Management Secrets From The Man Who Built the Bomb --- Robert Oppenheimer couldn't run a hamburger stand. Yet when the world hung in the balance, he became one of the most effective leaders in history

"When he was named the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer was an improbable choice for the most important job in America.

At the time, he was a 38-year-old theoretical physicist who had never managed anything more than a dozen graduate students, much less an operation with the fate of the world at stake. Leslie Groves, the Army general who hired him, said he received "no support, only opposition" for his decision. One close friend who would later win a Nobel Prize called Oppenheimer "absolutely the most unlikely choice" to run a secret lab that would build the atomic bomb.

"He couldn't run a hamburger stand," said another colleague.

So how did he transform into one of the most effective and consequential leaders in history?

This weekend, "Oppenheimer" is expected to dominate the Oscars. But even watching a three-hour movie from a painstakingly meticulous auteur like Christopher Nolan isn't enough to understand what made Oppenheimer tick. If you really want to get inside his mind, you have to read two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin and "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes.

I recently called the authors to find out more about Oppenheimer the manager.

They helped me understand three elements of his success that apply to any sort of project -- even the ones that don't involve gigantic explosions.

Before he could build the bomb, Oppenheimer had to build something else with the potential to blow up in his face: a team.

Los Alamos hadn't yet been selected as the site of his secret lab when Oppenheimer began hunting for talent. Once he identified scientists and decided to hire them, he did whatever it took to get them. 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.

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.

He understood that hiring was essential to his team's success and made it a priority from the very beginning, when he told a colleague they should adopt a "policy of absolutely unscrupulous recruiting of anyone we can lay hands on."

And it worked. Never before or since have so many of the nation's most brilliant scientists been concentrated in the same place for such a long time.

Many of his brainy recruits didn't love the idea of uprooting their lives and moving to a military post in the desert. But he could be as patient as he was relentless when he wanted someone, pursuing some for months, leaning on mutual friends to persuade others and even researching the local medical facilities.

Once he got them, Oppenheimer knew how to get the best work out of his scientists. In his new book, Charles Duhigg writes about "supercommunicators," people who are "capable of saying exactly the right thing, breaking through to almost anyone, figuring out how to connect in even the most unlikely circumstances." Oppenheimer, as it turns out, was a supercommunicator.

Others in Los Alamos were better physicists, chemists and engineers. But what he could do better than anybody there -- and maybe better than anybody on the planet -- was take scientists with different perspectives and bring them to a consensus.

"He would stand at the back of the room and listen as everyone argued," Bird said. "Then he would step forward at just the right moment, summarize the salient points that everyone had been making that were in common and point the way forward."

Bird told me that Oppenheimer was both the "director and dictator" of Los Alamos, but he was a peculiar sort of authoritarian: He didn't believe in giving orders.

Instead, the charismatic physicist with sparkling blue eyes and a magnetic presence gently nudged the scientists in the right direction, speaking in a voice so quiet that "you had to lean forward to make sure you caught everything," said Bird, whose biography inspired the blockbuster movie.

There were several reasons besides his complete inexperience running complex organizations that Oppenheimer was an astonishing selection as the Manhattan Project's scientific director: his lack of Nobel Prize, his links to the Communist Party, his knack for breaking every piece of equipment he walked past.

But what set him apart from the other geniuses at Los Alamos was his broad knowledge and breadth of interests, which allowed him to make connections across disciplines and see what others in the room couldn't. They were specialists. He was a generalist. They were singularly focused on their narrow fields of research. He was curious about philosophy, literature, poetry and the Bhagavad Gita.

Groves was so impressed by Oppenheimer's range of interests that he once declared: "Oppenheimer knows everything." He could also explain everything he knew without condescending, another trait that distinguished him from other eminently qualified scientists who interviewed for the job.

"He was able to speak in plain English," Bird said.

The scientists were willing to drop everything in their lives to work around the clock in the middle of nowhere. What they were not willing to do was wear a military uniform.

Oppenheimer himself was so allergic to hierarchy that he objected to making a basic organizational chart. He was intense but informal, commanded respect without demanding it, and the biggest difference between Oppenheimer and Army generals was how they believed teams should operate.

The military relied on compartmentalization. He insisted on collaboration.

When Groves learned that Oppenheimer was in favor of instituting a weekly colloquium for hundreds of scientists, he tried to shut it down. Oppenheimer prevailed. He understood the value of gathering people from different parts of a project in the same place, encouraging them to discuss their work and combine ideas.

"Very often a problem discussed in one of these meetings would intrigue a scientist in a completely different branch," Bethe once wrote, "and he would come up with unexpected solutions."

The meetings also improved morale at Los Alamos, providing a weekly reminder that everyone on the Manhattan Project had a role to play. Oppenheimer was right to fight for their existence.

"He won the loyalty of people inside the fence," Bird says. "They could see that he was protecting them, allowing them to collaborate and talk freely, which was necessary to the success of the project."" [1]

 Americans are drawn to success stories. Therefore, his success brought a lot of money to the development of science and engineering in the United States. Paradoxically, he himself was quickly removed from work with military secrets.

1. Management Secrets From The Man Who Built the Bomb --- Robert Oppenheimer couldn't run a hamburger stand. Yet when the world hung in the balance, he became one of the most effective leaders in history. Cohen, Ben.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Mar 2024: B.2.