Department of Defense

In Robert Gates, former secretary of defense, and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, Professor Lambright has identified two outstanding government leaders who both led transformation initiatives in their organizations.

Declared wars start and stop, but the conflicts between nations and groups around the world simmer continuously and boil over frequently. Speaking to the Air War College class in 1992, then CIA Director Robert Gates said, “We must expect continuing radical change and upheaval around the world – at times promising, at times frightening – before the form and patterns of a new era settle into place.” Two decades later, it is not entirely clear what the form and patterns of this new century are.

National defense choices can leave a country vulnerable.  Military organizations routinely deal with risk and trade-offs.  But longer-term strategic defense choices—shaped by multiple factors including uncertainty about the future, the pressure of dominant current constituencies, and fiscal constraints that are difficult to “get right.”  Once a conflict begins a new set of options and trades emerge but the uncertainties, the pressure of constituencies and resource constraints remain (even in a national level mobilization).  In the United States, we are currently dealing with strategic choic

Simply put, reverse auctions are auctions that enable sellers to “bid down” prices for their goods and services. The use of reverse auctions has substantially increased since Wyld’s initial report in 2000, albeit at a slower pace than anticipated in the earlier study. This new report contains original research on the potential of reverse auctions as a government cost-saving tool that also saves time and increases transparency.