TL;DR: Three key questions: Who trusts you? To do what? Why?

This blog post is devoted to a category of jobs that I find of particular personal interest, being a “big picture” individual. I call such jobs Positions of Trust; I’ll discuss below what they involve, but instead of boring with theory, I wanted to provide a highly instructive example.

The Rocket Man

Even as World War II was drawing to a close, the US Government began investing major attention into creating long-range ballistic missiles that could be used to strike enemy cities with nuclear weapons reliably and quickly. Soon after the war, it became apparent that the Soviet Union was rapidly becoming an adversary, and indeed it had set up a strikingly similar rocketry program.

The person who ended up behind much of the engineering of the American rocket program had a track record of leading the world’s most sophisticated rocketry program during World War II, of being a genuine luminary and visionary whose one main aspiration since adolescence some 30 years prior was to enable human space-faring. It should go without saying that the person came to be held in trust throughout a vast array of US Government organizations.

And now for the conundrum: the person in question was Dr. Wernher von Braun, a career rocketry engineer and engineering leader, who until Germany’s loss in 1945 held a senior role in the Nazi rocket R&D apparatus, was personally associated with the SS and had a formal rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (equivalent to Major). The brilliant rocketry program he led during World War II was designing the V-2 ballistic missiles used to bomb Antwerp and London and other Allied cities, killing thousands of civilians. The V-2s were manufactured using slave labor, which von Braun knew of and indirectly benefited from. With Germany’s loss, he became a prisonner of war. None of that smells like the right stuff for launching a stellar US Career (pardon the pun).

Analysis

What forces set up von Braun for success? Why could he be trusted in spite of the above? I propose to analyze his story using three questions: “Who trusts you? To do what? Why?”

“Who”:
- What is the trust-giver accountable for? Promoting the American rocket program was seen as a first-order matter of national security, handled by top level “business owners” - cabinet Secretaries, one level below the President.
- What can the trust giver provide to enable the success of the relationship? In von Braun’s case it was investing the efforts to move his German team as a whole from POW detention in Europe to the United States, and allow von Braun to continue leading it.
- Alignment of values – von Braun’s personal motivation had been to build better rockets, with the long term dream of making space travel possible. Never a big fan of the Nazi values, von Braun appears to have been genuinely repentant about the Nazi attrocities, and saw redemptive value in working for the US government.
“Trust”:
- Expectations, “having the right answers” – this category includes behaviors which are relatively well understood to the people involved. For example: deciding on propellant, reviewing mechanical design calculations and maintaining secrecy. Clearly von Braun was a highly trained engineer with a good grasp of the required disciplines. However, he was by far not the only such person, and in more than one way not the “best”.
- Agency, “having the right questions” – this category includes proactively exercising judgment to fit some greater purpose. In my opinion it is here that was von Braun’s transformative value – he was the person who could proactively come up with and project how to “convert” the greater purpose of developing a missile into the specific problems of how to organize and manage the process of development. In that respect he was unique.
“To do what?”
- Why is the marginal value of the trusted person? Major new technology fails by default. For the political leadership, the way to enable the success of the rocket program was through establishing an appropriate human apparatus. In that apparatus, von Braun had the vital role of converting engineering insights into actionable administrative decisions.
- The price of failure – for the rocketry program as a whole, the price of failure was the United States’ coming into a disadvantaged position relative to the Soviet Union in terms of security deterrence. Such an outcome was widely considered catastrophic.
“Why”:
- Who else can be chosen? By the late 1940s, the US had raised a generation of qualified leaders for a nuclear program and for aircraft programs, but not for rocketry programs. So it was either von Braun or a home-grown expert; the price of “growing” an expert of sufficient magnitude is a delay of 2-5 years in reaching major goals.
- Why this person? Why not? von Braun’s ability to drive rocketry forward was salient - his Nazi past was a very bitter pill to swallow, but bygone, whereas his impact on US national interests was prospective and likely to be huge.

The Trajectory of Trust

It’s hard for me to imagine how von Braun with his past was even an option. However the need was dire, and the US did not have a cadre of leaders of similar stature.

The US career of von Braun began in several temporary sites over the southern US where he and his old German teams were asked to resume the manufacture of the V-2 and upgrade its design for usage by the United States. The misisle in US use was designated Redstone. During that phase, von Braun was denied resources but was responsible for educating a large cohort of American engineers.

The Redstone missiles were deployed by the US Army and von Braun’s American fame grew. Accordingly the team was given new resources and moved to Hunstsville, Alabama to form an organization called the Redstone Arsenal. Eventually the group served as the basis for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), where von Baun was the first and only technical director.

By the late 1950s, the ABMA team up-engineered the Redstone design, with range increased from the 320km/200 miles of the original V-2 to about 2400km/1500 miles. The new model entered service as Jupiter. Jupiter was a massive success, being the first ever ground-based ballistic missile option for striking the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. To compensate for the insufficient range, the US struck agreements with Italy and Turkey to host missile bases, which was one of the causes for the 1962 Caribbean Missile Crisis.

Jupiter was used to as the basis for Juno which wasn’t a ballistic missile anymore - it was a space-grade launch vehicle. The ABMA team was then merged into NASA, and in 1960 von Braun was appointed as the founding Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He accepted that role on the condition he would be able to continue evolving the Juno technology into a family of massive launch vehicles designated Saturn. This was accepted; Saturn V was the launch vehicle that brought mankind to the moon in July 1969.

A year after the moon landing, von Braun left Marshall for a senior administrative position in Washington D.C. and was replaced by one of his German team members. After two more years, as budgets were scaled back, it became apparent that NASA did not see a priority in manned exploration of outer space, which also meant there was no need in new launcher technology. Aged 60, von Braun retired from government altogether. The next several Directors of Marshall Space Flight Center were engineers whom von Braun trained in the Redstone era; however by the late 1990s, that line had been broken, and the position since has been filled by career bureaucrats.

Aftermath

As space travel was becoming less of an open-ended journey and more about playbooks and contractor management, NASA stopped being a literal “moonshot” organization and became a “standard” government contractor bureaucracy. One could say that after some point the balance of trust shifted from engineers to administrators. One can correlate that with NASA stopping being the cutting-edge innovative organization it used to be in von Braun’s period, and indeed losing the space launch edge to the extent of having to become massively reliant on Russian launch capabilities when the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011; this unfortunate situation was only broken through the innovative work carried out by SpaceX, which did not enjoy NASA’s support during much of its early history.

The story above teaches me several crucial intuitions:

Growth is much easier when you’re trusted with a part of the top-line organizational outcomes.
Technical prowess alone is not enough. One needs to be involved with both major roadmap decisions and with staffing - in plain words, you need achievements attributable to you, and people who will stick with you.
Having a shared vision is immensely useful for having people stick with you, even if the immediate/short-term goals fall short by a lot of the long-term possibilities.
It would be extremely rare for a person to be given the trust they “deserve”; at best one can expect several “steps up”, each building on the previous one.
Positions of trust are volatile: they tend to arise only when a need is dire, and often fade away before the need is answered in full.
Relegating domain experts to advisory/expert roles is unavoidable but it means that they lose trust, which could coincide with the organization losing the edge in that domain.

Now that we have examined a complete trajectory of a specific position of trust, I intend to write a Part II that applies our learnings to the specific trajectories of employees in the tech industry; stay tuned.