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Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Dr. Tony Tether was the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, from 2001 till his retirement in 2009.
DARPA is widely known for being the principle agency in DoD for research and development. DARPA is charged with investing in projects that aim for high-payoff. They fund innovative ideas, develop solutions, provide demonstrations of concepts and systems and take any other prudent action required to move the right ideas from concept to reality.
In this OODAcast we examine some of Dr. Tether’s formative experiences, including a very unique job he held while awaiting entry to Stanford. He was a door to door salesman and while doing that learned the importance of quickly assessing challenges that were not being addressed and then forming an ability to express what needs to be done and how to do it quickly. As we hear in the discussion, this type of approach, very consistent with the famous “Heilmeier Catechism”, ended up producing a wide range of DARPA breakthroughs, including one that is now in every cell phone in the globe (next time you use your cell phone’s mapping and location services, remember to thank the Fuller Brush company!).
Dr. Tether also walks us through a brief history of DARPA and dives deeper into the questions Heilmeier is so famous for articulating as a requirement before funding advanced capabilities:
Other topics we discussed with Dr. Tether include:
Slides Dr. Tether Reviewed in this OODAcast are at this link: Dr. Tether Presentation
Podcast Version:
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence