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Chapter 35. Building a Sublime Organization

In 1939, Albert Einstein sent economist Alexander Sachs on a secret mission. Sachs, a banker with Lehman Brothers and a respected economist, was entrusted by Einstein to personally deliver a letter to the president. In this message, Einstein implored Roosevelt to undertake a crash course in development of a new branch of experimental physics. While the research would be done in a laboratory, the practical implications would first be explored in the Nevada desert, and later to earth-shattering effect over two major Japanese cities.

The scientific achievements of the Manhattan Project were masterminded by a deceptively small team: just 86 key scientists. These were no ordinary scientists, though. To get a sense of their level of ability, the odds of winning a Nobel Prize as a practicing scientist are roughly one in a million. Among this group of scientists, one in four received that honor at some point in their career.

In 1961, another American president set a scientific crash course in motion, this time much more publicly: to land a man on the moon before the decade was out. This challenge was no less daunting, but it involved a much larger technical staff. Roughly 400,000 engineers and scientists were put to work on the moon shot—more than half of the engineers and scientists practicing in the United States at the time.

The moon shot was a technical, scientific, and engineering triumph. It involved many of the brightest minds in our ...