Saturday, June 13, 2009

Surviving and Thriving in the OPNAV Environment - Cubicle Leadership

Reports are that the CNO is preparing for some long-awaited changes in the OPNAV organization. It's always worthwhile to look at prior studies on reorganization in such cases.

The following is part of the executive summary of OPNAV Functional Reorganization Study: Final Report by Frederick D. Thompson and Christopher A. Trenholm (Center for Naval Analyses) - written nearly 20 years ago (1990).

The Approach to the study:

OPNAV makes decisions regarding (1) current and programmed forces; (2) the technical R&D opportunities to pursue; and (3) how Navy missions, functions, and policies should be articulated. The organizational structure of OPNAV is clearly only one component, perhaps even a minor one, in contributing to how these decisions are made. OPNAV decisions on forces and R&D undergo subsequent approvals by the Department of the Navy Secretariat, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the President, and Congress. Even if there were a direct link between organizational structure and decisions, no objective measure exists for determining whether OPNAV decisions are "right" or "wrong," because there are no definitive measures of force effectiveness or of the true military promise of emerging technologies. A confounding factor is the lack of explicit, concrete examples of perceived "wrong" decisions that could form the basis for case studies.

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