Rapid Development 163 



You seem to have promoted executive rotations during your tenure. How did you arrive at 

 this policy? 



Well, I did it on a small scale every time I had a supervisory job. It all comes 

 out of the notion that a man practicing good management, as one of his first 

 acts, makes sure that his replacements are trained. Some people don't believe in 

 that. They think that if they can keep themselves indispensable, no one can 

 replace them. They get more security out of it. That kind of guy shouldn't be 

 promoted. An indispensable man isn't ready for any promotions because he 

 can't be spared for any promotions. I've always found it to be a good practice to 

 make sure, as soon as possible, that replacements were under training to take 

 my job. I found I was always free to say "yes" when I was offered another 

 without hurting the organization that I was leaving because my job was ready to 

 be filled with trained men. Well, how did I do that? By letting them take my job 

 once in a while. I'd go away and come back after a visit to Washington or an 

 extended course that I was taking and see what they did, and in this way I had 

 them face those kinds of problems I was facing and gave them a better under- 

 standing of what my decisions were when I got back on the job. That always 

 worked for me, so I tried it on a larger scale and said, "Why just have them 

 rotate to my job? Why don't they rotate to each other's job — all of the depart- 

 ment heads?" Then nobody is indispensable. Any one of them can fill any of the 

 other jobs, including mine, and you know they all got higher jobs out of it, and 

 one of them became the Technical Director. 



Jim Co hard. * 



He not only made Technical Director of the Laboratory, but of the Center. 

 Two of them are essentially Technical Directors of the two labs. All came out of 

 that system. So I think it's good. Then it was picked up lower down the line. 

 Division heads began to rotate. The departments began to practice that with 

 their division heads and division heads with branch heads. This made for a very 

 flexible organization, no member of which was too closely identified with his 

 parochial organization, and all this bickering that I used to see at China Lake 

 with department heads plotung against each other just disappeared because 

 each guy knew that if he was plotting the downfall of another department, 

 that's the next assignment he would get — that other department. 



*Mr. James E. Colvard came to Dahlgren in 1969 and has held positions as Head, Advanced 

 Systems Department; Head, Surface Warfare Department; and Assistant Technical Director. In 

 July 1973, he became Technical Director at Dahlgren and is presently Technical Director of the 

 Naval Surface Weapons Center. 



