What's wrong with Rickover as a role model? If he'd been able to do for the civilian nuclear power sector what he did for the Navy, a lot of things would be a lot better now.
Rickover effectively seized control of the entire USN submarine arm and ran it as a personal fief for three decades. I don't think that could possibly work with civilian power in the US, because it's NOT a military organization and can't be changed by top-down mandate.
A 1978 USNI Proceedings essay on NR and leadership[1], which won a bunch of prizes, had this great description of Rickover's micromanagement: "Each nuclear submarine is commanded by two people: its captain and the Director, Division of Naval Reactors [Rickover]. The captain has full responsibility for the military operations of his ship as well as for power plant safety. He also has full authority over the military operations. NR has much of the authority over the power plant; its Director has been known to place a call to a submarine’s engineering space telephone and then personally direct the commanding officer how to organize his watch bill."
That level of micromanagement wasn't great inside the US Navy, a military organization (hence the essay) and would have spectacularly bombed and flamed out in the civil power world and is also not a great idea for the commercial world at large. This is why taking Rickover as a model is something that you should do very very carefully. He did some things right, but a whole lot of things can't be brought over to your company, in a way that suggests using him as a baseline takes you further away from a good answer.
I wrote a paper decades ago comparing Rickover and Jackie Fisher- of HMS Dreadnought/HMS Invincible fame- as technological entrepreneur's introducing new technology into their respective fleets. And one lesson I took away was that both of them took a whole lot of advantage of being in a military service where they could issue orders and have them be legally obeyed in a way that commercial people just can't get away with. Employees will just leave your company if you tried a bunch of the crap that Rickover did.
[1]: A badly OCR'd version of the essay is available here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1978/july/leaders... The author, then Lt Ralph Chatham, would go on to have the first ever novel published by the US Naval Institute Press dedicated to him. "To Ralph Chatham, a sub driver who spoke the truth" is how Tom Clancy's _Hunt for Red October_ begins.
The reality is we have to give Sam total credit for transparency. From the USNI and Air University articles mandevil and I cited he was completely open and honest about how he intended to run OpenAI (although he was still at YC then). Let's just hope his next role model isn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naftaly_Frenkel
This is what I cited (from the 1983 issue of Air University Review) which makes many similar points but concentrates more on his impact on the organization at the Navy level (https://web.archive.org/web/20130310192210/http://www.airpow...). I also pointed out to him that Rickover didn't think civilian nuclear power should be a thing towards the end of his life as well as some points about the Shoreham plant and the backup turbines.
e: "In time, he became increasingly conservative if not reactionary, putting space between himself and any responsibility for failure or accident. When the USS Thresher was lost in April 1963, he immediately phoned the Bureau of Ships to dissociate himself from any likelihood of failure of the nuclear plant in the incident. The bureau chief thought this action "thoroughly dishonest."
It's interesting because you can't argue with the success he achieved, and given how high the stakes were, you can sort of understand the temptation to micromanage. But (having read the essay now) you also can't learn much from Rickover's methodology, or apply it anywhere else. If for no other reason than the fact that few/no similar problems exist anywhere else.
We also can't run the experiment multiple times to determine if he was really relying on luck all along. The Navy's luck ran pretty low at a couple of points (Thresher and Scorpion come to mind).
I think he realized it painted him in a bad light which is why he blamed it on the reporter to me but I really just should have responded with the Edward Teller quote from the 1983 AUR article: 'I liked Rickover better as a captain than as an admiral."
