Rapid Development 161 



What was your philosophy of management disciplines at Dahlgren in the 1960's? 



1 think that it was suitable up until about the 1960's. Management always took 

 great pride in doing very well what Washington asked them to do. One of the 

 problems during my time was that people weren't being rewarded for what they 

 were asked to do. Many of them didn't like that. Some of them couldn't even 

 understand what 1 was saying, that it wasn't going to be a question of slavishly 

 doing what you're told to do. Professionals would have to think about what 

 ought to be done or what makes sense to be done and not assume that the 

 people in Washington or even the management at Dahlgren had a monopoly 

 on brains. Real rewards would come from sticking to what you believe to be 

 right, even against external resistance. As it turns out, that's what the Bernard 

 Smith Award is for. Every year it has been awarded to just those kinds of guys 

 who believed in what they were doing. They didn't get much support. In fact, in 

 some instances, there was resistance against what they were doing, but they 

 stuck with it and came through with a valuable product. We tend to forget those 

 kinds of people. I'm glad that the award was established for them. 



Dahlgren now seems to emphasize heavily professional development. Was this always the 

 case or can you relate some factors that led up to this? 



No, it wasn't always the case. The only place where it really was pushed was in 

 K Lab when 1 arrived and that was through Ralph Niemann. He knew that 

 professional development would be the answer. He and a few others I ap- 

 pointed worked with the Personnel Department and really worked up the 

 Dahlgren University. That has had a tremendous payoff. The best part of it is 

 that if you have that kind of thing on the premises, professional work itself 

 reveals the need for the training; and if it can be obtained on the site, that's a 

 real good closed loop. Most universities are teaching things something on the 

 order of 5 years behind the times at best. At the Dahlgren University, we have 

 closed that gap to maybe a year or two. Technology advances so fast that you 

 have to get courses organized and changed at a very high rate. Universities 

 don't want to do this. It takes them so long to get a course established. 



How do you feel about management training? 



1 think it is a good thing to do, even though the results are frequently 

 disappointing. We've had many cases where we poured management courses 

 into some of the managers for years and made absolutely no change, just a 

 complete waste of time. In some instances, it has made a change, but 1 often 

 wonder if the people who took those courses didn't have it inside of themselves 

 in the first place and that we really don't know how to teach management. We 

 think that we're doing something progressive and beneficial when we give these 



