# PARPA needs to be obsessed with PMs The coupling between the ARPA Model and empowered program managers is like the coupling between Star Wars and lightsabers or between classical physics and calculus: there’s lots of other stuff but the former would absolutely not be itself without the latter. There’s perhaps not much more to say about PMs than the breakdown in Why Does DARPA Work, but the key points are worth reiterating both as a refresher and to emphasize this as the thing *one should not mess with.* “What about managing programs through a committee?” NO. “What if performers just submitted grants and coordinated among themselves” NO. “What about a more rigorous approval process to make sure money isn’t wasted?” NO. “What if people could be career program managers?” NO. You get the point. * [[DARPA Program managers pull control and risk away from both researchers and directors]] * [[The best DARPA program managers are the ones who can look at an entire literature in an area and notice a systemic bias]] * [[DARPA is incredibly flexible with who it hires to be program managers]] * [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]] * [[Why do people become DARPA Program managers?]] * [[A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building]] * [[DARPA PMs need to think for themselves, be curious, and have low ego]] * [[The dependence of DARPA on high quality program managers mirrors the obsession with “talent” in other disciplines]] The importance of program managers means that anybody attempting to replicate DARPA’s outlier results needs to be utterly obsessed with bringing the right program managers on board. Getting the right program managers will require understanding both who those people are and how to convince them to join. Program managers can’t just be general high quality people but need to exhibit specific traits - [curious, low ego,][[DARPA PMs need to think for themselves, be curious, and have low ego]] [able to bring people together][[A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building]], [good at communication] [[There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model]], and [high doing:talking ratios][[Darpa’s aversion to people with a web presence hints at a way that the internet has eroded institutions]]. An ARPA-riff will need to do some hard work to convince good program managers to join. A new organization can’t depend on accumulated prestige and [A private organization][[21st century riffs on ARPA should be private]] can’t leverage patriotism. Below are a few (admittedly weak) speculations on recruiting good PMs. One speculative approach for recruiting PMs could be to embrace people who have expertise but are not traditionally credentialed. You often see this pattern in software-adjacent disciplines where people can independently build mastery and then do real cutting-edge work without going through traditional institutions. Uncredentialed research expertise is rarer farther away from software presumably because developing it requires more specialized equipment and tacit knowledge that lives primarily in traditional institutions. However, they’re still possible to find and if predictions about the democratization of disciplines like biology play out, they may become easier to find over time. Thus, developing taste in uncredentialed experts might yield fruit. An ARPA-riff does offer a set of career affordances that you can’t find elsewhere and will hopefully appeal to a subset of folks who would be excellent PMs. There aren’t many opportunities that offer the ability to work on getting a technology out into the world without needing to tune the work to either produce papers or hockey-stick revenue numbers while at the same time having extreme autonomy. I suspect that there are a few highly competent people out there (it doesn’t take that many) who are seething to shift technological paradigms and are willing to trade off salary, prestige, and stability for the ability to make those shifts happen. Of course, often that sort of pitch leads to bitter disappointment so smart people are rightly skeptical of it! The burden of proof is then on the organization become a place that does deliver on those promises. More than any specific ideas though, an ARPA-riff will need to constantly ask itself how it can become a place that PMs want to work. ### Related * [[§PARPA]] * [[Talent is the most important thing to building great orgs]]