Mission Acceleration and Ingenuity in Defense with Pete Newell

[00:00:00] Pete Newell: you have to keep an open mind, you have to engage people, you have to be curious, you have to do discovery, you have to do analysis, and that analysis turns into facts that will lead you down the right pathway. And once you're there, you can actually solve a problem fairly quickly. 

[00:00:35] Ryan Connell: Hello, this is Ryan Connell with the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. Joined today with Pete Newell. Pete, how you doing?

[00:00:41] Pete Newell: Yeah, I'm doing great.

[00:00:43] Ryan Connell: Awesome. Hey, thanks for being here. Pete, I'll just turn it over to you to do a self introduction. 

[00:00:47] Pete Newell: Hi. I'm Pete Newell. I'm a retired army officer turned entrepreneur who, lost a company, you know, when I left the military, I think 11 years ago now, that is, um, focused on understanding the problems of our government. You know, helping build the networks of people and processes necessary to solve those things because we do that, we have really taken the idea of entrepreneurship all the way inside what we call mission acceleration.

A lot of people would talk about is innovation, but we actually talk about what the result of innovation is, which is really how do you accelerate the accomplishment of an organization's missions. I'm also an investor, um, I have, a whole slew of other things that I've worked on over the years that are just kind of spun off from BMNT, uh, I am also the co author of Hacking for Defense, which is the,academic course that we use to, to actually teach entrepreneurship to young men and women who want to work in public service.

[00:01:53] Ryan Connell: Awesome. Appreciate it. Uh, yeah, let's get into hacking for defense. So, uh, I'm a little familiar, but, it's a course or is it a series of courses or what is it?

[00:02:02] Pete Newell: Um, today is a course, it will soon be a series of course, I'm glad you asked that, Hacking for Defense really started out as, I'll call it a failed experiment, which an experiment that went wildly well back in 2015, but, one of the, I guess the problem we were asked to prove for a government client was this, you know, can we prove there's a way to get Silicon Valley engaged in a conversation with DoD about something that's important to DoD and by engaged, I mean, people showing up and doing things and talking and mixing, and I knew from my time as the former director of the Army's Rapid Equipment Force that, problems are like fish bait. When you throw problems into Silicon Valley, you get people to talk to you.

So, you know, the answer was, yes, I can do that. We will pull out a problem, which, you know, we're still trying to solve today. And that's the, um, supply chain problem in the Pacific. So we went through this, this process of, bringing a bunch of Stanford students together during spring break. And we actually hired them.

And put them on teams and gave them a problem and said, you know, their first task is we want you to rewrite this problem so that it makes sense to people that get rid of all the jargon and the acronyms and the other things that just make it as simple as you possibly can. And then we want you to go find people in Silicon Valley who are working on things like this.

We want you to recruit them to come back and wants to rewrite the problem after that. So, yeah. It's not just a government problem, but the problem reflects both the government's challenges and the commercial industry's challenges. And at the end of this, you're going to, you're going to pitch your problem statement at one of the managing partners of the BC firms on Sand Hill.

And, you know, that was the goal. We can prove we can do this. We get people to come in and, it was amazing. In fact, the folks from Sand Hill, the venture capital folks, they said, when are you going to do this again? I got tons of companies and this is the best paragraph somebody's ever handed me that gives us some kind of direction that makes sense to us why we would work with defense.

We were doing the outbrief with,━ I say this, I met Steve Blank in the middle of doing this.and I'd never heard of Steve Blank. I didn't know he was, um, he showed up in my office for, uh, an intro because one of the students we were working with was taking his lane launchpad class. And, Steve came in for what was supposed to be a 20 minute coffee and left four and a half hours later. Steve and I got the talking on, you know, our walls were painted with dry erase paint and Steve was giving me the history of lean and how lean works and customer discovery and he was drawing on the wall and I was drawing how we did problem sourcing curation for the battlefield. Um, and how we generated solutions through the rapid equipping force and, you know, days, not weeks and months.

And when we get done, the hieroglyphics were identical. We were literally doing the same work, we just talked about it differently. Um, Steve, to his credit, as you're walking out the door, you know, said, you know, I don't know what you're doing after this, but we're going to take everything we just talked about and we're going to figure out how to do this for the government.

Flash forward a couple of weeks and we're now doing an outbrief of this project and the government clients there. Um, there's some mentors and advisors who were former, you know, Assistant SecDefs from the Pentagon and there's Bill Perry.who, who obviously is a former SecDef and we got talking, got through talking about this thing and Bill looked at it and said, this is absolutely amazing.

how are you going to keep doing this? You know, he looked at it and said, you know, fortunately we used Stanford students on spring break and during the semester, students are not reliable. To do anything, um, I had a kid stand up in the back of the room and say, Hey, wait a minute, if this had been a class at Stanford, I would have taken it.

Bill Perry looked at Steve Blank. I didn't realize that Steve had worked for Bill Perry at ESL, you know, years and years ago. And it was like they had never, they were still the boss. Bill, he looks at Steve and says, you guys are going to create a class. Then we're going to call it acting for defense. Bill Perry gets credit for naming the course.

It took us less than nine months to write the course curriculum and convince Stanford to let us teach the course. And I, if you have listeners that have every experience working with academia, nine months is light speed.

[00:06:26] Ryan Connell: Yeah. 

[00:06:26] Pete Newell: Normally, if you're going to teach a new course at a university, it takes three years to get it done.

Um, we were fortunate that Tom Byers, he was the faculty, chair of the Stanford Venture Technology Program, and he was also a Manufacturing Science and Engineering professor.Tom gave us a course number, and we just rewrote the course. So we launched the first Hacking for Defense class. With the premise of we're going to recruit problems from the government, not knowing that we would ever be able to get the government to give us problems because you run into classification problems and you get, you know, attention deficit problems.

And, I was able to, um, just using the network that I had, you know, worked with the past, get. People to work with my, for the most part from the first course, I wrote all the problems and then I took them to people and said, would you sponsor the problem? Because it reflects you. And he said, Oh, yeah, that's great.

What do I gotta do?we didn't know that Stanford students would actually take the course. Now, this is in the middle with, you know, the NSA Silicon Valley thing going on. You know, and everybody said, well, you know, Silicon Valley is anti government, anti defense. And it's not true. In fact, Stanford of all places, one of the most conservative places I've ever been when it comes to defense missions.

when we opened up the class for registration, man, we can only take, um, 32 students in the class. The goal was to have students come together and form teams and select a problem. And we wanted a multifunctional team with the right talent, you know, computer science and MBAs and nurses and biologists. We didn't care as long as it was a diverse team that had the ability to actually act like a startup.

And the goal was for them to just take a problem and actually come into the course and work to solve the problem. And we didn't know if the Stanford students would take it. And we were surprised there were 190 students who showed up 

for the information sessions to get into a course that only sat 32. I think that first year we could eight teams.

We had, I think, 14 actually formally come in and apply to get into the course. we took applications for the course, just, just like you would for, um, you know, somebody pitching you for a new company. So the, you know, the course is a little different. It's a flipped classroom, which means we don't do any lecturing.

The learning is done by the students as they get out and do customer discovery and learn about the problem they're trying to solve. And then learn about the ecosystem around the problem, and then learn about what the pathways are, why which they might solve it, and then learn about the government and the client and all that stuff.

before we taught the first class, we had other universities come to us and, and say, you know, we want to teach this course as well, so, how do we do that? We begged off and said, listen, we're going to teach the first course at Stanford and we're going to see how it goes. And then we'll, we'll talk about what happens afterward.

The first course was amazing. You know, we had. Eight teams, three of those teams turned into companies, one of which is Capella Space, which, you know, by this point has raised, you know, half a billion dollars. you know, incidentally, the, the team from Capella, they came to us with an idea for the tech and we essentially wrote a problem for them.

Steve Buto and I, sitting on either side of Payam, said he had a classroom one day, you know, wrote the problem for them and brought them into the class. you know, flash forward a couple of years, you know, we expanded that course. I think it's been taught in over 60 universities in the United States.

We generally support, through incident defense innovation unit, 20 universities a year on the U S through them. We support another 10 through the common mission project, which is the nonprofit that we stood up to do. to actually run the academic platform. we get, you know, donor money. BM& T actually donates part of its profits to the non profit.

Lockheed Martin does more with Grumman and some other companies donate money to the common mission project which allows them to extend The, um, access to non traditional universities and other folks that actually teach this course.Eventually, uh, I met a young woman who was on the section, 809 commission, uh, as a senior researcher and turned out she was, a dual citizen, you know, Britain, U.

S. And she made it her, her life project to go back to the UK and launch hacking for defense. so Allie Hawks, now Allie Searby went back to the UK and launched it. Um, In the UK, it is, it is not just taught in universities, but it is also part of the professional military education program for the defense college.

So if you're a, military officer in the UK and you go to what we call a war college, they actually can get a master's degree in national security, innovation and entrepreneurship. The capstone of which is hacking for defense. is taught at Sandhurst, uh, and here this year, there are some, charter high schools that are launching, we're hoping to launch a similar course, but, all of it is focused on, entrepreneurship and national public service.

So we got past defense and, you know, we've done defense. we run one for,diplomacy for the State Department.we are running courses for Homeland Security this year.I know that we have run some sustainment, and climate stuff in the UK and a number of other places. At this point we're, we're having conversations with, Swedes, uh, Finns, the Danes, the Dutch.

Uh, Taiwan, uh, Chile, um, Australia is kind of off and on, but there are a number of other countries that, that want to launch hacking for defense.it's a really long answer to the question, but I, I'll say that at the end, we built the course in order to introduce young men and women to the really nasty, hard challenges that.

Come from national public service and to get them excited about working on those things while also bringing the problems of the government to light. And giving a different set of eyes to look at them. You know, one of the things we learned in the process was, you know, we're 11 years in and I can't tell you how many problems we looked at.

It's just thousands of problems at this point. Only 001 percent ever survived the course in their original form. Which means most of the problems we think we're working on are generally wrong. And it's not until we start to solve them that we realize what the actual problem was and start to make changes to actually work on the right thing.

So that's, that's one of the beautiful lessons that the course teaches people is you have to keep an open mind, you have to engage people, you have to be curious, you have to do discovery, you have to do analysis, and that analysis turns into facts that will lead you down the right pathway. And once you're there, you can actually solve a problem fairly quickly.

I'll stop there, Ryan. That's a really long answer.

[00:13:26] Ryan Connell: That was great. I appreciate that. And it's super impressive. Uh, 11 years in, you know, you mentioned something about, accelerating the accomplishment of an organization's mission. you mentioned the first, specifically, I think the first year three teams went on to make businesses. I assume those numbers are staggeringly higher now that we're 11 years in.

[00:13:46] Pete Newell: Yeah, we're, I think, um, 68, companies now. Um, of which I would say maybe a dozen, maybe 15 are really viable who've done well. we've got some really cool space companies that came out of Stanford's class this year. I still teach the course by the way, Steve and I and Joe Feltler and Jeff Decker and Steve Weinstein teach the Stanford course every, every spring quarter, simply because we learn so much from the students.

It's exhausting, but we learn so much. Um,the teams that come out of, these universities are particularly, here's what I would say, they are the world's expert in that problem for a period of time. Whether they start another company or whether they simply go back and engage with a sponsor and help them do something.

Now fully, I don't want to say it, 60 or 70 percent of the students that take this course stay engaged with a problem sponsor afterward. And continue to do something with them regardless of where they go. So we, we have alumni that are in companies all over the world that, it's fascinating that when we asked one of them for help with something, you know, generally the answer is always yes.

And they're right there, you know, ready to help, whether it's a student team or a course or an instructor or somebody else. It's, it has created this absolutely amazing network of people that are really, truly focused on helping one another.

[00:15:09] Ryan Connell: Yeah, that's incredible. I'm curious. Cause You're not the first person to come on the defense Mavericks podcast and talk about, you know, utilizing college students. obviously you're far beyond anything from a scale standpoint, but I'm curious, like, do you think that's related to, generational or do you think it's, they're green to the problem and they don't really understand the barriers that the, those that are working, already have built in, or is there a different reason?

[00:15:32] Pete Newell: um, you know, from my own perspective, I took over the Army's Rapid Equipment Force and I knew absolutely nothing about acquisition, science, technology, how money worked, the government. The only thing that I knew really well is I knew the problems in the battlefield and I had a fantastic network.

of people on the battlefield who would talk to me. the benefit of that was I didn't have any bad habits. I wasn't afraid of anything because I wasn't educated, which means I questioned rules. Cause I just, I didn't accept the rules simply because, well, that's new. think the beauty of students is that they aren't.

hindered by,the history of how things have always been done. It's a fresh, eye fresh face, fresh mind, fresh ideas.the students, and here's why they take the course that there was a Stanford student that, you know, came to us afterward and said, listen, I've been, you know, some of the, there are students that go to Stanford and don't, they start.

That's freshmen and they leave as PhDs. They're there for eight or nine years. This is one of those guys. And he said, listen, I've been here for eight years and this is the hardest course I have ever taken at Stanford. He said, it's also the most professional awarding. And he said, the reason is this is the first course I've ever taken that allowed me to work on a real problem with real people using everything I had ever learned in the school that actually produced real experience for me. the incentive for the students is that experience. Students take the course because it's real, real problem, real people, real opportunity, real education, that in many cases helps them get a real job.and they're able to work on something they're passionate about and learn some things. A lot of them will take it and learn that, that they get another student came to me and goes, you know, the one thing I know for sure coming out of this class is I'm not an entrepreneur. I don't like risk. I like things because I'm a better person because I understand how to, and I can work on a startup, I'm never going to found one. I just, I don't have that in me.and that's probably true of, you know, 60 or 70%. But all of them will come back and say the skills that we used and learned in terms of how to do customer discovery, how to do an interview, how to write a hypothesis, how to create a test of a hypothesis, how to gather data and how to do analysis to actually help us make decisions.

Here's where that fail fast thing comes in. How do you write a hypothesis that stretches you so far that it is going to come back as a failure, which helps you learn what's right. That, that's not normal. And, and the way we teach people in the government, that's kind of the antithesis of how you get promoted.

[00:18:18] Ryan Connell: Yeah, that's incredible. Um, I. I wrote down some things that you said just now about, not accepting the rules and, uh, constantly trying to challenge the rules that exist. I'm going to kind of shift gears on you a little bit. I think you recently wrote a piece about, Ukraine and some lessons learned from Ukraine.

Uh, do you want to get into that a little bit?

[00:18:37] Pete Newell: Yeah, I can. I think, um, I started way early when Ukraine first started. And the idea that the battlefield, here's the first premise, the battlefield changes so fast. There isn't about how good the piece of kit you put on the battlefield is, as much as it is about how fast you learn how to adapt and adopt.

And it's all about this idea of speed. The idea that you can achieve technical dominance over somebody is fleeting. You can achieve it just so long as somebody whacks you off the toadstool. So the winner of the battlefield is not the person who fires the first bullet or even wins the first battle. The winner is going to be the person who changes the fastest.

Now, sadly, it's usually the loser who has the incentive to change the fastest. So if you look at the Ukrainians facing the Russians, they have their backs to the wall, and they have the most incentive to learn the fastest and apply those lessons on the battlefield. And all I could, I don't want to say look at the Russians and say, you have no idea what's about to happen to you.

Because these people are going to throw out all the rules, they're going to find tech, they're going to, adopt it, and then they're immediately going to start adapting it to the circumstances they're in. And that cycle of adaptation is not going to slow down, it's just going to get faster. We talked a lot about OODA loops, you know, going back to, Boyd's rules about, how you, observe, orient, decide, and act.

And the fact that if you can get inside somebody's OODA loop and completely disrupt them, they will never catch up with you. Even though they are superior tech, they're superior formations, more people, whatever else. So, this idea of mission acceleration is really tied to the concept of getting inside your protagonist's OODA loop and staying there, and not allowing them to get inside yours.

And I don't care what technology, or what battlefield you're on, you have to be able to do that. Now, the challenge is, and unfortunately most of the discussions about innovation are largely about how we buy things. Because obviously if we buy things faster, we can solve the problem, right? Except you have to back up and remember what I said about us constantly getting our problems right.

We, in the past, have perfected the ability to perfectly solve the wrong problem or perfectly solve the right problem too late. Half, if not 80 percent of the battle really happens on the front lines, not just asking people what's wrong or what do they need, but actually being able to look at the fight, look over the shoulder of the people in the front lines and anticipate what's going to happen next.

A new tech to put on the battlefield, you have to anticipate how that's going to be adapted. How is the enemy going to adapt to it? And you have to start working for options on how you're going to get, what's next? But without doing that. You're, you're stuck to, here's a point insertion, here's a point insertion, here's a point insertion.

It's slow, it's stodgy, and quite frankly, in the 21st century, it's not going to work. Look at the Ukraine, and we have watched it play out over several years, where the technologies are constantly changing, and even the Russians are starting to pick it up, as you start to look at how fast things are being jammed, which they've always been really good at.

Now we're trying to figure out is, is how do you jam the jammers? Or, or how do you use Dormant Explorers to figure out what frequencies are being jammed, so we can figure out what frequencies aren't being jammed, so we can use them. That's a constant cycle of adaptation, which defies the concept of a program record.

[00:22:13] Ryan Connell: Yeah, you know, you got something in my head, right? There was a story that broke months ago at this point with, uh, A bunch of poles and cell phones taped to them or, you know, attached to them to help detect Uh, I think it was cots drones kind of inbound and all I thought of when I read that article is gosh if this was us We would have started a program on record It would be something that would be launched in four years or five years if we're lucky 

[00:22:37] Pete Newell: I, I can give you example after example of, places where we do that. in some cases it worked out really well. You know, in Afghanistan, at one point, we were trying to pick up, you know, the ICOM shadow and GLOK ICOM cell networks. And there was a system that could do that, that the NSA had. And unfortunately, the NSA said, well, you've got to have a top secret clinician in order to operate the system.

And there are only so many of these, so they don't We got a small team to do this. And some young, um, intel officer, I think it was at Fort Brom, he and a couple of buddies got together and said, no way, man, we can build our own. Went to Radio Shack, bought a bunch of parts, put it together, took the system to the National Training Center and it worked like a charm.

So they built like 10 more and took them to Afghanistan. The next thing you know, we got a program, a record for proliferating these things all over the battlefield. Unfortunately those things are few and far between, some young man went, went way out on, on a limb, his brigade commander went out on a limb, and then somebody else went out on a limb.

It actually said yes to actually trying something and the problem actually gets solved. You know, cell phones on the battlefield were the same one. You know, you know how we got cell phones on the battlefield? I get yelled at by a former boss from the third range of battalion. He was the one star in Afghanistan.

And I was the ref director and I was in Afghanistan talking about his problems. And this is right after a couple of, uh, Navy corpsman had been killed in a friendly fire accident, and Steve Townsend was just immensely frustrated that we got blue force tracking on all the vehicles, but we can't keep track of the people.

Yet he could pick up a cell phone and keep track of all the Afghanis that were on his cell phone network. And he says, I don't understand why it's so hard to keep track of people on the battlefield. I went back and, you know, I was frustrated and talking to a couple of engineers that just happened to be a ref and one was from General Dynamics and one was from Harris, the radio folks.

And the two of them who shouldn't have been talking to each other. I mean, anyway, you know, being engineers that couldn't help, but tell me it's easy. It's to run a cable from the phone to the radio, that special kind of cable.and because it's geolocation data, it'll pass from one way to the next.

And I kind of said, BS, it's no way, it can't be that easy because the army's spent a billion dollars and spent 10 years trying to solve this problem. They laughed and said, we'll come back and see you. And I kind of forgot about it, but about six weeks later, they showed up in our office and the first thing they said is, listen, you can't tell anybody we're doing this.

The least of which is the FA or the FCC I said, but, you know, Buddy's on the other side of Port Belvoir and I'm here, and he's gonna start driving. And sure enough, we're, we're watching this thing go. It's gonna solve the problem. So all I need is this cable, right? Yes. All you need is a cable. And of course, um, one of the companies wanted to charge me 600 bucks apiece for a foot and a half cable.

But we eventually got to the point where we took it to Fort Bliss to, um, you know, one of the early, you know, when they were running all the demonstration stuff at Bliss. I got there and fortunately a friend of mine was the chief of staff of the, innovation command there, but I had to convince him on the three star to actually let me turn it on because the acquisition guy was looking at him and saying, no, it's not allowed to do that,They eventually forced him to let me use it. And then we snuck a guy into a lineup. They were doing a dog and pony show. And general Corelli was going to see all the cool kit. At the last second, we stuck this kid in the line and Corelli got his hands on this thing and looked at it literally in 30 seconds said, Hey, you look at the acquisition guys said, I don't know what you guys are doing, but stop it and do this.

Nine months later, we sent the first brigade kit of, cell phones, Androids to Afghanistan. Um, You know, it's a long story, but the point I make is things like that don't happen with a lot of, without a lot of people taking a risk. And building a network of people around something in order to get it done.

I started it and I inserted myself whenever it started to fall apart. But I had to recruit my buddy who's the chief of staff. I had to recruit a three star. I had to get Damo LB, the radio guys in the Pentagon to quit complaining about something and actually give me radios to test. I had to convince a company to build the cables and come up with a business solution that said, you know, no, you're not going to charge us 600 a piece Something, but we're going to produce these and prove that it's a viable experiment that's not a natural act in a stovepipe organization. People don't take risks like that. They're not given the freedom to cut back and forth.yet. Everything I've talked about is a highly social, experiment. You talk about innovation, but there's largely, you know, our challenges are about science and technology. We have a sociology problem. It's how do we get people to work together, socialize across stovepipes to get them to come together faster and get them to experiment with things and actually produce them.

And then, you know, for the longterm is how do we breed people like that forever?

[00:27:47] Ryan Connell: Yeah. No, absolutely. I love the story. So I appreciate you sharing. I don't have, so I don't have the, the battlefield experience. I've been an acquisition guy forever. So I'm curious now that you've kind of seen both sides of the table, you know, you've shared, I think at least two stories now about what I'll call like innovation by the war fighter on the battlefield.

do you think that's like, are we, are we stuck in this, in this Environment where that's the peak of our innovation or is there a better future where we can get our acquisition, you know, professionals to actually better define the problem and actually go fast. Yeah.

[00:28:23] Pete Newell: So, so I would say is it's not necessarily innovation by the warfighter. I created the memes to, uh, Get more of the warfighters input on what's next and then use my understanding as a warfighter and my understanding of running around. I spent a lot of time at MIT and Boston Robotics and Stanford and companies looking at tech.

So I had a good sense of where things were.there was almost never a place that went and they had a thing that said, okay, buy that, that's going to solve the problem. It was usually, um, you know, for instance, I was at Boston Dynamic for something. And, you know, the, the, the man robot that bought Boston Dynamic, his YouTube video.

You know, way back when, that thing started out as a means to test mop suits. Chemical protection. So this was designed to do, but while I was there, they had this snake robot crawling on the wall and another one that looked like a cockroach. And another one that would jump from the ground or two stories up.

And, and at the time, we were trying to solve a bunch of, problems with access to places you couldn't get to with people. and I started pulling pieces, you know, at that cockroach thing, give me the legs off of that and the body off of this and something else, and cobble that together, that can actually crawl through a sewer pipe and regardless of how it lands, it's going to keep moving. 

the ecosystem we're trying to build, and this is, this is what VMNT does so well, is if you understand the problem, and you understand the implications of the technology affecting the problem, and the timelines that technology is changing on, you're able then use that problem again as bait to build an ecosystem of people and organizations working in that space.

Those people in those organizations will educate you. On the corner of the problem statement and the trajectory of that problem has before the technology times out and it becomes a different problem if you know that and if you understand the acquisition system on how money works and the timing. And the people necessary and have the connections, you can build this really impressive team of people to get something done and you can do it repetitively, but you have to do all of the work, just not a piece of the work.

You have to bring all of that stuff together. we, you know, we spent a lot of time. We took the work that I did at ref that we originally called business intelligence, which was this, how do we gather all this data and then how do we fuse it together so that we constantly have feedback when we need to do something.

we call that innovation operations. Then eventually we start talking about the doctrine for innovation or for mission acceleration. One of them is how do you build these teams of people and what is the data flow, where is the data fused and what do you do with the data that helps you make this a constantly moving cycle?

the organizations that are doing it were actually, I mean, they're light years ahead. Of some of the others out there because they've broken a lot of the barriers between stovepipes and they understand the value of, battlefield feedback and the ability to go back for feedback. you know, I, I use this, um, the explanation to tell people is you're never going to know that you're solving the right problem until you actually, try and give somebody a solution.

But that's the first point you're actually going to have an honest conversation about what the problem was. So, this whole thing about create a hypothesis, the faster you create a hypothesis and a demo of something, even if it's just a picture, the faster you're going to get feedback that will help you better understand the problem you should have been working on versus the one you thought you were on.

That's all the pre work that leads to all this other stuff.

[00:32:05] Ryan Connell: No, it makes, it makes complete sense. curious, you know, I, I, again, in the acquisition space, I remember, I don't know, three or four years ago having this, uh, like pre conference whiteboard session, we're all brainstorming. Everyone's excited. We're trying to list out all the big problems that everyone wants to solve.

And we're going to go through this three day, You know, down, select, and then really solve some real problems, right? Like that was the, we had this whole plan, right? And I remember this, uh, this guy that I respect very much, works for a major, major defense prime, been there for years, came up to me and said something like, Ryan, I want you to know we did this 30 years ago.

And, it really, uh, it felt like a knife in the heart. I was like, gosh, it feels different now, but I don't know. I wasn't around then. so I'm curious if you have thoughts on that.

[00:32:52] Pete Newell: you know, we're guilty of reinventing the wheel over and over.I tend to shy away from the word innovation and innovators. In fact, you know, Steve Blank and I have this lengthy conversation about, what it is we're supposed to be breeding and people keep defaulting the innovation thing. They like the whiteboard.

They like design thinking. They like all that. And I fell into the design thinking trap for a while. And then I realized it doesn't produce anything. It produces a lot of ideas, but then you got to, and then what? You actually have to curate all those ideas down to something that's actually ready to be worked on.

And I think, you know, when you look at a problem that comes into BM& T, they're literally like 32 data points in a problem that we measure and look at to determine whether that problem is ready to move to the next step or something. 32.

[00:33:44] Ryan Connell: Wow.

[00:33:46] Pete Newell: And it includes things like, does this problem actually have a sponsor?

Is there a person, and when I say sponsor, I don't mean somebody threw something out and said, give me a white paper. I mean,is there a person that sits next to this problem? Who's willing to continue to work with us. And is that person going to be in their seat long enough for actually make the place?

And if the answer is, well, I got this in the staff, but it's really related to somebody else. Or I got the perfect, you know, I got the perfect champion, but they're changing jobs in three months. Well, that thing's not moving because you're missing the critical element of the human being. The next one is there a senior leader champion?

Does the person who wants to solve this even have the authority to solve the problem? And does their boss have the authority or the desire or the budget lines, the other things? And if they don't, can you build a cabal of people that do? It's like who does? Okay. It's not quit, but if this person doesn't, how do I find the person who does?

So, so coming out of these whiteboard sessions, you really have to get into the, okay, don't move something forward on a platform that's not ready to work on. Otherwise you're going to fail yourselves and you're just going to piss off a bunch of people because you're wasting their time. Um, entrepreneurs, and this is what I've learned, and I think I'm on company number six or seven that I've started over 10 years and fortunately all but two are still rolling.

I'm not an expert at anything other than understanding, how to move people and listen to data and judge whether, you know, we tested something hard or whatever else I don't consider myself to be an innovative, I have a superior, um, ingenious response mechanism. So ingenuity becomes the word that really, when you start looking at entrepreneurs is they're ingenious people.

They know how to manipulate systems to get things done. They know how to recruit people. They know how to get past blockages, but the idea of breeding ingenious people is kind of falling off the plate. You're back in the late 1800s. When you talked about ingenious people, that was like, those are the people who built America's industry.

And they talk about the preponderance of the use of the word ingenuity versus innovation back then and how it's now changed. And I think we missed something because we assumed that, you know, the inventors of the world are the people who are going to fix something. But from a system standpoint, if you want something done, you need ingenious people running the cells that are responsible for actually delivering something.

Now, the hard part is in the military, ingenuity is something you, learn on the battlefield real damn fast when you don't have the right tools or the right equipment or right mission or whatever else, but you still have to solve the problem, in peacetime, we don't breed it. In fact, we actually.

Punish people for being ingenious and working around the rules and not playing by the rules. so the concept of, I'll come back to mission acceleration is really driven by ingenious people embedded in, Organizations who know how to rapidly build specialized teams around specific problems to move that problem along to the point that it's a solution and build a specialized team to deliver the solution at the speed it needs to be delivered.

It's all people problems.

[00:37:03] Ryan Connell: Pete, that was, uh, that was incredible. I appreciate it. Um, I know we're getting close to time here. Uh, any, any last, uh, words of wisdom? I have a page full of notes, but,I'll turn it over to you to kind of, uh, have any last thoughts.

[00:37:15] Pete Newell: You know, at first, I appreciate Ryan, what you guys are doing, and I've followed you guys for years, and I know that you're doing this on behalf of CDAO, and I think that these are all signs that people are starting to, uh, Respect that the system has to be a little different. we, we have got to figure out how to continue the work over time.

You know, one of the things that Steve and I've been talking about is the hype cycle of innovation, a hype cycle of organizational innovation. As we bring teams together and they start to do something and they realize that what they're really doing is innovation theater, not really delivering anything, but they're doing a lot of stuff and you know, they hit the dumps and then they go back at it and they start to figure out what it is they're really supposed to do.

And then the senior leader moves and then somebody else moves. And then before long, you know, the knives and the forks come out from everybody who lost budget to these people and it dies again, and then we start all over with a new team. We're having a hard time building from one set of leaders to the next leader to the next leader organizationally.

Because there's a lack of doctrine for what we're doing. This isn't just an acquisition and S&T problem. It's an operational problem. It's a strategy problem that all require a different set of rules. I'm not talking about throwing out the acquisition system. I'm all done with that. It's really good at what it's supposed to do.

But we need something that runs in parallel with it. Which requires its own doctrine to include its own education system. We need to professionalizethe building of people, this ingenious response mechanism. We need to professionalize the idea of mission acceleration to keep up with the modern battlefield.

whether it's at the tactical end of the battlefield or whether it's on the strategic end of technology development, all of it has got to be done. So Ryan, thanks for the time. I appreciate

[00:39:06] Ryan Connell: Yeah. Pete, thanks so much for being on. I appreciate it. and we'll talk soon.