Entrenched Pentagon Procurement Culture Leads to MiscommunicationAugust 05, 2010
 There was some confusion recently about whether the U.S. Defense Department's push to cut costs using new procurement strategies and policies, would affect new and existing weapons programs, or simply new programs. That matter is now settled. Ashton Carter, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, said his office would release the new acquisition guidelines in September and that they will address both kinds of programs. "We are looking at programs that are ongoing and have projected costs, and asking if there are ways that can bring down costs in the program and bring down projections of what [those efforts] are going to cost," Carter told Defense News. Carter comments clarified those made earlier by Brett Lambert, the Pentagon's industrial affairs chief, who apparently was mistaken when he said that the cost-cutting measures would not affect existing weapons programs. Such miscommunications are to be expected at the Pentagon given the decades-old culture of institutionalized procurement. In order to make a sustainable change, the norms and values of the workplace have to be reshaped, says Lawrence Gelburd, a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Wharton. Look back at IBM in the early 1990s, says Gelburd, when the company was grappling with changes in the technological landscape by mistakenly retaining a business approach that had worked when the company was a dominant force. Louis Gerstner took over IBM and remade its corporate culture before fully implementing his new business strategies. "It wasn't just IBM's technology that was the problem. The company's corporate culture was completely antithetical to what it needed to be," said Gelburd. "If Gerstner had not changed the IBM culture and just told them about his strategy to shift to software services, they would never have followed him." DoD photo by R. D. Ward. (Released) |
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