famous girdle has proclaimed, this requires four-way stretch up and down the organizational chart, and laterally in both directions. We have found and I know you have, too — that management employee communication requires more attention the larger an organization becomes.
We have a phobia against getting too large at Marshal; we have had, I think, a number of rather noteworthy successes on several assigned rush projects because we are a moderately sized, but well-integrated organization. The Marshall Center designer can leave his drawing board and go across the street to consult with the person doing components testing, or he can talk to the vehicle fabricator in the next block, while the static test tower is just over the hill.
Over the years, as we have rocked along together in this rocket business, we have found that this increased emphasis on communication is not only necessary, but creative.
We like to exchange information and ideas. We like to develop new ideas. Along with industry and universities, we push hard at this cross-fertilization of ideas. One basic aspect of our philosophy is this: whenever an engineer or an industrial inventor or a college professor tosses us a new idea, we try to say first:: “Well, why not ?”
Rather than a negative: “Why?” or, “that won’t work; and even if it does, we’ll have to change everything all around.”
Suppose, when the wheel was invented way back in antiquity some stubborn guy said: “throw it away. If we develop the wheel, all the women will be out of work. Instead of carrying babies and fetching food and firewood, they’ll start using baby buggies and wagons to do all the work.”
And tragically enough…at least in most instances…if there were no wheel today, there would be no golf balls, no fishing reels, pool halls, bowling balls, drag racing, baseball, dial telephones, or lawnmowers. All we would have would be crabgrass, politics, the stock market, unemployment, the Berlin Wall, and the twist.
At Marshall we can still carry an idea for a space launch vehicle and its guidance system from the concept through the entire development cycle of design, development, fabrication, and static testing, and we have every intention to preserve and nurture a limited in-house capability. The reason is simple: the ability of American industry to produce fine products is unquestionable. To market them, it has developed a persuasiveness in salesmanship that is unequaled. It’s not easy for the Government to determine which bid or proposal we receive from industry is best, and how well competing claims and estimates can be substantiated. In order for us to use the very best judgment possible in spending the taxpayer’s money intelligently, we just have to do a certain amount of this research and development work ourselves. We just have to keep our own hands dirty to command the professional respect of the contractor personnel engaged with actual design, shop and testing work.
Otherwise, our own ability to establish standards and to evaluate the proposals — and later the performance — of contractors would not be up to par.
Our Marshall Center engineers operate like doctors. i.e., you take the doctor away from his patients, he soon forgets how to practice medicine and starts writing books or publishing trade journals about it.
We trust that Marshall’s present performance reflects, at least to a perhaps worthwhile degree the experience gained through the years in management, as well as scientific and technological advance in rocketry, as a matter of fact, our rocket team has become more than ever today a managerial group:
The nucleus for the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center was the development operations division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. The development operations division was a purely technical organization and we depended entirely on Army organizations for administration and technical services. When it transferred to NASA, we had to add administrative and technical service personnel to form a self-sustaining organization. We had no finance office to make out the payroll, no personnel office to hire payroll clerks, no procurement and contracting personnel, and no facilities engineering or support services. Through contractual arrangement we still obtain sizeable support from our army neighbors, particularly in the utilities area.
Our managerial responsibilities have increased under NASA as was noted by Eberhard Rees at the NASA Administrator’s Hideaway Conference last January: “the Army used to attend all the cocktail parties for us, but now you folks at NASA make us do our own drinking!”
Since the management and direction of the various projects assigned to Marshall constitute our primary mission, we have made two important changes in our management structure. One is the establishment of a central planning office. Our main objectives in establishing this office were to assist top management by providing consolidated overall planning, closer program coordination, and increased management data and support. Our central planning office is also coordinating the introduction and development of such management tools as pert (program evaluation and review techniques) and ADP (automatic data processing).
The other important modification is the creation of project offices, in addition to our technical divisions. The responsibilities of Marshall’s ten technical divisions are essentially unchanged from those they possessed in the past. These divisions are not project oriented, but are aligned along professional disciplines such as mechanical engineering, electronics, flight mechanics, vehicle dynamics, and the like.
They continue to have full cognizance and responsibility for all effort, including active projects, future project studies and supporting research work, that falls within the purview of their respective disciplines. Competence in depth in each discipline exists at no other point in the organization. The division director is responsible directly and solely to me for his performance in each of his assigned disciplines. He is expected to participate automatically in all projects that involve his discipline and to carry his work through to conclusion.
An important responsibility of the division director is that of assuring the maintenance of a high level of technical competence within his organization. This may be done partially by theoretical studies and by following work being done by other agencies and industry. But, as I have pointed out previously, it cannot be done adequately unless the technical people of the division keep their hands dirty and actively perform work on projects selected specifically to update their knowledge and increase their competence. These in-house projects are to be carefully selected to serve this purpose.
The responsibility for management of projects involving more than one discipline is vested in project offices, which report directly to me. Project management at Marshall includes directing, coordinating, programming and budgeting all effort that relates to individual projects. This total effort includes all that which is expended by the technical divisions, as well as that performed by contractors.
But the task of the project office is not to do any part of the technical job in the various disciplines, but rather to assure that all effort required by the project has been planned for, budgeted for, and is actually being accomplished in a coordinated, effective and efficient manner. Because project management involves a multitude of complex technical considerations and decisions, technical support in depth is required by the project office. It gets this support, not by creating it within its own organization, but by calling upon the technical divisions.
The technical divisions, through instruments such as working groups, technical committees or task assignments, directly assist the director of the project office to make the technical decisions required for effective project management.
Government and industry are really developing new concepts of management in the space business.
Risks are necessarily involved. But we like to live dangerously.
I rather suspect that most of us have to be something like the leader of ancient Greece with the rope around his neck.
As G. K. Chesterton used to say: I believe in getting into hot water. It keeps you clean.”
