How the US Army Got Interested in Requisite Organization Concepts

Speaker A I was working with Colonel Neil Cosby at the Army Research Institute. And Neil, because the army had looked at organizational design, organizational development work in the 70s, he had brought Elliot on as a researcher out of our London field office. And during the late 70s, neil had provided Elliot with some consulting funds, some research funds to write up his work as it could influence the army. And then he brought Elliot back to the States in 1982 80. And I had just finished up working with Edgar Shine, up at MIT. Elliot, myself, and Steve and Owen Jacobs all were pulled together by Neil to look at the technology of Elliot and see how it could be applied to the army. And we had some, I would say, fascinating kinds of seminars, daily seminars with Elliot at Ari and then in the office of the Chief of Staff, special Studies Group, where we had some very bright officers that had been pulled together by the vice chief, Max Thurman, to help him think about change in the army. So Elliot would we would take Elliot over, and he would meet people like John McDonald, who had my job previously, wes Clark and a couple of people like that, john Caldwell, who was a lieutenant general, head of acquisition for the army. So there were a whole slew of these young officers who were exposed. And Elliot what drove it was that Elliot would ask some very penetrating questions about how do you build a company, how do you build a battalion? And then he would take them into his framework and ask questions about the mutual knowledge unit. And we would get into some pretty heated discussions. I mean, these were people who had commanded battalions, commanded brigades, and he would push them about how they were structured, how they were staffed, how they were fought, and then they would push him in terms of how you would apply this intellectual framework into their kind of an organization. But I think what we learned was that it'd be pretty tough for the operational army to think about designing this stuff. So we moved it into the overhead army. And Steve, when Max went down to TRADOC, steve worked with him on the headquarters side of the business. As opposed to designing the operational force. There's a certain culture that is really tough to get around in terms of developing an operational force. So we focused it on what we call the institutional army.