THINK, EXECUTE, IMPROVE


BETTER BUYING POWER PRINCIPLES


Kendall began his keynote at the third U.S. Army Innovation Summit with a list of better buying power principles. “I kept getting briefings from people who would tell me, ‘Sir, I’m doing better buying power here. I’m following Better Buying Power principles,’ “ he said. “And because I’d never put out any better buying power principles, I thought that was interest- ing, and I’d ask them what they were.


“Most of the time, people didn’t know. But they were following them. They were sure they were following them. And most of the time they probably were. But I thought it might be useful to actually write some down.”


At the very top of the list, he said, is the importance of people. Although that’s not at the top of the list of Better Buying Power initiatives “for a variety of historical reasons,” it tops of the list of principles, because that’s where people belong.


Principle 1: People matter most; we can never be too professional or too competent.


Principle 2: Data should drive policy.


Principle 3: Critical thinking is necessary for success; fixed rules are too constraining.


Principle 4: Controlling life cycle cost is one of our jobs; staying on budget isn’t enough.


Principle 5: Continuous improvement will be more effective than radical change.


Principle 6: Incentives work—we get what we reward.


Principle 7: Competition, and the threat of competition, is the most effective incentive.


Principle 8: Defense acquisition is a team sport.


Principle 9: Our technological superiority is at risk, and we must respond.


Principle 10: We should have the courage to challenge bad policy.


In his keynote at the summit, he said, “In my 45-odd years in the military and defense acquisition, I have lived through a lot of cycles of what’s called, usually, acquisition reform.” While it has taken on different flavors over the years, he said, “generally speaking, fads have not worked.”


“I will tell this community and any other community that there is no magic that’s going to remarkably transform acquisition. What it takes to make things better is professional people, hard work and a willingness to challenge assumptions and a willing- ness to go back and look at the data and understand what’s really happening. It’s a very difficult, incremental process.”


BBP is acquisition reform at the operational level, and the kind of improvement that Kendall and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, his boss and predecessor as USD(AT&L), most want to see in order to meet the challenges that DOD faces. Congress, he said, keeps wanting “to replay the same experiments.”


But that misses the point. “I think the basics about how to do a program are understood,” he said. “What we need to do is just hone our craft and become better at it. So, what we’ve been doing for the past several years, in the Better Buying Power ini- tiatives in particular, is to address a number of areas that we thought we could improve, learn from that experience and then kind of move on to the next round of things.” Improve- ment has emerged from that work and from other experiences, Kendall said.


TAILOR AND CHALLENGE Like the engineer he is, rather than going for magic solutions, Kendall looks at the massive layers of rules that make up the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation as obstacles for which it is possible to engineer solutions. In that context, fixed rules are too constraining, he believes.


One of the methods he wants “my acquisition people” to use in all programs is tailoring. What he means by that is simple. It comes back again to “think,” he said in the interview. “I empha- sized tailoring—I wrote it myself—in [DOD Instruction] 5000.02 [Operation of the Defense Acquisition System] exten- sively. I must have put the word in there 150 times.” (A search of the document turned up slightly fewer than 50 appearances.) In reading about tailoring in 5000.02 and listening to Kendall, it seems clear that what he wants program managers to do is fig- ure out how to make the rules work in their favor, not to follow them without thinking. For Kendall, the key is critical thinking.


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Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2016


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