High Performing Team: The Manhattan Project
For a team to become high performing, it must have certain quantifiable characteristics. Among them are a reason, purpose, and sense of urgency. The Manhattan Project Team had and utilized all three of these criteria. In 1939, World War was raging in Europe as the Nazi Party was sweeping across the continent in search of global domination. Two refugee scientists, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, sent a letter to President Roosevelt warning him that they feared that the Germans were constructing a bomb of grand scale proportions (Nobelprize.org). They pleaded with President Roosevelt to begin working on a weapon based on atomic fission, to beat the Germans and prevent them from achieving their goals. …show more content…
The task took nearly five years and employed over 100,000 people working in complete secrecy in many different locations. The Team was comprised of scientists, military personnel, support personnel and many others. The leader of the organization was Colonel Leslie Groves, who was later promoted to Major General and a scientist named Robert Oppenheimer. Groves and Oppenheimer’s immediate priorities were to establish the right team for the job, lead the widely distributed team, establish priorities and ensure success of the critical project that would later determine the outcome of World War II and introduce technologies that the world had never …show more content…
Fearing that conventional combat would not bring an end to the war, President Truman and other Allied Leaders invited the leaders of Japan to the Potsdam Conference hoping to reach terms for the surrender of Japan. However, the Japanese refused surrender under these terms. President Truman was faced with a couple of choices which were to invade mainland Japan, which would take an indeterminable amount of time and undoubtedly cost the lives of thousands of American and Japanese lives, or utilize the weapon developed by the Manhattan Project. He decided to drop the atomic bomb and bring an end to the war in the Pacific.
The Manhattan Project Team serves as a model to teams today in their demonstrated ability to make incredible advancements using a large number of professionals in distributed teams. General Groves is attributed with the management technique now referred to as compartmentalization (Lee, 2012). The results of this team not only led to the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II in the Pacific, educational and medical advances, but to the demonstrated power of the United States that ensured much of our national security for years after
For a team to become high performing, it must have certain quantifiable characteristics. Among them are a reason, purpose, and sense of urgency. The Manhattan Project Team had and utilized all three of these criteria. In 1939, World War was raging in Europe as the Nazi Party was sweeping across the continent in search of global domination. Two refugee scientists, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, sent a letter to President Roosevelt warning him that they feared that the Germans were constructing a bomb of grand scale proportions (Nobelprize.org). They pleaded with President Roosevelt to begin working on a weapon based on atomic fission, to beat the Germans and prevent them from achieving their goals. …show more content…
The task took nearly five years and employed over 100,000 people working in complete secrecy in many different locations. The Team was comprised of scientists, military personnel, support personnel and many others. The leader of the organization was Colonel Leslie Groves, who was later promoted to Major General and a scientist named Robert Oppenheimer. Groves and Oppenheimer’s immediate priorities were to establish the right team for the job, lead the widely distributed team, establish priorities and ensure success of the critical project that would later determine the outcome of World War II and introduce technologies that the world had never …show more content…
Fearing that conventional combat would not bring an end to the war, President Truman and other Allied Leaders invited the leaders of Japan to the Potsdam Conference hoping to reach terms for the surrender of Japan. However, the Japanese refused surrender under these terms. President Truman was faced with a couple of choices which were to invade mainland Japan, which would take an indeterminable amount of time and undoubtedly cost the lives of thousands of American and Japanese lives, or utilize the weapon developed by the Manhattan Project. He decided to drop the atomic bomb and bring an end to the war in the Pacific.
The Manhattan Project Team serves as a model to teams today in their demonstrated ability to make incredible advancements using a large number of professionals in distributed teams. General Groves is attributed with the management technique now referred to as compartmentalization (Lee, 2012). The results of this team not only led to the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II in the Pacific, educational and medical advances, but to the demonstrated power of the United States that ensured much of our national security for years after