Opportunities for HR Division Doctoral Students Interested in National Security Issues

A nonpartisan consensus is building in Washington around the idea that the current U.S. national security system may not be able to adapt to changing environments.  The Project on National Security Reform has been funded by Congress to conduct a $3 million study of the current national security system.  We are scheduled to deliver our report to Congress on September 1, 2008.  One of the likely contents of the report is draft language for a revision of the National Security Act of 1947.  More information on the PNSR is available at www.pnsr.org.

Dr. Christopher Jon Lamb is the Director of Research & Analysis for the program.  We have been working since the official kick-off of the project on July 26-27, 2007 on the construction of a fruitful partnership between the Project on National Security Reform and the Academy of Management.  A Professional Development Workshop has been accepted by the Academy of Management for Sunday morning, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., under the title of "Project on National Security Reform."  Dr. Lamb will be the first keynote speaker, there will be two hours' of "table discussion" among doctoral candidates of specific sections of the PNSR report to Congress, and Dr. Karl Weick will be the concluding keynote speaker.

We have started to build a wikispace for the PNSR -- pnsr.wikispaces.com -- that we are using to build a "battalion" of outside experts/doctoral candidates who can help bring the best and deepest new thinking about complex organizational processes into the new national security system.  We are creating 240 wikispace "sandboxes" (a term we have adopted from Second Life) for our 240 outside experts.  My sandbox, for example, is at pnsr.wikispaces.com/Orton.

The Project is structured around eight core management processes:  leadership, stucture, culture, strategy, decision, learning, sensemaking, and change.  "Leadership" is being treated as a gateway topic into the other seven processes; "Change" is being treated as a summary topic that draws on the other seven processes.  The working group for the PNSR that is best equipped to manage research on leadership processes is labeled "Human Capital."  Its leader is Myra Howze Shiplett. 

We are reaching out to the Human Resources Division of the Academy of Management to support the work of the Human Capital Working Group in its attempt to improve the quality of leadership processes in the U.S. national security system. 

All of this, of course, is very experimental.  We are building on the experience of the 9/11 Commission -- which only had a staff of 63 people, none of whom were experts in scholarship on leadership, organization, management, and strategy.  The Academy of Management PDW and the wikispace technology give us the possiblity to reach far outside the traditional Washington practitioner-consultant community for scholarly expertise.  We are convinced that excellent scholarship in support of this project can lead to a more effective U.S. national security system.

Could you and your colleagues please give our little experiment some thought and forward this background material to doctoral candidates who might be interested in representing the Human Resources Division of the Academy of Management on our project?  We have ten spaces at the table for HR Division scholars -- now and at the PDW in Anaheim.

I am certain that your doctoral candidates will have questions, which they may address to us on the wikispace or by e-mail to my doctoral student rubens@gwu.edu.

Thank you,