High Stakes, Big Bets

By: Bill BreenWed Dec 19, 2007 at 12:34 AM

Tom Burbage and his 500-person team at Lockheed Martin went after the biggest military deal in U.S. history -- and scored a $200 billion victory: a contract to build the Joint Strike Fighter. They didn't play it safe; they played to win.

In the end, Boeing helped Lockheed's cause by choosing a design that looked like no fighter before: a stocky body with a large air inlet under the nose that resembled a gaping mouth. Air Force staffers dubbed Boeing's plane "the Monica."

Ultimately, however, Lockheed won because its three big bets paid off. It teamed with the enemy and successfully leveraged its team. It delivered a plane that the Air Force wanted but pushed the envelope on a plane that the Marines needed. And in the 11th hour, when it found itself in a dogfight with its customer, it brought in a leader who could make peace.

Four months after that 30-second flight in the desert, Air Force secretary Roche made it official by awarding the future of the U.S. combat-aircraft industry to Lockheed Martin.

Bill Breen (bbreen@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Contact Tom Burbage by email (charles.t.burbage@lmco.com).

Sidebar: From Postmortems to Premortems

Before heading Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, Tom Burbage led the company's effort to develop the F-22 Raptor. By almost every measure, the F-22 is a standout program. But when Burbage reflects on his tenure, one event stands out: The F-22 team missed the critical first-flight date by four months. "There was hell to pay," he recalls.

For Burbage and the JSF team, nothing is more sacred than a deadline. "If you can't control your schedule, the implication is that you can't control costs," he says. "And if you can't control costs, you won't keep the services interested in funding your program."

The critical deadline facing the JSF team is October 2005, when the Air Force expects to fly its JSF aircraft. To nail that date, the team must harness a program that encompasses 75% of the world's fighter-development industrial base.

In a paper titled "JSF Management Philosophy," Burbage highlighted the biggest potential speed bumps: coordinating the efforts of numerous U.S. agencies and nearly an equal number of UK Ministry of Defense agencies; meeting the expectations of the U.S. armed services, as well as the militaries of a growing number of allied air forces; and managing the collaborative efforts of hundreds of U.S. and foreign subcontractors.

The team's best hope for staying on schedule is to anticipate problems and fix them before they occur. To do that, managers from Lockheed and its partner companies, Northrop and BAE, undertook an ambitious postmortem: They compiled an exhaustive database of setbacks and lessons learned on virtually all of the world's modern tactical-aircraft development programs. Then they did a premortem: They plotted their lessons-learned analysis on a graph that runs from 2001 to 2011. The graph enabled them to identify 10 future inflection points -- dates when the risk of a setback runs high.

"The techniques we have put in place allow us to measure our confidence in nailing these four- and five-year deadlines," says Burbage. "If I really understand this program's critical drivers, I can tell you today whether I'm confident that we'll fly that plane in October 2005. Today, my confidence level is 50-50. We haven't experienced any setbacks, but we haven't submitted our detail plans to our suppliers yet. Six months from now, I'll have a much better feel for our confidence factor. If it looks like we're falling off the curve, I can take corrective action."