Skunk Works

Kelly’s stubbornness angered several important blue-suiters and a few of our own senior corporate executives. And in the fall of 1974, as his sixty-fifth birthday approached, he sent for me and informed me that I was his personal choice to succeed him at the Skunk Works, and he had so informed the company’s president, Carl Kotchian. “I told him that, out of fairness, I had to submit Rus Daniell’s name too, but that you are the one I’ve trained and counted on to carry on the great Skunk Works tradition.” He looked tired and discouraged, but also I detected a sense of relief. And a few days later Kotchian called me and I began jumping through the hoops at a series of meetings with key senior executives. All of them demanded the same thing: that I accommodate our blue-suit customers and that I recognize management’s responsibilities to keep a close eye on me as Kelly’s successor until I had a chance to prove myself. The name of the game was “get along and go along”—no more tyrannical Kelly Johnson types. I understood, as did Kelly, that he was unique in his power and independence, which was nontransferable to any successor. For better or worse, a new era was dawning for those left behind in a Kelly Johnson-less world. The Skunk Works was still expected to produce giant results, but the new guy sitting in the boss’s chair would be a lot smaller than the original Gulliver.