Word: raborn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke summoned Raborn to Washington, placed him in charge of a program aimed at developing a solid-fuel, nuclear-armed, 1,500-mile missile that could be fired from a submarine...
...project wound up involving more than 20,000 separate contracts and a budget of $3.5 billion. Raborn operated throughout with a bare-bones staff...
...more out of one overworked man than out of two underworked men," he said. He kept his people on the job seven days a week, and when their enthusiasm flagged, he gave them what he called the "Raborn rededication treatment." This was a cross between a half-time pep talk and a Fourth of July speech. Said one dazed aide after getting the treatment: "I knew that I was ready to die for someone, but I didn't know whether it was the admiral, the President, my mother, the head of the Boy Scouts...
Drowned in Data. More than anything else, Raborn made use of a then-obscure management system known as PERT (for Program Evaluation Review Technique). Using PERT, Raborn set precise timetables for each phase of the enormously complicated program, thus assured that everything would mesh without time-wasting gaps or overlaps in the schedule. He papered the walls of his office with flow charts indicating the progress of every major phase of the Polaris program -the missile, the sub, the navigational and fire-control systems, training of the crew, securing of overseas bases, establishment of communications relays. Result: the first Polaris...
...Raborn seems made to order for the CIA. As the free-world's guiding intelligence agency, the CIA's operations are supersecret. When things go wrong, the agency is a perfect scapegoat because, as Dwight Eisenhower once said, "success cannot be advertised; failure cannot be explained...