Stop The Innovation Theatre with Steve Blank
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In this episode of Defense Unicorns, Join Steve Blank as he shares his experience working across Silicon Valley, the Department of Defense, and beyond. Steve goes into the current state of national security innovation, how he co-created the Department of Defense Hacking for Defense and Department of State Hacking for Diplomacy curricula, and why the DoD needs an innovation doctrine. We hope you enjoy this episode and encourage you to check out Steve at www.steveblank.com and learn from him as we have.
Defense Unicorns, a Podcast, is hosted by Robert Slaughter, Founder, and CEO of Defense Unicorns.
Guests this week include:
Steve Blank is an adjunct professor at Stanford and a co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation. Steve consults for the National Security establishment on innovation methods, processes, policies, and doctrine.
His book The Four Steps to the Epiphany is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He created the curriculum for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. At Stanford, he co-created the Department of Defense Hacking for Defense and Department of State Hacking for Diplomacy curriculums.
His follow-on book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, described a process for turning ideas into scale, and his Harvard Business Review cover story redefined how large organizations can innovate at speed.
Steve’s latest class at Stanford, Technology, Innovation, and Great Power Competition, is providing crucial insight into how technology will shape all the elements of national power.
Highlights from Defense Unicorns, a Podcast:
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
(00:15) Four Steps to the Epiphany
(3:12) Hacking for Defense
(7:35) Connecting civilian populace to the military
(13:23) Silicon Valley, Startups, and the greater Department of Defense
(22:29) Timeline of change
(29:19) Challenges and Potential
(44:11) Innovation Doctrine
(1:02:34) Advice to disruptors
ROB: Steve, the first time I came across your name was several years ago. I had started my first startup while I was still on active duty and working things on the side, and somebody recommended a book by you known as The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I was curious for our listeners if you could give some insights on what that epiphany was.
STEVE: The Four Steps to the Epiphany was based on having done eight startups in Silicon Valley. At least in the 20th century, investors simply asked you to write a business plan. And whether you had the right font and waved your hands in the right direction, you might get money. Then investors basically insisted you execute the plan. We went through a serial process, which was kind of a lot like the requirements in the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) process in the military. Simply put, I gave you the money; now, go build the team, build the product, and execute it. The only problem we’re going to have is whether the building has enough space for the bags of money that were going to come.
Of course, it never worked like that because, as we discovered, no business plan survives first contact with customers. What I realized is that while large companies were executing known data, startups simply had a series of untested hypotheses; they were searching where companies were executing. We had a hundred years’ worth of tools from business schools and management consulting firms on how to build execution processes, stage gates, product management, et cetera. We had almost no tools for thinking about, “How do you deal with a series of unknowns?” The question had never even been asked; perhaps startups and new ventures needed different toolsets.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany was the first book that literally took me three years to get my head around the idea that maybe we need something different, which you could probably explain in 30 seconds today. Which is basically saying there are no facts inside the building, so get the hell outside. Also, what you should be building are minimum viable products — small things to test hypotheses, whether they’re about products, features, or pricing. That is the long answer for what were The Four Steps to the Epiphany. What kick-started essentially 21st-century entrepreneurship is my work, and now someone named Eric Ries and Alexander Osterwalder are at the core of what’s called the Lean Startup, which is these three core tools that entrepreneurs use to figure out “I believe X and Y.” That is, I believe people have this problem or need, and I’d want to jump to building the solution, but maybe I should actually back up a bit for about a couple of seconds and think perhaps I should test whether other people share that problem and what is the right way to solve it?
ROB: It’s been inspiring to me as an entrepreneur, and I get so much out of your work, both in your books and in another thing you do, which is Hacking for Defense. I’d love to hear from you about where Hacking for Defense came from and how that relates to the Four Steps of the Epiphany.
STEVE: I mentioned that my work, Eric Rie’s work, and Alexander Osterwalder's work ended up being called a lean startup. We all published books on this stuff, but there was no class to teach it. Here I am teaching entrepreneurship at, at the time, both Berkeley and Columbia universities, though now I’m full-time at Stanford. The capstone class, which is the top class in any university, was still how to write a business plan, even though we were saying that business plans were not very useful for entrepreneurs, and those were the documents that venture capitalists made you write that they never really read, or at least there was nothing to operationalize in them.
I realized we needed a new class. So I created a class at Stanford, which is now in its second decade, called the Lean Launchpad. Six or nine months later, the National Science Foundation (NSF) adopted it and called it I-Corps or the Innovation Corps, which is also now in its second decade. The NSF used I-Corps to train principal investigators and their graduate students and postdocs on how to commercialize science in the United States. That is now the course being taught to do that. It was the exact same class at Stanford, which was teaching you the lean methodologies: What are my hypotheses? I came up with this great idea, and I’m so excited, but who are the customers? What are the right features? How do we find something called product market fit? How do we discover pricing and all the delivery components, et cetera? Then it got adopted by the National Institute of Health and other agencies as well. I stood up a version inside the National Security Agency (NSA) eight years ago called ICorps at NSA; it’s put more people through it than I think the commercial versions. Then the classes took off in multiple universities because I open-sourced the class.
The Hacking for Defense class came from those commercial classes when I met two retired Army colonels. One Pete Newell, who used to run the Army’s rapid equipping force, had just retired and set up a commercial company called BMNT in Palo Alto to do from the outside for the Department of Defense (DOD) what he did for the Army on the inside, which was rapid problem solving and rapid delivery of solutions, which he did on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. And then there’s Colonel Joe Felter, a retired Special Forces colonel now teaching at Stanford, still the senior military person on the Stanford campus. The three of us literally got in a conference room for the first time we met and realized that we all had kind of the same desire to connect the civilian populace to military problems, certainly in research universities and other places where student's only choices of thinking about service might have been Teach for America and other places. Most students were thinking about Facebook and Google at the time as their destinations. We realized that perhaps we could create a mission-driven class while solving serious national security, DOD, and intelligence community (IC) problems and, at the same time, connecting students who never would’ve understood, let alone considered, government service. The reason I told you all about the Lean Methods and the NSF classes is that basically, Hacking for Defense is that exact same class, but instead of students working on their own problems, we go out to the DOD and the intelligence community and solicit scrub down problems that could be worked on by students.
They get to pick from a series of problems that each class offers, and they form teams and then go work on them. Hacking for Defense is now in 60 universities and multiple countries. It’s in the UK and Australia as well. It has also spawned a nonprofit called The Common Mission Project, which collects all the DOD problems and doles them out to all 60 universities.
ROB: You mentioned that you had a desire to connect the civilian populace to military use cases; where did that come from? I’d love to hear more about you and what inspired your focus and mission statement.
STEVE: Well, I served during Vietnam for four years in the Air Force and a year and a half in Southeast Asia. There are two memorable things about my connection to the civilian world when I got out. I remember coming back from Southeast Asia through Travis Air Force Base and rapidly changing out of my uniform because that was not a popular thing to be in. Then, when I did my startups in Silicon Valley, I never mentioned my military career except in my first startup, which was kind of a halfway house. So between my military career and entrepreneurship, it was run by a Ph.D. mathematician named Bill Perry, who would eventually become the Secretary of Defense. But after that, they were all commercial companies, and most of the valley at the time did not have non-ex-military folks (at least at non-military companies if you worked for Lockheed, of course), so it never came up.
Fast forward a quarter of a century, and post-9/11, people started saying, “Thank you for your service.” And I almost fell off my chair. Thank you for my service. Where in the hell were you, like 25 years ago, when that was not something to be proud of? Then I realized that if you hang around long enough, the world kind of goes full circle and that people — certainly post-9/11 — appreciated the value of keeping the country safe and secure. The fact that, as screwed up as some of our policy and civilian decisions have been in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we’re still the best bet for freedom if we want to live an unencumbered life in a dystopian, totalitarian autocracy. This is our best bet so far, and we ought to figure out how to defend it. At the same time, I always believed that.
When I was young, we had the draft, which was when, during the war, you had a lottery number, and you got picked, and you went into service, but there was such a counter-prevailing view that that was a bad thing for the country. They ended that. And I’ve just watched that, without any form of national service, this disconnect between the body populace and military — it’s just the gulf has grown wider every year. And in fact, I believe that the gulf has let our civilian leadership make some pretty bad decisions because there was no skin in the game for most of the country. We’ve developed a professional military class with multiple generations following in service, whereas the rest of the country basically got a free pass. I still believe we ought to have national service — not necessarily the draft but some form of mandatory service for 18-year-olds. Whether it’s education or work in hospitals or somewhere else, the fact that you’re part of something larger is, I think, something that most 18-year-olds tend to look for anyway, whether they join gangs or use social media or something else. I think those are actually substitutes, or the military substitutes for something that, at that age, you’re kind of searching for. In lieu of that, we’ve failed to build a single national identity. In fact, we are basically breaking into tribes.
So with all that, I’ve had a constant belief since getting out of the service that having some type of connection to national interest would be helpful. When I saw the chance to do that with Hacking for Defense, I jumped right at it. And, of course, that intersection of Newell’s work and building probably the most innovative group in the Army, which we’ll talk about later that the DOD tends to kill any innovation organization it stands up just because of the nature of large organizations. But Pete was probably the epitome of innovation and the Army on the battlefield. Joe in Special Forces — I mean, by design, special operators are innovative, or they don’t get to see another day. So that intersection really helped in one way we could deliver. So now we’re touching thousands of students who never would’ve considered some form of service.
ROB: I’d love to hear from you about some of the key things that you’ve learned or that you think stand out in terms of this relationship between Silicon Valley and tech startups and the greater Department of Defense.
STEVE: The whole interest in how Silicon Valley got started, and its relationship with the military started when I used to ask my students, “Who started Silicon Valley?” Some of them might say, “Oh, it was Steve Jobs.” It’s like, Oh yeah, he’s a real old guy — this is when he was alive at the time. “Well, think a little more” “oh, maybe the Intel guys, I don’t know. Who were they?” There were some buildings named after them: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Well, they were even older. “Anybody ever heard of a company called Hewlett-Packard?” There were buildings named after them at Stanford, but very few actually knew who these people were. The real history of Silicon Valley started with a set of entrepreneurs. The first company spun out of Stanford was Paulson Electronics in 1909. The area we now call Silicon Valley made vacuum tubes. Lee De Forest, who invented the triode, started in Palo Alto, which was the basis of basically all vacuum tube amplifiers before we had transistors and chips.
More importantly, during World War II, the US government did something that no other country did. It enlisted civilians to develop the most advanced weapon systems. That sounds insane, even today. Just before the war started, someone named Vanover Bush, who had worked with the Navy but ran engineering at MIT and then the Carnegie Institute and had good connections with President Roosevelt, said to Roosevelt that when World War II comes, it’s gonna be a technology war. Our Army and Navy were not prepared to do that. We had great arsenals that knew how to bend sheet metal — essentially ships and airplanes. But knew nothing about these advanced things like rockets, missiles, physics, radar, and all these other things. His proposal was that civilians ought to be developing those weapons.
Of course, the military laughed hysterically, patted him on the head, and said, “Don’t worry your little head, we’ve got this.” and Roosevelt said, “No. Bush, you own it. Build the advanced weapon systems and Army and Navy will build the planes, subs, and ships”. The radical thing was that they stood up something called the Office of Scientific Research and Development. OSR&D had 19 divisions or organizations, each focused on a separate military weapons application area. Radar was at MIT, electronic intelligence (ELINT) and electronic warfare (EW) was at Harvard, operations research for anti-submarine warfare was at Columbia and Johns Hopkins, rockets was at Caltech. Pre-World War II, no universities received federal funding; that’s not how they funded research and Development (R&D) inside of a university. For the first time ever, during World War II, they poured the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars, in fact, billions across all these research universities, to build these weapon systems. Stanford didn’t get any of this money, except they got $50,000 for teacher training; That’s how much they thought of Stanford’s R&D and Silicon Valley. Except they took the one professor who wrote the textbook on radio engineering at the time, Fred Turman, and made him move to Harvard to run what was called the radio research lab, which had nothing to do with radio research. It was building EW and ELINT for the United States, for the first time, in an industry that never existed.
To make a long story short, Turman built that from zero to 800 people. When the war ends, he comes back to Stanford to do three things. One is to become dean of engineering. Two is that he swore that Stanford would never be left out again for government research and development money. And three, he started building essentially a weapons systems lab inside Stanford University. And this was, by the way, not some anomaly. Every university after World War II said, “Hey, that government money was pretty good. Thank you; can we have more, please?”
When the Cold War broke out during the Korean War, from the 1950s all the way through the Vietnam War, every major research university in the United States had essentially a weapons lab. Not a production lab but an R&D research facility. Whether it was rockets, missiles, spacecraft calculations, or working on intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) reentry vehicles, these were all doled out to different universities. Turman turned Stanford into the center of excellence for electronic warfare and electronic intelligence. So basically, entrepreneurship and innovation in Silicon Valley started with a professor who turned a second-rate engineering school into a powerhouse in microwaves and electronics. And that’s where it would’ve stood except for another guy in World War II named William Shockley. Shockley basically worked on radar bombing training for what was then the Army Air Force. He then went back to Bell Labs, where he was the co-inventor of the transistor. After that, he was recruited to run the DOD’s Weapon System Evaluation Group and was about to take that job when instead, he decided to found a semiconductor company in Mountain View, California, right down the street from Stanford. While Fred Turman thought that it wouldn’t be Silicon Valley, it would be Microwave Valley, another military guy with a military background started the semiconductor business. So, this is a long, shaggy dog story. If there’s any interest, it’s on YouTube as a talk called The Secret History of Silicon Valley. That’s how the DOD and the IC basically founded Silicon Valley, with a ton of government funding.
Simultaneously, the other third leg of this story is that in the 1950s, in the middle of the Cold War, the US decided that strategically we needed intercontinental ballistic missiles, and an airplane company in Burbank, California, named Lockheed (that all they knew how to do was make great planes at the time) decided they wanted a piece of the action. Someone else was building the land-based ballistic missiles. Lockheed bid and won the contract for submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), but they had no space in southern California. So they moved to a place called Sunnyvale in Northern California, in the middle of Silicon Valley, and they set up Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which went from having zero employees in 1956 to having close to 30,000 employees 10 years later. In fact, Lockheed, building the Polaris Poseidon and Trident SLBMs, was the largest employer in Silicon Valley for about 30 years. They also got the contracts, first from the CIA and then from the National Reconnaissance Office, to build the first, second, and some of the third generation of overhead reconnaissance stuff, starting with the Corona, Gambit, and Hexagon programs for the imaging stuff and other signals intelligence (SIGINT) and other interesting payloads for overhead reconnaissance.
None of that was obvious to people who were puttering around with commercial stuff at the time. So, while you had Shockley in the transistor curve going up, building companies like Fairchild and then eventually Intel. Every chip company in Silicon Valley came from Shockley Semiconductor, 65 of them spun out in the next 20 years. At the same time, Lockheed was building up an even more massive workforce for national security, and they kind of evolved in parallel for quite a long time.
ROB: One question that comes to mind when I hear the story, though, is: over time, what changed? Was it just a slow change propagated over years or decades?
STEVE: It’s hard to believe, but in the 1950s, 1960s, and even a good chunk of the 1970s, the most advanced technology was developed and procured for defense needs. The only people who could pay for these early transistors and then early integrated circuits were the Department of Defense and, not the DOD directly, but its subcontractors. For example, the first mass use of integrated circuits — people tend to point to the Apollo guidance systems, but actually, it was the Minuteman II guidance system that basically put Fairchild in business, which was one of the first successful semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley. That happened again in vacuum tubes, transistors, and then integrated circuits. Then people were building air-to-air radars and bombing navigation systems, et cetera. Low power, low heat, or low whatever were incredibly useful for airborne systems. So, being able to turn vacuum tube systems into transistors and then into integrated circuits, they would pay anything. And boy, if you’re a founder and you have a customer who says that — in fact, in my career, I’ve only heard that four times: “We’ll pay anything if you could do X.” Those were four public offerings. Three years later, when you hear something like “we’d pay anything if you could solve that problem,” that’s what advanced technology was doing for the military during the Cold War. So, I tell you all this as background: it was the driver of advanced technology until essentially personal computers.
All of a sudden, when mass markets for electronics came out, the cost drivers for making them cheaper were consumer markets. When PCs were shipping in millions of units rather than the bespoke, exquisite systems that we were building for things in space — missile guidance systems, airborne radars, et cetera — which might have been a good procurement at thousands but typically hundreds, it was the consumer electronics companies. That no longer held true only for hardware; it also held true for software. It didn’t mean that the military companies stopped existing; they were still building exquisite systems, and in fact, I mentioned that my first company in Silicon Valley was this company called ESL. They were building things that are in space or other places today that would still boggle your mind 40 years later. I mean, literally, you’d go, “We did what?” And more importantly, the military would spend dollars on achieving an outcome that no rational commercial company could do. That is, if I wanted to find a signal that was theoretically impossible to find and I threw 40 million dollars of equipment and semiconductors into a configuration that was unimaginable, not only by a commercial company but also by a potential adversary, and then coupled it with the engineering talent of Stanford, MIT, or something else, then yes, those are things today that still the military builds, and their primes and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) could deliver. But for the mass market, that’s how the technology is now being driven by civilian companies.
ROB: One of the topics you bring up is this transition between the DOD being the sole developer and maintainer — really the only customer of these exquisite technologies — and then having to transition to an ideal early adopter type of persona so that way you can integrate this technology that you didn’t necessarily create yourself, yet you could have a strategic advantage by adopting it first. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges you see there and maybe some ideas around potential?
STEVE: Number one is an organizational problem: if you try to stand up disruptive innovation organizations or execution organizations — those that do repeatable processes — you will run into this problem. Innovation organizations always die unless they’re strongly defended by being put into law. So, for example, DARPA exists because it exists in law, but organizations like the Rapid Equipping Force, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, or even the Army’s Future Command all die. They die because most of those leaders have three-year tours. So when it was a hot item for some Secretaries of the Army in one generation, it’s not for the next Secretary of the Army or even the Secretary of Defense.
Defense Innovation Unit is another example; once you pushed DIU down and it was not enshrined in law, we thought of commercial stuff with the DoD as this pain in the ass to OSR and where China has spent close to a trillion dollars. In the last eight years since we punted it to the side, they’ve raised $900 billion in what are called guidance funds. Think of it as the province’s venture capital funds, and the pro province is equivalent to our states, plus they securitized, which is a fancy word for taking public, all their state-owned enterprises and used the money to pour back into advanced avionics and shipyards. And so they basically used private capital as a force multiplier. We have stiff-armed both venture capital and private capital. And the reason why is, again, that no one in the civilian leadership of the DOD has had experience in private capital, venture capital, or innovation. At the same time, Congress lives in a deep-pocketed democracy that is coin-operated. By coin-operated, I mean there’s a whole street in Washington called K Street full of lobbyists. The people who fund the lobbyist are not startups; they are the existing primes. So if you look at the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and who funds their campaigns, it’s the primes. And the prime contractors have not been told that the world has changed. Primes have a role, but I believe that they have a different role and, more importantly, a different business model that they, in the DoD, need to be figuring out.
So here you have an organization that needs to execute. Think of it as the DoD part that executes existing doctrine through existing tools, existing training, existing services, and existing operational concepts, but you have a whole other half of the organization that’s building the future. The DoD has no concept of that. Congress has not basically said, “You guys don’t have a model, so we’re going to create one,” or “You guys need a model, and we’re going to force you to have one.” In lieu of that, what we’ve created is an innovation theater that is inside the DoD. A good number of your listeners are probably part of the hundred-plus DoD incubators, accelerators, initiatives, etc. None of them connected together, or only a few of them did. That doesn’t mean that they’re not useful; they’re useful in shaping culture, but the real test of whether innovation and change are happening in the DOD is to take a look at the Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) and say, “Okay, who are the new names in the last 20 years that’ve been added?” Not even SpaceX and Palantir make that list. Therefore, we’re doing innovation theater. It doesn’t mean SOCOM isn’t getting innovative devices or that we’re not deploying tools X and Y. But if you want to know if a program is real and whether an organization has bought into it, just follow the money, budget, and authority. But we’ve not built the equivalent of our execution doctrines.
My original point was designed to take advantage of private capital and external stuff on top of all the great existing assets we have. Most of the primes can’t get paperwork across the Pentagon for less than a hundred million. But when you need systems that could be incredibly cheap, treatable, disposable, and upgradeable, that’s just not an existing concept. It doesn’t mean they’re not capable, but it requires the DoD’s leadership to have a different mindset from top to bottom and for Congress to get aligned on how to do that. These reforms are hard, and the time to want and need them is not when the first missiles start hitting your bases or ships. For innovators, this is pretty obvious. And for people inside the building, whether it is a five-sided whatever or a building without windows, this is really hard to imagine because they have no experience with it.
In this part of the world and for innovators inside the DOD, this is worse because you could see it, and your leadership might even give you lip service, but then you have to deal with the PPBE or processes designed in the 1960s. Though it was useful in the cult ward when we built all those systems, no one, in fact, figured out, “Well, how are we going to maintain them?” And that’s when we came up with DotMLPF (doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities). When Packard came in as secretary of Defense, we came up with the 5000.1 series, which actually made acquisition times actually sprayer around even more. But, and just as again, I’ll take a sidebar, people who think that we should be working on reforming the PPBE are actually, I believe, on a major fool’s errand.
Commercial companies know how to build and buy billion-dollar things without a process that looks like that. The PBE is the world’s largest cover-your-ass thing, without focusing on speed or urgency. We don’t have to invent procurement; in the commercial world, we know how to do that.
ROB: I’ve heard other people talk about it, but I was curious: are you working on an innovation doctrine guide, or do you know of other people working on it? I’d love to hear you elaborate on what that looks like. Is there already a plan to make something like that? And is that something that you’re involved with?
STEVE: Pete Newell, who ran the rapid equipping force and is now the CEO of BMNT, and I, along with Steve Spear at MIT, who wrote the High-Velocity Edge book, have all been thinking about this notion that we have all these hundreds of innovation activities, but there’s no playbook. There’s no equivalent to doctrine. And if you’re familiar with doctrine, it goes all the way back to high-order concepts: what is the Army? What’s a joint command? All the way down to how we think about intelligence, fires, operations, etc. Then all the way down to TTPs and field manuals, et cetera. We need the same for innovation. How do we think about innovation? How is this connected to deployment? What’s the difference between demos and deployment? By the way, just as a sidebar, most of the innovation groups inside the DOD, and in the commercial world as well, do demos to impress the general and maybe get some more funding. But in fact, if I asked you, “Well, what’s the color of money, and how are you going to get this deployed to the field? And who’s the saboteur?” Most groups just roll their eyes and say, “I don’t even understand the question.” Well, the goal isn’t to get the generals excited; that is a milestone, but the goal is to figure out how to get to deployment.
And an innovation doctrine would actually describe both the needs and the strategy, as well as how innovation works to actually get things done with speed and urgency. This would be the equivalent of a playbook that, instead of having the Navy’s 2035 shipbuilding plan in the Army’s 2040 plan, I’m glad we have that, but I don’t think China and the South China Sea are waiting for those plans. I think they’re going to solve the Taiwan Strait problem certainly way before that. So in an innovation doctrine, some of those things might be, How do we deliver things with speed and urgency using Horizon 1, 2, and 3 activities? Horizon One is: how do we make stuff better than we already have in existing organizations? Horizon two is: how do we repurpose some of the things that we’ve built for X and now we need for Y, like putting harpoons on ships or something else? Horizon three is: how do we do disruptive or breakthrough stuff?
Now, we used to be proud of those, which we called the offset strategies that we did with the Soviet Union. The Cold War people have stopped talking about that because China has done at least five of them to the islands in the South China Sea. Man, that’s a disruptive innovation that’s probably the most expensive one we have to counter, and that required 19th-century dredging ships. That did not require advanced technology; it required dredging ships, and they rolled the dice and hoped we wouldn’t react. But for example, there are asymmetric operations against our carriers with DF-21s and 2026s and their use of hypersonic and glide vehicles. I mean, all of those things are disruptions to existing systems and operational concepts we had put in place. They have basically used offset strategies against us. So what are our versions that we could either quickly deploy or figure out how to get to that don’t require the next two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars? That’s the role of innovators. And it’s not a replacement for the existing long-range programs that we have.
That's the thing about the innovation playbook and the innovation doctrine. That is exactly what you need to create an ambidextrous organization. We have doctrine for the execution half. We are in the theater right now for the innovation half. We essentially need a doctrine that ties those pieces together and explains why they interact. Just like we developed joint doctrine to explain how combatant commands work, it’s not just a service showing up; it’s here’s how you interrelate, and here’s who’s in charge, et cetera. Now we need innovation doctrine to say, How do we play not only internally with new things, but how do we get the whole country integrated in this stuff that just simply doesn’t exist?
The good news is most four-star officers and admirals get this; most innovators on the bottom, whether you’re a captain or an airman, you get it. It’s both the people who’ve been around going, “No, no, that’s not my job, it’s not my MOS,” and “Wait a minute, do I get promoted for this or not? Is this on the promotion board? Is this a question that’s going to be asked on the test, professor?” Or the prime who simply go, “well, that’s not a nerve of financial interest. Why would we be doing that?” And by the way, welcome to capitalism. It’s a good question. No one has gone back to the CFOs of every prime and said, “How do we keep you in business and make you even more money as we reconfigure your business model to deal with this stuff?” That’s all part of an innovation doctrine and playbook. So that’s a long answer to a great question.
ROB: Any recommendations or advice to some of those disruptors that are trying to find a way to add to mission value and mission outcomes when they’re surrounded by a system that obviously makes it very challenging?
STEVE: Well, the higher-order bid means you can make a difference. You can make a change; you can make the country safer and more secure. If we have to fight a war, we’ve failed. We’ve all failed. I mean, the goal is to deter war like we did for the last 75 years by just making the calculus clear to a potential adversary. So we’re depending on all of you to help do that. Some of the dead ends in helping do that are to proselytize new methodologies. It doesn’t mean you need to convert everybody. Just figure out who you need to convert and what you need to deliver to them. Is it a minimum viable product that you are showing somebody — not just a piece of paper but actually a prototype — or is it to find somebody in some command who might want to grab that idea out of your hand and actually say, “Well, we’ll give you money to do that” over the dead body of your leadership?
The other thing is to decide whether you’re an innovator or an entrepreneur and what kind of team you need to actually deploy. What I mean by that is that an innovator is somebody who invents something and loves inventing something. The entrepreneur is maybe your partner who figures out this is a product or that this ought to be deployed everywhere. Then maybe there’s somebody who’s great at working the system. So maybe you have a third team member who says, “No, let me tell you about the color of money; here’s where we could get some O&R money, and here’s where it now needs to be in Newark” or, “Raytheon thinks they’re building this well; why don’t we partner with them?” Or “why don’t we start something and compete with them” So, rather than saying, “Hey, look at this neat demo I have,” you should build a team with the goal of getting this into the hands of a warfighter, a war preventer, or someone.
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