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Founders: #215: J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves (The General and the Genius)

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What I learned from reading The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer—The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb by James Kunetka. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- It is clear that nothing short of a full-speed, all-out attempt would be worthwhile.Once Leslie Groves accepted his new assignment, he embraced it completely. From his appointment in September 1942 until the end of the war, he worked at full speed, often fourteen hours a day or more. His remarkable energy and stamina frequently exhausted those who worked and traveled with him.Groves's style was to delegate whatever he could and then put the screws to the delegees. He was a taskmaster.The instructions to the project were that any individual in the project who felt that the ultimate completion was going to be delayed by as much as a day by something that was happening, it was his duty to report it direct to me. Urgency was on us right from the start.When Marshall asked him if he ever praised anyone for a job well done,

[00:00:00] The partnership between General Leslie Groves and the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the great stories of the Second World War, and it was as unexpected as it was successful. There was little in either man's life before 1942 to suggest that the general and the physicist would ever meet, much less form a close working association to develop an atomic bomb. They came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds. Their careers alone would have kept them apart had not the war thrown them together and changed their lives utterly. In Robert Oppenheimer,…

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