If you find yourself with a spare hour and a half, and fancy doing something a bit more than doomscrolling, then I heartily recommend watching this recently released lecture that Grace Hopper gave at the NSA in 1982 on “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People”.
It’s a fascinating insight into a variety of subjects that Rear Admiral Hopper had an interest in, including computer network design, leadership, the length of a nanosecond, building for future requirements and so much more. It’s delivered with humour and obvious intelligence, it’s a window into how we thought about the future 42 years ago. It’s also interesting to see that we’re struggling with a many of the same issues today… the value of data for one.
If you’re not familiar with “Amazing Grace”— seriously, where have you been?— I strongly encourage you to learn more about her. She truly lived up to her legendary nickname.
Grace talked a fair bit about leadership in this lecture, and there were a couple of things that really resonate with me, I’ve highlighted them below.
…and we lost that concept of leadership. Loyalty up and loyalty down. It’s the one thing those youngsters are looking for. You can’t do it all by management. If I had a Marine standing here beside me, what he was say would be: ‘When the going gets rough, you cannot manage a man into combat. You must lead him.’ And I think he would further add: ‘you manage things. You lead people.’ We need people, we need to bring that back very badly, not only in the armed forces but in all of government, throughout business and industry.
I ran extracted the talk’s content using YouTube’s closed captions and then cleaned up the results using chat GPT. I’ve saved the result to Evernote, so I can refer back to it later, and I’ve shared it here so you can enjoy it too.
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