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This article explores the need for a deep reassessment of Homeland Security, emphasizing the importance of innovation, inclusiveness, and quick wins. It highlights the need for a brand new approach to tackle modern threats effectively.
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Re-imagine!Tom Peters/Department of Homeland Security/BTS/02.27.03
A Baker’s Dozen Merger Messages: Private Sector & DHS/BTS1. Attitude Rules: Opportunity or Pain in …2. Unique time for Deep Re-assessment. (WE MUST RE-INVENT THE ESSENTIAL IDEA OF HOMELAND SECURITY.)3. THIS SORT OF THING ONLY HAPPENS ONCE EVERY SEVERAL DECADES! (I.E.: Don’t blow the Main Chance!)4. Avoid getting totally caught up in (necessary) details. (KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE B-I-G OPPORTUNITY.)5. Let’s assume you only hold this job for the next few months. MAKE A DAMN DIFFERENCE EVERY DAMN DAY. 6. What happens in the next few months is the principal basis by which your entire professional career will be judged.7. How well (IMAGINATIVELY!!!) you do this matters to 280,000,000 Americans.8. Every morning, say quietly to yourself, “It’s a Brand New World.” Forget Age Old Turf Disputes. (TURF WARFARE IS OSAMA’s-TERRORISM’s NO. 1 OPPORTUNITY.)9. Inclusiveness matters. Be incredibly careful about Respect & Involvement.10. Score some Quick Wins. (Rudy’s Rule.) Needed: New Behaviors. Focus on the Positives. (Bob’s Rule.) 11. BE INSANELY LAVISH IN PRAISE OF SMALL ACTS OF COOPERATION. (Be publicly brutal to the smallest act of turf warfare.)12. “GOOD” DECISIONS MADE TODAY BEAT “GREAT” DECISIONS DELAYED FOR MONTHS. MOMENTUM & MORALE MATTER. DELAY = CANCER.13. VISIBILITY RULES!
You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eyeAnd see it clearly in the idea of it.--Wallace Stevens/“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”—General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army
“The organizations we created have become tyrants. They have taken control, holding us fettered, creating barriers that hinder rather than help our businesses. The lines that we drew on our neat organizational diagrams have turned into walls that no one can scale or penetrate or even peer over.”—Frank Lekanne Deprez & René Tissen, Zero Space: Moving Beyond Organizational Limits.
“Our military structure today is essentially one developed and designed by Napoleon.”Admiral Bill Owens, former Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
“In an era when terrorists use satellite phones and encrypted email,US gatekeepers stand armed against them with pencils and paperwork, and archaic computer systems that don’t talk to each other.”Boston Globe (09.30.2001)
“IT MAY SOMEDAY BE SAID THAT THE 21ST CENTURY BEGAN ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. …“Al-Qaeda represents a new and profoundly dangerous kind of organization—one that might be called a ‘virtual state.’ On September 11 a virtual state proved that modern societies are vulnerable as never before.”—Time/09.09.2002
“The deadliest strength of America’s new adversaries is their very fluidity, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld believes. Terrorist networks, unburdened by fixed borders, headquarters or conventional forces, are free to study the way this nation responds to threats and adapt themselves to prepare for what Mr. Rumsfeld is certain will be another attack. …“ ‘Business as usual won’t do it,’ he said. His answer is to develop swifter, more lethal ways to fight. ‘Big institutions aren’t swift on their feet in adapting but rather ponderous and clumsy and slow.’ ”—The New York Times/09.04.2002
From: Weapon v. WeaponTo:Org structure v. Org structure
“We must not only transform our armed forces but the Defense Department that serves them—by encouraging a culture of creativity and intelligent risktaking. We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for threats to emerge and be ‘validated,’ but rather anticipates them before they appear and develops new capabilities to dissuade them and deter them.” —Donald Rumsfeld, Foreign Affairs
Forget>“Learn”“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.”Dee Hock
“Don’t rebuild. Reimagine.”The New York Times Magazine on the future of the WTC space in Lower Manhattan/09.08.2002
“Dawn Meyerreicks, CTO of the Defense Intelligence Systems Agency, made one of the most fateful military calls of the 21st century. After 9/11 … her office quickly leased all the available transponders covering Central Asia. The implications should change everything about U.S. military thinking in the years ahead. “The U.S. Air Force had kicked off its fight against the Taliban with an ineffective bombing campaign, and Washington was anguishing over whether to send in a few Army divisions. Donald Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to give the initiative to 250 Special Forces already on the ground. They used satellite phones, Predator surveillance drones, and GPS- and laser-based targeting systems to make the air strikes brutally effective.“In effect, they ‘Napsterized’ the battlefield by cutting out the middlemen (much of the military’s command and control) and working directly with the real players. … The data came in so fast that HQ revised operating procedures to allow intelligence analysts and attack planners to work directly together. Their favorite tool, incidentally, was instant messaging over a secure network.”—Ned Desmond/“Broadband’s New Killer App”/Business 2.0/ OCT2002
Shinseki’s ArmyFlat.Fast.Agile.Adaptable.Light … But Lethal.Talent/ “I Am An Army Of One.”Info-intense.Network-centric.
Forbes100 from 1917 to 1987: 39 members of the Class of ’17 were alive in ’87; 18 in ’87 F100; 18 F100 “survivors” underperformed the market by 20%; just 2 (2%), GE & Kodak, outperformed the market 1917 to 1987.S&P 500 from 1957 to 1997: 74 members of the Class of ’57 were alive in ’97; 12 (2.4%) of 500 outperformed the market from 1957 to 1997.Source: Dick Foster & Sarah Kaplan, Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market
“The corporation as we know it, which is now 120 years old, isnot likely to survive the next 25 years.Legally and financially, yes, but not structurally and economically.”Peter Drucker, Business 2.0 (08.00)
“Wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization. That is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown.”Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy
“Our military is very good at doing things as they are supposed to be done, but it is not always good at changing the way things ought to be done. Highly professional militaries can be very good at maintaining the institution’s traditions, mores and cultures in the face of rapid and important change. … Equating professionalism with automatically defending the status quo can be disastrous. This is the mindset that drives service loyalties toward narrow parochialism, and congeals organizations into brittle shells. We end up ignoring opportunities that could actually offer higher military effectiveness.” –Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War
“Many flaws remained—flaws not from poor performance, but from an ingrained command hierarchy and an outmoded concept of war that had taken root during World War II and then during the cold war. Desert Storm was a joint military operation in name rather than in fact. … The battlefield was divided among service components. … The fiefdoms existed not only because of tradition, service rivalry and the egos of the commanders; they were also there because of technological limitations. We did not have the communications capability to do it differently.” –Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War
“Once devised in Riyadh, the tasking order took hours to get to the Navy’s six aircraft carriers—because the Navy had failed years earlier to procure the proper communications gear that would have connected the Navy with its Air Force counterparts. … To compensate for the lack of communications capability, the Navy was forced to fly a daily cargo mission from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea to Riyadh in order to pick up a computer printout of the air mission tasking order, then fly back to the carriers, run photocopy machines at full tilt, and distribute the documents to the air wing squadrons that were planning the next strike.” –Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War
“The 1990s was a decade of multiple revolutions—political, economic, technological—that changed so thoroughly the way we live that the past no longer seems a good guide to the future (in fact the past seems precisely the wrong guide). So it is in the world of military affairs. The RMA is our opportunity to use the new information technology to change the very nature of the military—in a way that could reinvigorate American political, diplomatic and economic leadership in the world for decades to come.” –Bill Owens, Lifting the Fog of War
E.g. …Jeff Immelt: 75% of “admin, back room, finance” “digitalized” in 3 years.Source: BW (01.28.02)
“Our entire facility is digital. No paper, no film, no medical records. Nothing. And it’s all integrated—from the lab to X-ray to records to physician order entry. Patients don’t have to wait for anything. The information from the physician’s office is in registration and vice versa. The referring physician is immediately sent an email telling him his patient has shown up. … It’s wireless in-house. We have 800 notebook computers that are wireless. Physicians can walk around with a computer that’s pre-programmed. If the physician wants, we’ll go out and wire their house so they can sit on the couch and connect to the network. They can review a chart from 100 miles away.—David Veillette, CEO, Indiana Heart Hospital (Healthleaders/12.2002)
“It takes six years to develop a new car. That’s ridiculous. It only took four years to win World War II.” —Ross Perot
“A Big Electronics Show Is All About Connections” —headline, New York Times/ 01.13.2003/ Consumer Electronics Show > COMDEX
WebWorld = EverythingWeb as a way to run your business’s innardsWeb as connector for your entire supply-demand chainWebas “spider’s web” which re-conceives the industryWeb/B2B as ultimate wake-up call to “commodity producers”Web as the scourge of slack, inefficiency, sloth, bureaucracy, poor customer dataWeb as an Encompassing Way of LifeWeb = Everything (P.D. to after-sales)Web forces you to focus on what you do bestWebas entrée, at any size, to World’s Best at Everything as next door neighbor
“Supply Chain” 2000:“When Joe Employee at Company X launches his browser, he’s taken to Company X’s personalized home page. He can interact with the entire scope of Company X’s world – customers, other employees, distributors, suppliers, manufacturers, consultants. The browser – that is, the portal – resembles a My Yahoo for Company X and hooks into every network associated with Company X. The real trick is that Joe Employee, business partners and customers don’t have to be in the office. They can log on from a cell phone, Palm Pilot, pager or home office system.”Red Herring (09.2000)
“Ninety percent of what we call ‘management’ consists of making it difficult for people to get things done.”– P.D.
There Are Lawyers … and Then There Are Lawyers: John De Laney/ICMANYTHING TRULY IMPORTANT CAN BE BOILED DOWN TO 1/3RD PAGE.*(*NO SHIT.)
K.I.S.S.: Gordon Bell (VAX daddy): 500/50. Chas. Wang (CA): Behind schedule? Cut least productive 25%.
Systems: Must have. Must hate. / Must design. Must un-design.
“If things seem under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”Mario Andretti
“Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes.”Phil Daniels, Sydney exec
“In the modern military, risk is anathema to rising stars, who cannot afford any slip-ups on their records. ‘Zero defects’ and ‘zero tolerance’ are common bywords.”—Newsweek/09.16.02