First Public Talk on Systemic Leadership (June 2007)

I'm back from the Thanksgiving holiday and feeling nostalgic (originally posted in another blog on 9 Dec 2008).

Frank Sisti and I gave a talk in June 2007 at the 19th System and Software Technology Conference (SSTC) (link here in CrossTalk on the conference). This was to be our first dual brief on Systemic Leadership, although the title, "Acquiring and Engineering for Net-Centric Space Systems", seemed a bit vague. Looking back, this talk seems to have been ages ago, but in reality, the conference was just over 18 months ago.

About the Talk

This first talk gives a descent overview of the types of software failures that come from working highly complex systems. This talk goes into the people, management, and leadership issues that naturally come out from dealing with sufficiently "new to the domain" software applications.

Some effort is taken to develop the case proffered in our first post that there may exist some leadership mismatch between the types of leaders typically used in military acquisitions (Title 10 trained military officers) and those truly organizationally transformational projects that require equally transformational leadership.

One initial limit of our first talk was the focus on the development of software in support of novel space systems. In this way, we were able to echo the calls of others for the creation of software expertise to reside in the customer's acquisition organization (a point made by Glaseman in 1982, for example). Overviews were given of how to structure software expertise to support leadership at the acquisition program office and acquisition center levels.

The slides from the talk are currently available here. There are 24 references in the slide set, beyond the content described above. The SSTC is an informal professional conference, so no formal papers were submitted.


That was an interesting walk down memory lane. The next entry for me to write will be on the Journal Paper we wrote later that year (which, ultimately took much longer than anticipated to write).