GET OUT
football on TV but applied to the wrong college) and then, after dropping out of school, enlisted in the Air Force. After receiving combat training, he deployed to Tailand in 1974, where he repaired electronic warfare equipment for the Wild Weasels—aircraft equipped with radar-seeking missiles. “You get deployed overseas, you had to go through combat training,” Blank related in a Jan. 31 inter- view with Army AL&T. “And I thought it was funny because I was going to be in an air base doing electronics. And the guy training me said, ‘You know, the base you are going to has been attacked a couple of times. I sure hope the guy attacking you also laughed through his training.’ But yes, it was mostly screw- drivers and electronics.”
He thrived in the war zone atmosphere, where the assignment was to fix broken equipment, and fast, with minimum direction and few rules. “I didn’t under- stand until decades later: In a war zone, we were incredibly innovative, at least on my level—anything it required to get the mission done.”
SHOWING THE WAY
Steve Blank talks with students in Stanford’s first Hacking for Defense class, in spring 2016. H4D, as it is called, gives teams of students unclassified, real-world DOD problems to solve. H4D has given rise to Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Energy and other sister classes, now collectively known as H4X; the X can be any subject. (Photo by Rod Searcey, Stanford News Service)
“It’s not just an acquisition problem, it’s understanding that the nature of the threat and the speed that we need to respond have changed dramatically.”
126 Army AL&T Magazine April - June 2018
INNOVATION VS. NO DEVIATION After Tailand he was assigned to a Strategic Air Command (SAC) base in Michigan, with nuclear-armed B-52 bombers, “where there was no deviation from the technical orders and technical manuals at all, for all the right reasons. So here was an example of agile in a war zone, and an example of executing known missions with no deviation on a SAC base.” When people ask why the military can’t be as agile as startups, “I remind them that on the battlefield, the military historically has been more agile than startups. But when the military comes back to peacetime, it collapses into the world’s largest bureaucracy. But on the battlefield, it’s find, fix and fin- ish. … Given what [the U.S. military] was trying to achieve, it was incredibly
innovative. It used all kinds of people who typically never worked together and did incredibly amazing stuff. … It’s not that we don’t come up with this stuff, it’s that the bureaucracy tends to win when we get back home.”
Blank left the Air Force and went back to college, this time to the right Michigan, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But the emphasis on theory over practice led Blank to drop out again. He wouldn’t set foot in a college classroom again for 25 years, when he began teaching entre- preneurship at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1978, while installing process-control networks in automobile assembly plants and steel mills for one of the few startups in Ann Arbor, Blank and a colleague were
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