The Lessons of Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is blowing up! (ha)

With the explosive success of the Christopher Nolan movie, and my much-anticipated episode about him set to release this week, people can’t stop talking about J Robert Oppenheimer.

So let’s preview some of my biggest takeaways from his life:

The Background

J Robert Oppenheimer was born to German-Jewish immigrant parents on April 22, 1904. Oppenheimer was mysterious from the moment he entered the world: He and his parents would claim that the J didn’t stand for anything.

His father was a wealthy cloth merchant, so Robert grew up with money. He was recognized as a genius early in his life, and voraciously devoured information on any topic: math, science, poetry, literature, chemistry, history, and more.

He graduated from Harvard and did postgraduate research in Cambridge, Göttingen, and Zurich before returning to the USA to teach physics in California.

Eventually, he was tapped to lead research for the Manhattan Project, the secret American initiative to develop an atomic bomb during World War 2. His inspiring leadership was key to taking some of the top scientists in the world and forging them into a team that accomplished something unprecedented.

He later developed an ambivalent attitude toward nuclear armament, doing much to encourage arms control and transparent communication between the USA and USSR.

T-Shaped Knowledge

In the 1980s, the American consulting company McKinsey & Co came up with the phrase “the T-shaped man” to describe a certain type of candidate they were looking for: someone who had deep knowledge in one core competency, while still maintaining some working knowledge and interest in a number of unrelated fields.

Think about it as being the Jack of all trades while still being the master of one.

Oppenheimer is a great example of a person with T-shaped knowledge. He was well-versed in Math, poetry, literature, chemistry, and other subjects while being an expert in the field of theoretical physics.

This is actually one of the reasons he was tapped to lead the Manhattan Project. The leader of the project on the army side, Leslie Groves, spoke with a few leading candidates. He ended up choosing Oppenheimer because his genius was readily apparent to him: Groves might not be able to understand physics, but he was able to clearly see how well Oppenheimer understood history, literature, poetry, and other topics on which their knowledge overlapped.

He later bragged that Oppenheimer was a “genuine genius” who knew about “just about everything… except for sports.”

This is an attribute commonly seen in those who accomplish great things.

If you remember from the Leonardo da Vinci episode, he was not only a great artist, but also had some skill as an engineer, scientist, and musician.

You don’t have to spend long with Steve Jobs’s writing to realize that he had a deep interest in and good familiarity with literature and history.

And Einstein was a pretty darn good violin player.

You don’t want to spend too much time outside your core competency, but having some knowledge seems to accelerate success.

Being “Set Apart”

When Oppenheimer was chosen to lead the Manhattan Project, one of the first things he did was designate a remote site where the majority of research would be completed.

He chose Los Alamos, New Mexico. One of the most remote sites imaginable. The town (it was really just a boarding school) didn’t have a sewer system before the Manhattan Project, let alone a particle accelerator.

Why Los Alamos? There was one very practical reason, namely security considerations. Removed from friends, neighbors, and the normal interactions of daily life, it was easier to keep knowledge secret.

But something else happened.

The strict confines of Los Alamos created an intense, collaborative environment. This was a unique environment that everyone knew would only last for a short period of time.

It reminds me of the Macintosh team that Steve Jobs physically moved into a new building on the Apple campus.

Setting a place apart from the normal humdrum of daily work helps shake a person out of their normal work routine and opens them up to a period of more intense and more focused work.

The takeaway? For projects that require intense focus, set apart a new, shared environment where people can work hard together for a set period of time.

Thanks for reading. I’m almost done with the Oppenheimer episode so keep your eyes peeled for that coming later this week! 👀