Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence Review

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(More customer reviews)Many biographies have been written over the past 40 years about the impact that the life of Admiral H.G. Rickover has had on the United States Navy ' one in which redefined the role of the Navy in the post World II era. All of these works have focused on his many accomplishments and the controversies that surrounded him, which often conflicted with the executive branch of the Federal government, naval shipbuilders, and the U.S. Navy itself. Few, if any, clearly demonstrate who Rickover was, and how his principles evolved. No doubt, the author of 'Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence,' Francis Duncan, is the only biographer afforded enough access to the Rickover as an outsider to the Navy and its Naval Reactors program, to know him well enough to accomplish a detailed account of what shaped the man. This book, the third in a series by Duncan, tells the stories from birth till his death, remarking on events that shaped his priorities and principles, and addresses many of the unanswered questions or mysteries that readers of other biographers may have found in the story of Rickover's career. Some of the misconceptions about Rickover that Duncan's work clears up are concerns such that Rickover had lied about his age or that Rickover had been for the most part unsuccessful and out of place in the Navy prior to his work with Naval Reactors. Unlike the Polmar and Allen 'Rickover' biography, which often appears lengthy and intimidating as an all encompassing view of Rickover's life, Duncan's work is very readable and pleasant. I assume that Duncan knew that the larger than life Rickover story could never be captured in single volume, and separated his works, which describes his evolution; 'Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962' which deals with the influence of Atomic Energy on the modern U.S. Navy,' and the 'Rickover and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology,' describing the founding and management of Rickover's technical program.

Although the emphasis of most Rickover biographies has been his impact on the Navy, his story serves two other main purposes. First, from a management and organizational behavior perspective Rickover seems to break all the rules and still maintain a highly committed program that integrated safety, reliability and high-performance He embedded principles and expectations that continue to exist today, and are the core of the Naval Nuclear program. This is the ultimate measure of a founder's success, for an organization to remain relatively static around what principles and values drive its core mission. The second of course, is Rickover's influence on the operation of civilian nuclear power plants, an accomplishment that Rickover thought he was unlikely to achieve when he was forced to withdraw from Shippingport. However, his influence and principles have filtered down through the personnel he trained through 'NR,' and have subsequently redefined nuclear power operations in the Post-TMI era of nuclear power, and forced a paradigm shift in nuclear power operations and realigned the thinking about the discipline required to operate high-risk technologies.
My only criticism of Duncan is perhaps his fondness of Rickover, which comes through in his writing. Considering all of the negative stories of Rickover, I would expect more negatives in his depiction of Rickover as well. However, biographies are written about the life and accomplishments of great men, and gossip and scandals best left for supermarket tabloids.

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