What is portfolio management and how can it speed up defense tech insertion
Jerry McGinn and I joined Vago Muradian on the Defense and Aerospace report to discuss our recent webinar event with James Ruocco, Katie Wheelbarger, and […]
defense acquisition
Founder vs. Inheritance and other deep problems of DoD innovation
Here are some slices from an epic podcast with Balaji Srinivasan and Lex Fridman: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA. The US […]
Has the bureaucratization of knowledge made government less effective?
Here’s an excerpt from Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Walter Russell Mead on American Foreign Policy. Tyler asks whether the State Department or the CIA understand […]
Venture Capital takes advantage of power-law distribution, should the Department of Defense?
Here is venture investor Steve Kim on data-driven insights from the Venture Stories podcast. We model that 30% of the startups that we invest in […]
In the economics of acquisition, who is in the best place to make choices?
Economist Arnold Kling recounts an argument from Milton Friedman about whether people make rational decisions on behalf of other people: If you buy a coat […]
Time is running out for DoD with Silicon Valley
To those at Reagan National Defense Forum #RNDF, if there’s one BLUF you take away from the weekend, you should know: Time is running out […]
The subjectivity of project planning
If I think of myself as an engineer, some of my time is debugging and thinking about what to write. But [the 10x engineer] would […]
How Jeff Bezos created a business culture of mission command by replacing PowerPoint with narratives
I’d start by going back in time and place you where Jeff Bezos was when all entrepreneurs started out. At the beginning, Jeff worked out […]
Podcast: How innovation really works with Anne Marie Knott
Anne Marie Knott joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss her book How Innovation Really Works. She is a professor teaching strategy and […]
What is the difference between JADC2 and Mosaic Warfare?
I would argue that JADC2 is about giving the warfighter more options. What we’re trying to do with mosaic is do that with speed. The […]
Futurist and traditionalist views of national security
… the leaders and thinkers of this futurist camp have built a consensus that victory in great-power competition, especially between China and the United States, […]
The nature vs nurture debate for defense program planning
There is an interesting story about a single crayfish that managed to reproduce asexually creating offspring with the exact same genetics. The offspring, called marmorkrebs, […]
DoD’s fixation on cost stifles its ability to innovate
Accounting scholars Baruch Lev and Feng Gu found that the value of tangible assets and earnings explained more than 80% of companies’ value when entering […]
Rich-contextual capitalism and blockchain transparency
I am of the perspective that what we currently have is information-poor capitalism. We all agree that markets are really good at making decisions, but […]
Packard on workforce training
In most cases, it still is necessary for a project manager to get a decision by making his recommendations through several layers of hierarchy in […]