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It’s clear that he approaches acquisition improvement from the methodical, problem-solving perspective of an engineer, but also from the thoughtfully considered perspective of a professor urging his students to think outside the box. He understands that acquisition is “full of complexity, it’s full of difficult and tough problems to solve,” as he said in his keynote. Tat’s largely because, in his view, DOD does so many different things with so many different variables that there is no single right answer, no textbook formula. Acquisition programs have to be tailored to the product being acquired, and the managers of those pro- grams have to think along those lines.
Although Kendall is far too much the lawyer and diplomat to say so, he can leave a listener with the distinct impression that he thinks that “our board of directors, the Congress,” is to some degree wasting its time with acquisition reform, if not just plain getting in the way.
During his keynote, he said that Sen. John McCain, R–Ariz., and former Sen. Carl Levin, D–Mich., before he retired from the Senate in 2015, “asked for inputs from a lot of people on the acquisition system and how to make it better. One of the things I said was, ‘Stop writing rules.’ ” Te system, and the systems it procures, are just too complex for Congress to try to micro- manage them, Kendall said. “We do a huge variety of different things. Sometimes we are going to take a lot of risk because the
LATEST AND GREATEST — BUT IS IT ENOUGH?
Kendall tours the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., in February, reviewing the Navy’s latest research in new weapon technologies with Dr. Thomas A. Mehlhorn, center, superintendent of the Plasma Physics Division, and Dr. John Montgomery, director of research. The United States no longer enjoys the technological superiority that it had in the 1950s, ‘70s and ‘90s, and Kendall puts a high priority on the third offset as a way to restore that superiority. (Photo by James Marshall, NRL)
urgency is high and we really want to go fast and we don’t mind wasting money along the way. Other times, we want to take a more deliberate process because you want to get a better product and be sure of that.”
Te BBP initiatives are the means to that end. For Kendall, improving acquisition is akin to continuous quality improve- ment in manufacturing. “You attack the most common, important defects first, and you solve those first,” he said. “Ten you … move on to the next round of things.” Do that enough, and processes get streamlined and become more efficient.
Kendall said he’d been asked more than once “whether I was more of a revolutionary or evolutionary leader, and I thought about that—and the answer was, ‘I’m more evolutionary, but I’m going to stick around until I’m revolutionary by the time I’m done.’ Tat’s what I’ve tried to do.” Taken as a whole, he said,
“in a way, that’s reform, but it’s the accumulation of a lot of little things by an awful lot of people that lead to large-scale improve- ment by the time you’re done.”
A GUIDE TO HELP YOU THINK Te April 24, 2013, implementation directive accompanying BBP 2.0 is tagged, “A Guide to Help You Tink,” which is a theme Kendall comes back to again and again: Tink.
ASC.ARMY.MIL
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BBP 3.0
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