Norm Augustine retired in 1997, but not before creating the world’s biggest defense contractor.
Augustine, former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp. (IW 500/29), in 1995 orchestrated the merger of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Corp., creating what is now Lockheed Martin.
During the Industrial Research Institute’s 75th annual meeting in D.C., Augustine offered IW some insight on his time leading Lockheed Martin, serving as Undersecretary for the U.S. Army and on the defense industry.
My greatest strength as a leader was I’m very good at identifying talented people, talented dedicated people. I was always able to surround myself with people who fit those adjectives.
If you’re at a company with 180,000 employees as I was, you don’t make much difference by yourself. It’s “Can you create an environment where everybody else is at their best?” To do that, you’ve got to have people around you that are really talented.
I’m a delegator. I believe in delegating. My 13 words are: “Find good people. Tell them what you want and then leave them alone.”
That’s my management secret. It’ll save you two years, $100,000 at business school, if you do those things.
One of the things that certainly comes to mind that was always an enigma to me was I’ve had trouble holding schedules for meetings and the like.
I had on more than one occasion groups of people sitting outside of my office waiting for the next meeting. And it’s an insult to them.
It’s inefficient and the dilemma is you’re on the topic you’re on. You need 10 more minutes. Do you cut that off and then reassemble that group or do you finish that and have everybody else wait in the hall for 10 minutes? I never found the answer to that.
When I was CEO, there was nothing that really surprised me all that much, with one exception. It was pretty much what I expected, I guess.
The one thing I didn’t realize was the amount of time you would spend in dealing with people wanting the company’s support or the company’s money for very worthy causes. It just occupies a whole lot of your time.
Often, these people are customers that you have to listen to and what they’re doing, every one of them, you think, “Wow, that’s terrific. We’d love to do that.” But it uses an awful lot of the CEO’s time and a lot of this can’t be delegated. Some can but a lot cannot. That was the one thing I was unprepared for.
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