Rickover\u2019s Interviews<\/b><\/p>\n
His interviews were legendary. Rickover always wanted to cut through glib, rehearsed answers to get a look at the person underneath. He especially wanted to know how candidates would act under stress. On occasion he had them sit in a chair with the front legs sawed off an inch or two shorter than the back, to keep them off-balance.<\/p>\n
In his autobiography Why Not the Best?, President Jimmy Carter tells about his Rickover interview. The admiral asked how he had stood in his class at the Naval Academy. \u201cI swelled my chest with pride and answered, \u2018Sir, I stood 59th in a class of 820!\u2019 I sat back to wait for the congratulations.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead came the question: \u2018Did you do your best?\u2019 I started to say, \u2018Yes, sir,\u2019 but I remembered who this was. I gulped and admitted, \u2018No, sir, I didn\u2019t always do my best.\u2019 He looked at me for a long time, and then asked one final question, which I have never been able to forget\u2014or to answer. He said, \u2018Why not?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Reader\u2019s Digest, October, 1993, p. 104<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rickover\u2019s Interviews His interviews were legendary. Rickover always wanted to cut through glib, rehearsed answers to get a look at the person underneath. He especially wanted to know how candidates would act under stress. On occasion he had them sit in a chair with the front legs sawed off an inch or two shorter than … Continue reading “Rickover, Hyman”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}