________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
So, I think the value of what we have now in the Office for Strategic Initiatives is that you
have an absolute buy-in of the Chief of Engineers. I mean, this is his thing. It's not Bill
Robertson's thing. It's Hank Hatch's thing.
He's just not coming to a meeting and then pulling away. We now have a person in Bill
Robertson who's higher up the pecking order and has an access to the Chief that Kathy
Thompson never had. So, instead of working a process of strategic planning, talking about
this and that as possibilities, and developing certain products, we now are developing the
process and the vision and the products--developing the articulation for the Chief to use so
the words are out on the table, then networking behind the scenes to open contacts, to make
things happen, to hit points of influence.
It's much different now and much more active. Planning is not a very active thing. Planners
just keep planning. I mean, it's sort of a truism. Army planners keep planning and planning
and their product is a plan. Operators operate and accomplish the mission.
You get out into our divisions and districts, and our planners for years have turned out
planning product after planning product. When I was in the Ohio River Division there was at
least one district planning chief that every year budgeted the same studies. Just throw another
little bit of money at it, hire a couple of people, and he would keep working, irrespective of
whether the district ever came up with a product.
What a corporation needs in strategic planning is to find and establish a sense of direction
and to follow that direction. Corporate America does that for several reasons: because a
functional mission area goes away and they need a new one, or they've maximized their
talents and they want to move into another area, or they see an opportunity, or they want to
coalesce and find other opportunities because they've outgrown their wealth and are big
enough to expand. Then they move, make decisions, and crank up.
What we in USACE were always doing was talking, but we were never doing in the process
that I described of 10 years ago, in my view. What we have now with the Office for Strategic
Initiatives is an ability to at least work in certain directions.
When I was in the Ohio River Division, the word was, "Yeah, we ought to be the federal
engineer. You guys at the bottom go out and carve out your way of doing it." Well, some
things you can do at the bottom, but to carve out a new mission area really is top team, top
leadership stuff.
So, you don't approach NASA from the bottom, or even the Department of Energy--
although we have, working the Hanfords and the Savannahs and all those other places. If you
really want to carve out a mission area, that is doing the necessary things at the Washington
level, and that means you have to get to influencers and decision makers and essentially get
to the person who's got his hands on the resources.
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