Statement from StratFor regarding state of the Army

[selil]

After all, quoth he with a jaundiced air, how many politicians (or bureaucrats) will buy "analyses" that disagree with their theological convictions?

OOH PICK ME!! <hand waving in the air>

The answer to the question is NONE, unless the focus group disagrees.

[Old Eagle]

Selil, you have hit upon a major difference between those in the gov't bureaucracy and those in business. When businessfolk hold on to the party line too long, they risk failure which means loss of profit, etc. In the government, we don't have the same negative incentives. Good business guys try to stay ahead of the changing environment to ensure continued profitability.

[Steve Blair]

Selil, you have hit upon a major difference between those in the gov't bureaucracy and those in business. When businessfolk hold on to the party line too long, they risk failure which means loss of profit, etc. In the government, we don't have the same negative incentives. Good business guys try to stay ahead of the changing environment to ensure continued profitability.

Naw...business just waits for the next reorg, backdates their stock options, and then heads for the door while the next guy comes in and tries to figure out how to clean up the mess....

[wm]

Selil, you have hit upon a major difference between those in the gov't bureaucracy and those in business. When businessfolk hold on to the party line too long, they risk failure which means loss of profit, etc. In the government, we don't have the same negative incentives. Good business guys try to stay ahead of the changing environment to ensure continued profitability.

He reponded , slightly tongue-in-cheek:
"About the only party line that business folk hold on to is doing whatever it is that will maintain shareholder confidence. 'Good' business CEOs try to ensure they do nothing that will devalue their stock until they can sell them off. They merely milk cash cows rather than try to find ways to improve their yield of 'dairy' products.

"Ask the leadership at such business successes as Digital, Wang, and the last round of leadership at Dell and HP about what made their companies so successful. Do I dare mention wonderfully successful companies as Enron, US Airways, Delta, Northwest, and United?"

[JHR]

And the bigger a business gets, the more acts like the government previously describe.

JHR

[120mm]

Every organization that gets beyond a certain size, becomes unmanageable, and the consequences of incompetence become sheltered by mass, alone. At a certain point, it quits being a "business" and starts being a large, dead elephant and the point quits being to build the company, and starts being "how to strip the carcass".

CEOs are kind of like NFL football coaches. There are a limited number of them, and they just shuffle around, from failure to failure, until they retire. Sooner or later, one of these "blind pigs" finds an acorn and posts good results in a quarter, or wins the Super Bowl, and they make the cover of a magazine and sell a book/consultant concept. Until it is discovered that they really DON'T have all the answers.

Meanwhile, at the small-medium sized business level, there are a bunch of really sharp guys who are creating concepts, making and selling products and "making things happen", though no-one really cares how "Po-Dunk Donuts" is run.

[Van]

Sooo... The consensus seems to be that the Army has be Dilberted?

Perhaps the misquote is; not that the Army is in revolt, but that the Army's situation is revolting. The most distressing thought is that historically, for an organization this size to head down such an ugly and bureaucratic path, the best chance for recovery is a massive failure then complete reconstruction. Still, there are lots of good people in the Army to fall back on.

This only re-emphasizes the need for good PME, to prepare the next generation of leaders to sweep up after the mess that we're headed for.

[marct]

Sooo... The consensus seems to be that the Army has be Dilberted?

Future tense? You are more optimistic than I am.

Perhaps the misquote is; not that the Army is in revolt, but that the Army's situation is revolting. The most distressing thought is that historically, for an organization this size to head down such an ugly and bureaucratic path, the best chance for recovery is a massive failure then complete reconstruction. Still, there are lots of good people in the Army to fall back on.

If we carry on the analogy between the military and business organizations, and it's a good one given how much cultural "genetic" (aka memetic) material has passed between them, then what about the Board of Directors? I have yet to see, barring the current examples in Israel, any Western nation really going after politicians for incompetence. Maybe the Western nations should consider the advantages of putting together something like SEC for politician overwatch, similar to Canada's Auditor General or the US GAO, but with the power to indite politicians for incompetence and malfeasance.

Marc

[selil]

An interesting point about technology innovation is that almost none is done by large companies. Small companies or small units that are autonomous of large companies do technological innovation. An organizational leadership scholar once told me it was effective span of control by the leaders. Vision and enthusiasm can only be pushed out by leaders to a certain number of individuals.

When was the last time you heard somebody in governmental or business leadership positions talking about vision and it didn't sound pedantic or hollow? When you can't create consensus in an organization (even at the platoon leader level) you are left with tools like fear and authority to get the job done. Those two tools being in direct contradiction to vision and innovation.

I was only a corporal in the Marines so my leadership was learned much in law enforcement and business. In once case running a 100 million dollar project my span of control was 15 subordinates with a team total of 135 or so on my project. The VP I worked for was an Army colonel and he laughed when i set up the project in teams of 5, with three teams of five being a section, and three sections per department... The organization ran lean, ran fast, and came in on-time and under budget.

I learned from that job the worst thing an organization can do is give you everything you ask for. A lean staffing profile is much better than bloated. It was a hard lesson but I learned that work is not done by the leaders and in general they just get in the way. Vision and mission is done by leaders and their effectiveness should be rated on their ability to communicate that to the leaves of the organization.

I know with the amount of military leadership here none of that would be much of a surprise.

Of course at the end of the project they disbanded the team and sent the CEO to jail but that is another story.

[selil]

Sooo... The consensus seems to be that the Army has be Dilberted?

I ran across an article about this factor with Information Technology. I got to thinking about the concepts and if you switch army, officer, and such in the right places this article could be this thread.

How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT (March 16, 2007)

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2104997,00.asp

Talk to someone who has worked in IT for decades and more often than not, they'll regale you with stories of the "good old days," when the workplace was lively and creative juices flowed.

Nowadays it's a different story, they usually say, and place their blame along any number of lines: outsourcing, offshoring, cost-cutting, IT commoditization, reactivity where there was once proactivity, not to mention the shoddy desks in their office in dusty room at the end of the hall.

n the simplest terms: too many IT workplaces have become Dilbert-ized—micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively. It's become an environment where busy work is praised and morale is low.

IT is isn't fun anymore, and while a lack of fun at work may not seem worth stopping the presses over, the long-term effects of depriving a field of appealing work may very likely look like this: Students are turning away from computer science at an alarming rate. There's a huge talent shortage across the entire field, and, in confidence, enterprise IT workers say they'd probably choose a different career path if they could go back and start over again.

"When I first got involved in IT, it was fun. It was a cool job; you were a hero because you helped people do things," Bruce Skaistis, founder of eGlobal CIO, a consulting firm, told eWEEK. "Now I go in to organizations and it has become drudgery. They seem beat-down, in less nice facilities. If you want to attract better people back into IT you need to make it more fun again. You need to recognize it as a problem."

But how to go about bringing IT's appeal back? Answers come from surprising places. Recipient of the 2006 Turning award and IBM Fellow Emeriti Frances Allen said in a recent interview that the answer lies within the field.

"I believe that there was great excitement early on. You couldn't have had a more wonderful experience than I did at IBM in 1960. We worked through wonderful problems with wonderful people. There was always the sense that there was so much more to do, more than we ever had time for," said Allen.

"The excitement is not as much now, which is unfortunate, because we've really just gotten started."

eWEEK spoke to long-time IT professionals about ways they think the fun and excitement can be brought back to IT. Beyond blaming external factors, they speak of bringing focus back to what is already in-house: professionals eager to love their work again.

Much more at the link......