Building the Bell Labs of the future

If you’re trying to replicate DARPA’s success, most of the structural bits are a distraction. They’re certainly useful, but if you don’t get the agentic program leader piece right, nothing else matters.

This realization made several things click:

1. All program managers are program leaders but not all program leaders are managers. Licklider and many other PMs did not manage but they did lead (even if the ideas were not their own). (As such, I think the term “program leader” is much more accurate and I’ve started using it to describe the position whe

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The reality is that there have been successful ARPA programs all over the spectrum. JCR Licklider “just” spelled out an extraordinary vision, found people who were aligned with it, and gave them resources. Only a few years later, Lawrence Roberts ran the ARPAnet program almost like a CEO: giving different people and groups parts of a broader archit... See more

The importance of agentic program managers to the success of the ARPA model isn’t surprising or new. The “aha” was that the only way to cut through the paradox of inconsistent process leading to consistent success was that the agentic program leader may be the only thing that’s important to get right; everything else may be cargo-culting.