Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

In the wake of the 1956 agreement, AT&T appeared to be indestructible. It now had the U.S. government’s blessing. It was easily the largest company in the world by assets and by workforce. And its Bell Laboratories, as Fortune magazine had declared, was indisputably “the world’s greatest industrial laboratory.” And yet even in the 1960s and 197

The black-folder, tip-of-the-spear gang doesn’t come to the meeting themselves. They send representatives I think of as gray folders—spook look, spook jargon, but stuck here at HQS when they’d rather be out in the field. Some of them tried and didn’t make the cut. Others are still training. The worst are the has-beens: former field officers cooling

The visceral pleasure of solving tough flight-related problems was one Johnson continued to seek in his retirement. In his autobiography, he writes that he often entertained himself while doing laps in his pool by asking, “How would I make an airplane from scratch?”

the Byzantine management atmosphere at first Rexall and then Hughes Aircraft had convinced me that the only real security lies in having your own business, and this left-hander was well ahead of the curve on that one. Also, I was convinced that I was on a holy mission in preserving a company owned significantly by its employees. My