A General Services Administration procurement vehicle for office supplies has saved the agency $200 million and supported small contracting businesses. GSA Chief Acquisition Officer Anne Rung announced the number during the Small Business Administration’s National Small Business Week Phoenix and Procurement Awards ceremony in Washington, the agency said Friday. Small contractors won 13 of 15Read… Read more »
Looking for an overview guide to understanding how the federal government goes about managing the performance of its many goals, missions, and programs? Here it is! The President’s fiscal year 2014 budget was released last week and emphasizes the creation of “a culture of performance improvement.” This is also the theme of a new IBMRead… Read more »
Does it make any sense for the government to think long term? One agency, NASA, developed a 200-year strategic plan, at one point. They engaged futurists and science fiction writers to help develop a plan for interplanetary exploration. Maybe it makes sense for NASA, but what about other agencies? Strategic foresight is not futurist forecasting,Read… Read more »
Solutions come from discussions. Strategic solutions develop from structured discussions. For strategic planning, a facilitator is like the conductor of an orchestra – does not write the music or play the instruments, but does bring it all together for the desired result. The facilitator is an asset to a critical planning session bringing their experienceRead… Read more »
What’s the distinction? A strategic plan is a project, initiated by others – e.g., the CEO, the Board, Department Head – with some input from the originator but little participation. Planning strategically is a team project, initiated by the leader of the team, with the leader’s input and participation. First thing to determine for eitherRead… Read more »
So by now most of you are aware of the incident that occurred at the US Embassy in Benghazi on September 11th 2012. An independent panel was established by the U.S. Government to further investigate how the attack occurred, how it was handled, and what can be done to prevent such future issues from takingRead… Read more »
2013 is literally around the corner. The topic of goals and objectives arises frequently this time of year. Many organizations (and individuals) have begun to update their strategies and create new goals for the New Year, have you? Hopefully you have, and if you haven’t, well – you may want to add it to yourRead… Read more »
By Tom Kuhn, PhD and Fellow, DAWIA III from Integrity Matters blog For a better part of twelve years the federal budget has been pretty ample and programs were free to operate in a much more flexible environment. “Supplemental” allotments of funding were in large supply at the Department of Defense (DoD). Then the faucetRead… Read more »
A History of Entrepreneurship As someone who grew up with entrepreneurial parents, I can say without hesitation that there is no job experience that can completely compare with the rewards and perils of such a career path. Although many would prefer to be employed, even employed by large or in the past, bureaucratic organizations, manyRead… Read more »
Way back in the early 1990s during my undergraduate business studies, we began learning about various predicted changes that were going to occur in the structure of leadership throughout corporate America, and all organizations. Sixteen years later in graduate school, I was surprised at the universal nature of most of our experiences: the majority ifRead… Read more »