Category: Uncategorized

iLeader – Navy style

Okay, I am going to take some crap for this and some crap is going to be heaped on Commander Sean Heritage for it also.  It doesn’t matter.  Pile on.  As my former boss, Hon. Donald H. Rumsfeld said, “If you aren’t being criticized, you may not be doing much.”

In my estimation, Sean is the epitome of the “iLeader”.  The “i” is small for a couple of reasons.  Number 1, it represents how Sean has minimized himself in his leadership approach.  It really is all about the Sailors, Chiefs, officers and civilians at his command.  If you don’t believe me, ask them.  The other aspect of the “i” is INTERNET in the same way “i” is represented in Apple products (iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc).  Sean has made the internet a part of his leadership toolbox. 
His first attempt at iLeading was the IWOCM (Information Warfare Officer Community Manager) blog he started in 2007.  Unfortunately, though it was well received and appreciated by many of us, senior IW leadership asked him to take it off line.  Undeterred, Sean associated himself with me (and all the crap that accompanies the association) and mentored a small team that created the IDC Self-synchronization community on the web and in FaceBook.  He’s used the INTERNET to associate himself with some of the leading thinkers and doers in the commercial sector with great success.  He provided some of the impetus for the re-engineered IW Community Forum and Leader Blog.  He continues to grow what he refers to as the “Coalition of the Doing” (a link to post is HERE) by directly engaging peers, seniors, and juniors who care enough to collaborate.  So, that makes him an iLeader in my book.
How about you?  Know any iLeaders?  Admiral Stavridis, Captain Michael Junge, CNO is trying with mixed results, LCDR Armstrong and some others.

Jim and Shirley Newman Retire

Captain Jim Newman, Shirley and Captain Jim Hagy
Captain Jim Newman and Shirley retired recently after a combined 100 years of service to the Navy and Naval Security Group.  Jim was 12 years old when he started in the Navy in October 1964. ((How did he do that???))  He retired as a Navy Captain in 2005.  Shirley was a very well respected (and some say feared) Budget Analyst/Director on the OPNAV Staff for many years.  Mahalo to both of you youngsters !!  You both served the Navy and NSG so well.  Your many friends and Shipmates wish you Fair Winds and Following Seas.
Significant Duty Stations
  • COMPACFLT
  • OPNAV
  • ROTA, SPAIN
  • COMUSNAVCENT
  • CNET PENSACOLA, FL

Significant Awards
  • LEGION OF MERIT
  • MERITORIOUS SERVICE MEDAL

Changes of Command

Commander Giangrasso

Commander Peter Giangrasso relieved Captain Joseph Pugh as Commanding Officer, Navy Information Operations Command, Whidbey Island, Washington.

And, on the intel side…

The Office of Naval Intelligence’s (ONI) Nimitz Operational Intelligence Center held a change of command ceremony at ONI headquarters May 31. Captain Andrea Pollard relieved Captain William Bray, who has been named 6th Fleet intelligence officer. The Nimitz Center is the Navy’s Center of Excellence for operational and strategic analyses of events associated with the maritime domain. Its products and services support operational commanders and national policymakers.

NAVY’S Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet

The Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise, a joint effort between the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and Institute for the Future (IFTF), is an online game designed to crowdsource ideas and strategies that may provide insight to some of the Navy’s toughest problems.

Play the Game, Change the Game

With the help of multimedia and web 2.0 technology, MMOWGLI creates a future environment where players are asked to share new ideas and collaborate with other users to earn innovation points and win the game. MMOWGLI is a web-based game which allows ONR to strategize with more players than possible in a face-to-face setting. Scaling up participation increases our aperture and enables the development of more solutions and unimagined possibilities. The game’s first round, piracyMMOWGLI, launched in summer 2011 and centered around a fast-paced, geopolitical situation off the coast of Somalia. Piracy professionals are being privately invited to continue this exploration.

Upcoming MMOWGLI Gameplay

ONR’s Office of Innovation plans to run a series of MMOWGLI games on a variety of topics over the next year. In November, ONR will launch the next round of piracyMMOWGLI. If you have not previously joined the game, watch for additional opportunities to register and join the action.
ONR is excited to partner with the Naval Task Force Energy to develop a new MMOWGLI scenario focused on the future of energy. This round of gameplay, known as energyMMOWGLI, will launch in May 2012. To pre-register for this game, please visit this link: www.onr.navy.mil/energymmowgli.
Note: Some users may experience difficulty accessing this site. Your browser may require a downloadable DoD root certificate. For othe registration access and registration problems, contact the MMOWGLI team directly.)
The MMOWGLI game blog and Twitter feed are additional resources for updates on live gameplay as well as previous scenarios. See video highlights on YouTube.
For additional information, contact mmowgli-trouble@movesinstitute.org.

Can you write?

Let them know where you stand.  And find out where they stand by exchanging ‘commander’s intent’ messages.

I have not seen anything like this before.  Imagine: A senior leader sends his destroyer squadron his “Commodore’s Intent” and asks each of his Commanding Officers to send him ‘their’ intent in the form of a handwritten essay of their command intentions for the next two years.  This is a novel way of finding out if your Skippers can write and a great way for them to connect their command intentions with those of the Commodore.

Commander’s Intent – A way to deal with incomplete or changing requirements

Commander’s Intent is a military concept. It seems to have been first articulated by the Prussians after their defeat by Napoleon’s conscript army in 1806. Commander’s Intent is “the commander’s stated vision which defines the purpose of an operation, the end state with respect to the relationship among the force, the enemy and the terrain; it must enable subordinates to quickly grasp the successful end state and their part in achieving it”.

by Sanjay Mishra

RDML Tighe – BIG data

“You can go to almost any mission area or functional area in the United States Navy and think about how much of our human capital gets spent diving into various databases and then manually aggregating it,” she said. “If we could get to a place where our data is in a cloud that’s understandable, that’s smartly tagged, that’s discoverable, we could easily get to solutions that don’t require so much human intervention. That lets the humans deal with the higher-order thinking that’s required to make those decisions.”

That’s the next step, Tighe said, and it’s a lot easier said than done. The Navy’s IT architecture isn’t poised to free the data from the systems that house it, and neither are its policies.

“What we’re thinking is along the lines of a big data-type approach,” she said. “We need to ingest data in a way that lets us understand it well and share it across a number of different mission areas. We need to get to a more standardized way of dealing with data, and particularly big data.”

Tighe said the big data issue isn’t really a technological problem, as Amazon and Google have proven with their own decentralized cloud based information systems. Rather, it’s a policy problem the Navy, and DoD as a whole, need to overcome by rethinking things such as identity management, and collapsing networks that don’t inter-operate with one another.

Full Article from Federal News Radio is HERE.

And, more on BIG DATA here.

RDML Tighe is Director, Decision Superiority, OPNAV N2N6F4.