...it's in a global security context or an industry context, you're striving for creativity, innovation, and improvement. If not, then you find yourself as a strategic fixed target. The emphasis here is to create an organization that focuses on learning--that is, outlearning your competition and being able to turn that into action as a source of your competitive advantage.

Transformation is, first and foremost, about grand strategy. And we define strategy as selecting a competitive space and then facilitating the creation of the processes, the organizations, the capabilities, and forms of policies that influence the scope, pace, and intensity of the competition in that space. So it's very much about helping create the future that we would all like and trying to understand the emerging strategic context, the emerging threat context, acknowledging the opportunities, and combining those in ways that produce competitive advantage. It's similar to industry, which is not satisfied with chasing the emerging market because they want to create the next market. In a sense, that is the kind of thinking that we try to do in this office: to create some new logic for those people who actually own the decisions in building within the requirements process, the acquisition process, the personnel management process, and the budgetary planning processes. In essence, that's a huge focal point of this office: to be a catalyst, a focal point, in those kinds of efforts.

JFQ: How has transformation changed from when Secretary Rumsfeld first established the office, when network-centric warfare and the revolution in military affairs were terms we were talking about so frequently?

Pudas: It's changed significantly. If you go back to the beginning, when we first started talking about transformation as one of the key priorities, it was not well understood. If you ask senior leaders about transformation now, you'll get a whole different dialogue than you got 4 years ago. It is now better understood why we need to do this, and the effort is in implementing some of these new initiatives using some of the new logic and metrics that people have developed in the last 3 or 4 years. This whole notion, for example, of network-centric operations is no longer a debate. Debate is now focused on how we implement it, what is the best way to resource it, and what is the return on investment.

JFQ: People are creatures of habit. How do you make their habit transformation?

Pudas: One of the things the office has done is to try to focus on those levers that get at organizational culture. We assert or we advocate the view that education is a really big deal for our key players. We train...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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