Managing Organizational Change While Implementing RO Principles

Speaker A Although Elliot's time span concepts are of interest to me personally, it's tough to very difficult to get the senior executives on the civilian side to look at that concept. But what we've done is that, as the secretary has done, is to create a war room for the management of our senior civilian executives, where we've laid out all of the we have 284 senior civilian executives in the army, and we've laid out on a board their relationship to the commands and then the commands relationships to the headquarters. And we looked at the level of work and we've color coded the level of work at the one, two, three star level and the civilians fit into those and the complexity of their jobs fit into that category nicely. They don't know that that's what we've done. We're not going out and explaining complexity and time span efforts to them, but what we've done is lay out who they are, where they're located inside these commands and how their work fits inside the army, the big army's efforts and where they fit as managers. But we've used Elliot's time span concept and we've used his work environment models there. And what we've done is put it in such a way that we're going to be able to manage their careers, we're going to be able to identify the hype, the people that have the potential to pop out, as I said earlier, and to manage at the three star level these very complex pieces of the army. It's a great tool. We've had all of our four stars in for one on ones to look at their commands and look at their sess and look at how they relate to the total institution. So it's going to be a legacy. We have a few more years so will get it ingrained into the way people think without having to deal with some of the other issues around Elliot's time span.