Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

CHAPTER 3LEADING THE HUMAN DIMENSIONOut of a Legacy of Failure 1Col. G.I. Wilson (U.S. Marine Corps, ret.)and Maj. Donald Vandergriff (U.S. Army, ret.)“Take away my people, but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on the factoryfloors. Take away my factories, but leave my people, and soon we will have a newand better factory.” – Andrew Carnegie 2Summary: A Legacy of FailureThe end of the Cold War brought changes to our national defense strategy and forcestructure. Yet, we remain hobbled by an archaic and dysfunctional personnel systemthat fails to recognize the new realities of leading our human resources. The mostserious of these realities is that the demands on our active duty, reserves and retiredrecall personnel differ greatly from those of the past. Institutional failures are abundantin the management of military human resources.Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch’s book, “Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy ofFailure in War,” describes three kinds of institutional failures: failure to learn, failureto adapt and failure to anticipate. This chapter contends that the military legacy ofhuman resource failure encompasses all three types by incorporating flawed mentalconstructs – including lack of imagination, faulty assumptions and analysis paralysis –compounded by lack of risk awareness, preference for the status quo and organizationalfactors such as institutional-think, “turf” battles and bureaucratic arrogance.All large organizations have similar needs for managing their human resources.Therefore, DOD’s legacy of human resource failures can legitimately be evaluatedfrom a business perspective. For example, a recent economics conference conductedby The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., to ascertain whether Americanindustry could raise productivity by changing the way it pays its employees reachedthe conclusion that productivity may be boosted more by changing the way workersare treated than by changing the way they are paid. 3 In line with that finding,the late Peter F. Drucker, perhaps still the most respected writer on leadership andmanagement in the United States, concluded “most of our assumptions about business,technology and organizations are at least 50 years old. 4 They have outlived theirtime.” Drucker went on to identify a number of personnel management assumptionsthat are no longer valid:• There is only one right way to manage people.