Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 10 January 2005

This is an excerpt (opening section + profile of Cebrowski) from a story that just appeared in Federal Computer Weekly. I gave the guy about 10 minutes over the phone a while back. Find the original at www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2005/0110/unconv-enough-01-10-05.asp

Enough with convention already

A look at seven individuals for whom the unconventional is second nature

BY Michael Hardy, Florence Olsen, David Perera, Brian Robinson and Frank Tiboni

Published on Jan. 10, 2005

Behind most unconventional ideas, there are unconventional thinkers. But everyone has moments of inspiration when they see things in a different light. The real unconventional thinker — someone who looks at the world from a different perspective as a matter of course — is a much rarer breed.

Federal Computer Week editors recently canvassed the federal information technology community to find those people in government and industry who have a reputation for unconventionality. They may not be the doers who grab the spotlight and make things happen. Instead, they are often the ones behind the scenes who ask, "What if . . .?" and "Why can't we . . .?" Others sometimes respond to their ideas with hostility; unconventional thinking is not always a ticket to popularity.

The group we have selected is not exhaustive, but rather it is meant to be representative, a subset that provides some insight into the unconventional mind-set and its value to the community …

Arthur Cebrowski: Thought leader at large

Retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski loves to put his ideas into play.

He is widely known as the father of network-centric warfare. He earned the moniker after writing an article describing his vision for incorporating technology in battle operations for the January 1998 issue of Proceedings, a monthly magazine published by the Naval Institute.

It was a classic Cebrowski approach to exploring new fields, said Thomas Barnett, a professor at the Naval War College and author of the best-selling book "The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century."

"He engages in data-free research," Barnett said. "He reads widely, thinks horizontally and looks for patterns. He then proposes an idea based on that approach."

Cebrowski's reputation helped him get a job with the Bush administration. In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld formed a new organization to help Pentagon officials rethink their approach to warfighting. Cebrowski had recently retired as president of the Naval War College. Given Cebrowski's reputation, it made sense to put him in charge of the Office of Force Transformation.

Cebrowski's brilliance also results from his ability to listen, said Jerry Tuttle, a retired Navy vice admiral who led the service's IT efforts in the 1990s but now heads his own aerospace and communications consulting firm, JOT Enterprises.

"When he listens, he listens with empathy," said Tuttle, who met Cebrowski 40 years ago and later chose him to oversee IT customer service for the Navy fleet. "He then thinks about his ideas. And if they are bad ones, he'll flush them."

One of Cebrowski's first initiatives as director of the office involved improving the military's logistics. He dubbed the effort "sense and respond." He sought to use technology to sense when troops' fuel, ammunition, water, food and hygiene supplies get low and respond by automatically ordering more of them.

Barnett cited another example of Cebrowski's creative thinking: When he first worked with Cebrowski at the war college in 1998, the big concern was fixing the Year 2000 date problem on government computers and networks, which had some serious implications for national security.

But Cebrowski started thinking along other lines. As seen during the Year 2000 effort, computer systems worldwide are becoming increasingly networked. Beyond fixing the computer bugs, he wanted to know the national and international security ramifications of such connectivity.

By publishing his thoughts, Cebrowski gets comments from people he might otherwise not meet, and then he refines his thoughts. "If you [are] ambiguous, people come to you," Barnett said.

COMMENTARY: Art's sort of thought leadership scares a lot of people, who don't handle his ambiguity well. If you can, you can flourish, and that's what happened to me working for him. Looking back, my time at the college was essentially defined by him. When he was here, I did very well. When he left but took me along (virtually), that was great too. When the college made it clear to me that his paying my salary irked them (control issue), I caught the hint and stopped working for Art. After that, the college never really knew what to do with me. PNM filled the space for a while, giving me lots of speaking requests, but eventually that irked the college too, so now I depart. But the upshot? No Art, no career at college. So it wasn't just nice that Art and I came to the college the very same month back in 1998. It basically made my career here. When people ask me years from now what it was like to have worked at the Naval War College, my honest reply is going to be that I didn't work for the college, I worked for Art. And that job was fabulous.