In October 1982, millions of Americans learned about Kelly Johnson for the first time. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, the grizzled 72-year-old recounted his involvement in numerous secret military projects over his impressive career in aviation. He also predicted the future: unmanned, autonomous aircraft and satellites that enable video conferences via data streaming at the speed of light. Yes, Johnson forecasted drones and FaceTime decades ahead of their arrival.
How could he be so prophetic? Because he had been building the future of aerospace for half a century. Moreover, decades before Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates reshaped entrepreneurship, he crafted the cultural and organizational operating system upon which all modern tech startups run.
Born on February 27, 1910, in the small mining town of Ishpeming on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Johnson would go on to design and build the world’s most iconic and possibility-pushing planes as an engineer at Lockheed Martin and founding leader of the company’s Skunk Works. The SR-71 Blackbird, the U-2, the P-38 Lightning, the F-117 Nighthawk, the P-80 Shooting Star — these planes literally reshaped how all aircraft are built. All were Skunk Works creations.
But Johnson didn’t weld them into reality solely through his own prodigious genius and problem-solving abilities; he did so by devising an organizational system that enables dedicated, hard-working, brilliant individuals to do great things quickly. At Johnson’s funeral, Air Force Brigadier General Leo Paul Geary, who had worked extensively with Johnson over the years, said that this was Johnson’s greatest legacy. Yes, he built amazing things, but more importantly, he showed us how to build those things.
A “radical” way to do business
Johnson’s life story and business-altering philosophy are vividly chronicled in journalist Josh Dean’s new book, The Impossible Factory. In an interview with Big Think, Dean said that Johnson’s “get stuff done” modus operandi was born out of existential need. He joined Lockheed fresh out of the University of Michigan when the company was a scrappy airplane-building startup in the California desert. There, he spent his formative working years designing and building planes that would be flown in combat during World War II.
“They needed to do things overnight because the war effort demanded it,” Dean told Big Think.
When the conflict ended, other companies that swiftly expanded to crank out tanks, jeeps, weapons, and other wartime materials fell back into old, slow, bureaucratic ways of doing things. Johnson, on the other hand, maintained a wartime mode of thinking.
“It was truly radical,” Dean said.
At a nascent division within Lockheed, which would come to be called Skunk Works, Johnson eschewed meetings, red tape, and diffuse responsibility. He sought to put his brightest, most motivated minds in environments where they had the runway to work with limited oversight.
“Give your smartest people money and authority, and they can create miracles,” Dean said, distilling Johnson’s philosophy.
A project’s lead engineer would be fully responsible for all decisions. Teams would be tight-knit and small. Everything possible would be done to save time. Decisions, once made, were final. Purchasing would be streamlined. Special parts avoided. And importantly, Johnson was the boss. The buck stopped with him.
“He never lost that idea of being a twenty-something-year-old guy who had direct access to budgets, decision-making, and his boss,” Dean remarked.
Flying very high
Johnson’s style was put to the test in 1954 when he was given the green light by President Eisenhower to build a top-secret surveillance plane to photograph sites in the Soviet Union. Early in the Cold War, the United States was struggling to place spies on the ground. So, Johnson proposed an aircraft that could snap crystal clear images from 70,000 feet up in broad daylight, seen by the Soviets but untouchable so high in the stratosphere. Commercial planes at the time were only capable of flying at half that height. Soviet MiGs were capped at 60,000 feet, and to fly that high invited serious risk.
Johnson’s proposal promised to do what had never been done before. Oh, and he also vowed to deliver a prototype in a mere nine months.
The following summer, he and his Skunk Works engineers delivered. The legendary plane that would come to be called the U-2 (which is still in service today) was built on time and well under budget. General Geary later said it was “probably the finest bargain the American taxpayer has ever had under any circumstances.” Johnson’s organizational philosophy was put to a stringent test and succeeded beyond all expectations.
During his 60 Minutes interview, he subsequently recalled when the U-2 flew over the Soviet Union and snapped photos, dozens of Russian fighters would attempt to fly as high as they could to shoot it down: “We had actual pictures taken on some of the overflights where there were as many as 35 Russian fighters trying to get up to get it. In fact, we’d call that the aluminum cloud that was obstructing our photography.”
Moving fast and breaking things … literally
Over time, Johnson’s organizational formula spread from Skunk Works to Silicon Valley.
“This guy created a philosophy that every tech mogul claims to ascribe to. Literally, they all use the term ‘Skunk Works,’” Dean said. “Move fast, be willing to make mistakes, kill programs when they don’t work, trust a strong leader who has total authority — all these ideas trace to Skunk Works.”
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs even toured Skunk Works during the late 1990s while designing the Pixar Studios campus to gather inspiration for fostering a creative and functional workspace. Throughout his career, Jobs reportedly modeled his own workgroups after Johnson’s approach, including the one that built the Macintosh computer.
Johnson’s business motto was “Be quick, be quiet, and be on time.” Today’s Silicon Valley tech startups regularly brag about “moving fast” and “breaking things.” For Johnson and the Skunk Works, this wasn’t merely a catchy slogan — they literally did it. Often, the only way to deliver a revolutionary plane quickly was to test it before you were 100% certain it was safe to fly.
“To his credit, he insisted on being the flight test engineer on as many of his planes as he could,” Dean said. And if Johnson didn’t do it, one of his trusted engineers would.
The Skunk Works spirit lives
Kelly Johnson died in 1990 at the age of 80. Who today best carries on his business philosophy of cutting bureaucracy, entrusting subordinates with the authority to make rapid decisions, and giving employees latitude to be creative?
While Johnson’s spirit definitely permeates throughout startup culture and Big Tech, Dean thinks there’s also a lot of lip service. In reality, many tech companies, flush with profits or investor cash, often solve problems by spending vast sums of money.
Instead, during our interview, Dean pointed to Ukraine’s buzzing defense industry as the current torchbearers of Johnson’s legacy. Numerous companies are rapidly innovating on shoestring budgets, much like a young Johnson did at Lockheed leading up to and during World War II.
The Wall Street Journal recently described the groundbreaking exploits of Ukrainian companies like Fire Point. CEO and chief technical officer Iryna Terekh told the Journal that the company now delivers 220 long-range strike drones every day — more than it made in all of 2023 — and is on track to almost double daily production by the end of the year.
Much as the U-2 altered the course of the Cold War and broke new ground in aviation, so, too, are Ukraine’s innovative drones turning the tides of a war and changing warfare as we know it. Johnson — who, you might recall, predicted the rise of drones — would be a fan.
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