Butthole, Notorious
My post last week on bulldozers hit a nerve, mostly positive, with one friend writing:
“I’m reading ‘Blind Man’s Bluff’ right now about the history of the US submarine force. Rickover sounds like a real butthole”.
By all accounts this was true, but the “Father of the Nuclear Navy” also went from napkin sketch to working ship in three years. He was fired from his last job. Why did three living US Presidents still show up at his retirement party?
More Ferrari than Bulldozer
If history gives us clues to the future, the current can also explain the past. Since 2009 I have worked for a man who has started four multi-billion dollar companies, made close to a thousand investments and recently launched a podcast called American Optimist countering fear, cynicism, and zero-sum thinking. Mr. Lonsdale has gone from napkin to prototype for things ranging from a university to sovereign floating islands. He’s creative, instead of notorious.
Admiral Rickover was indeed a notorious butthole. There are a lot of leaders who have this reputation: Jobs, Elon, Bezos, SamA, etc. But there’s a reason for this: the biggest problems have so many sources of resistance to overcome, that someone needs to be pushing. All the time.
I’m not suggesting that being a butthole leads to success. Silicon Valley is full of wannabes who make this mistake in causality, magnifying their worst impulses and failing. The line between notorious and creative can be hard to pinpoint, but as The Supreme Court said about pornography, “you know it when you see it”.
Forms and The Formless
The American Optimist mission statement of countering cynicism and zero-sum thinking appeals to me, but as the son of a professional smuggler and Mormon school teacher, I have to be more optimist than patriotic. I have no business writing about a man like Rickover, and I’m no Ferrari. I was born on the seat of a tractor, not a chess table. My biggest investment is just my house. My title — if I had one — might be Optimist, American.
The emphasis on Optimist, which is made of individual choice, over American — which is part of a group. Americans are a courageous group, full of misfits, organized on behalf of a collective good. But for most Americans, it isn’t a choice, it’s just a fact of birth.
For Rickover, it was a decision. A Polish immigrant Jew with an engineering degree from Columbia. He personally presided over 14,000 applications of leading officers seeking to be on his ships. This might be a bit hot to touch, but today he could be perceived as being the opposite of woke. He wrote four books, two on education. We would do well to remember that clinging to an elective, even fashionable title — Americans and Optimists be damned — is to confuse forms for the formless.
Be Creative, But Carry a Shotgun
Matt Damon as Shelby, in Ferrari vs Ford, epitomized an American rogue pushing through the bureaucracy of Ford and legacy admissions in racing. The early teams at Apple and Industrial Light & Magic did the same. I doubt Jobs and Lucas were ever nominated in any popularity contests, and like Rickover, all were either fired or had to start their own companies. These stories have the same message: across generations and spanning industries, small teams of passionate, detail-focused, and empowered doers — unconstrained by unnecessary bureaucratic weight and lameness — have always been the force of innovation. Whether it be race cars, Star Wars, nuclear subs, SR-71s, or Macs. These innovators are leaders who guard over the conditions necessary for success and, conversely, quickly identify and remove sub-optimal conditions. The history of new product creation is clear on this point. As another friend recently wrote in response to last week’s post about bulldozers, “Most of the time, the creative leadership job is janitorial: sweeping the floors meticulously, getting rid of small debris that adds friction to the team. But sometimes a broom isn't enough, so you need to have a shotgun too.”
Whether this is being notorious or creative, either way runs the risk of being called mad. And artists know this better than anyone, like John Mayer, back in 2008:
“Maybe that’s what you have to do to be a genius, is you have to be mad. So if you get mad before the word genius, then maybe you can make genius appear, right? But that doesn’t work either.”
Jack White of the White Stripes aimed his shotgun thusly:
“You can’t take the effect and make it the cause”.
Green Shoots
Many commentators are pointing out that our areas of greatest need for innovation are no longer in the areas of IT. Instead, it’s infrastructure, climate, energy, education, and defense. This isn’t some natural monopoly selling ads on the internet. This is the hard stuff. The regulated industries. The place where bureaucratic lameness is strongest. And we have to take all this on as a country with external adversaries looking to exploit our divisions. A threatened bureaucracy will cut off its own nose when threatened by a heretic. Even the Navy — ask Rickover. Or the three presidents at his retirement party.
Despite all this, there are already the green shoots of new companies that will take these challenges on. I think they will overcome. Why? History shows there will be creative teams. Capitalism is humanities’ most effective technique for organizing collective action. But individual action and choice for the benefit of collective good? Companies and products can’t do that. That’s on us, Optimists, Americans.
And bulldozers. And Buttholes, Notorious.
I need to think about this piece for a few days, which is a compliment, by the way. Right off the top of my head, I can think of two people for whom I worked who were buttholes. Decades later, these are also people I absolutely revere, and I cherish the memory of the work I did there. Here's the key point -- they were, in many way, horrible human beings, but they cared, intensely, about the work. And that, as the poem says, made all the difference. I wrote for two years for Peter Arnell, who was absolutely legendary for being an awful boss. But every single cell in his body was about doing great work, and I loved him for that. And still do.