What do you want to be when you grow up?

It’s a question we all heard as kids, and our answers were frequently telling. A child’s answer— whether firefighter, astronaut, or, in my case, paleontologist—said something about their instincts and their imagined future.

Lots of kids dream of space and fire trucks, but Philip Clark had a distinct set of ambitions: he wanted to be a physicist and the CEO of Lockheed Martin .

“Oh, I loved the [now-retired Lockheed recon aircraft] SR-71 when I was a kid,” said Clark. “I remember my parents put me in a preschool interview, and I was telling people about the aerodynamics of F-16s. I don’t know how much I really understood at the time, but I was definitely talking about it in building-block interviews with preschool and kindergarten principals. Th

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