Admiral Rickover Would’ve Made a Great Capture Manager

Admiral Rickover’s 7 Rules

On 18 June 2023, a terrible tragedy occurred with the loss of the Titan, a submersible owned and operated by the American travel and adventure business OceanGate. Titan imploded killing all five passengers at about 12,500 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean’s surface within 1,600 feet of the wreckage of the Titanic.

This tragic event made one of my business partners who graduated from the United States Naval Academy remind me of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who is known as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy." ?Admiral Rickover’s influence on the Navy and its warships was of such reach that he is recognized in U.S. Navy history as one of the Navy's most important officers.

In particular, my business partner reminded me of Admiral Rickover’s 7 Rules:

1) Practice continuous improvement.

2)?Hire smart people.

3)?Establish quality supervision.

4)?Respect the dangers you face.

5)?Train, train, and train.

6)?Audit, control and inspect.

7)?An organization must learn from past mistakes.

Long ago, I was an enlisted sailor aboard a Kidd Class Destroyer and then a naval officer aboard a Ticonderoga Class Aegis Cruiser. Today though, I teach companies in the government contracting (GovCon) marketspace how to approach the upfront thinking necessary to win a competitive GovCon pursuit.?This thinking includes a strong focus on the proper function of capture management.?The Titan’s tragedy, plus being reminded of Admiral Rickover’s 7 Rules, made me think of how the rules are also applicable to GovCon capture management as it pertains to capture managers and their companies.

Here is what I mean:

1) Practice continuous improvement―A company needs to have ongoing improvement to its offerings; business development lifecycle (i.e., people, processes, and tools); and corporate services (e.g., recruiting, contracts) through incremental and breakthrough improvements. In GovCon, if your company is continually not improving, then it is slowly dying.

2) Hire smart people―You are who you hire. It is just like the saying, “You are what you eat.”?The bottom line is that GovCon is a “Thinking Person’s Business.” GovCon companies must hire the best people that they can; place them in the right position in the company; invest in them; and the do everything possible to enable them to be successful in their role. With competitive GovCon pursuits, winning is really a whole-of-company effort regardless of deal size.

3) Establish quality supervision― A successful capture manager sets the degree of excellence for the pursuit.?The capture manager alone is accountable for observing and directing the execution of the capture effort.

4) Respect the dangers you face―Competitive losses and the many things that contribute to them (e.g., lack of follow through, employee turnover, high overhead) are the things that can destroy a GovCon company’s business.

5) Train, train, and train―When pursuing a competitive opportunity ensure that all contributors have been properly taught how to support their respective roles before, they actually perform them. Make the necessary upfront investments in the professional development of pursuit contributors to enable the win.?Winning a high-dollar value, mission-critical, solution-based prime contract in GovCon worth millions to hundreds of millions of dollars is high stakes.?On-the job training (OJT) is valuable, but it alone is too risky when your company’s business stakes are high.?OJT should be complemented with other training in advance of the bid.?The Association of Proposal Management Professions (www.apmp.org) has a fabulous body of knowledge to support training across the business development lifecycle. In particular, if you want to train business development and capture managers how to conduct the necessary upfront thinking to win a competitive pursuit, reference www.solutioneering.company.?Plus, never underestimate the value of bid team refresher training regardless of the years of experience that a particular individual might have.?In sports and business alike, as well many other professions, loss is often the result of failing to execute the fundamentals well.

6) Audit, control and inspect―Regardless of the size of a deal, it is essential to always have an independent party (i.e., a fresh set of eyes) iteratively assess the state-of-play of the pursuit. This assessment will help mitigate the risk of errors in judgement, essential actions not being taken in a timely manner, etc., which could adversely impact the likelihood of winning. An lack of an independent assessment is common with recompetes when the incumbent becomes too comfortable, assumes the customer cannot do without them, does not start preparing for recompete until the last moment, and other such things that contribute to a recompete loss.

7) An organization must learn from past mistakes―A successful GovCon is a learning organization. This means that everyone in the company is continually learning. Particularly when it comes to both competitive wins and losses.?Its employees need to have a shared vision on what success is for the company’s government customer and the company. Company employees should have a shared understanding on key mental models (e.g., company core values and culture, business development lifecycle activities, project management, innovation, process improvement, quality). Plus, individual employees need to be encouraged, invested in, and held accountable to mastering their respective roles (e.g., capture managers, proposal developers, project managers, software developers).

The Problem

The value of Admiral Rickover’s 7 Rules to GovCon are indisputable; however, being able to address them in a way that is both efficient and effective is a challenge in today’s GovCon market. For example, hiring the smartest people comes at a premium. How does a company conduct a GovCon bid with the people it has so that collectively the pursuit team performs as if it is composed of the smartest people bidding the deal amongst all potential competitors?

The Need

There is a need today for an innovative capability that enables business developers, capture managers, and others involved in a competitive pursuit to apply Admiral Rickover’s 7 Rules in an efficient and effective manner. Particularly a capability that allows them to better perform the upfront thinking and analyses necessary to win a competitive GovCon pursuit.?You can call it, “Thinking-as-a-Service” and it allows a pursuit team to:

• Conduct:

―???Issue & Key Factor Analyses

―???Notional Winner Benchmark Analysis

―???Competitive Assessment

―???Discriminator Qualification

―???Gap Analysis

―???Win Strategy Development

―???Win Theme Formulation

―???Proposal Strategy Development

―???Strength Inventory Formulation

• Visually and digitally integrate captured data.
• Preserve digital threads of context of the company, customer, and competition as it pertains to the capture effort at hand.
• Build an inventory of proposal strategies and strengths in advance of any proposal writing and then allocates them to a requirements-driven outline to facilitate scoring the most points against the evaluation criteria.?As it is often said, if you do not have the proposal strategies and strengths in advance of the writing, then what are you writing to??You cannot get the proposal strategies and strengths in advance of the writing unless you do the necessary upfront thinking and analyses.

The Benefits

In particular, the benefits of such a “Thinking-as-a-Service” capability are that it would:

• Help do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.
• Provide executives early, on-going, and easy visibility and insight into the true status of capture management activities in advance of periodic bid reviews.?
• Enable risk-reduced decision-making, particularly at the C-Suite level with strategic analytic information.
• Assist with answering the most important question when pursuing a competitive pursuit ― “Why your company?”
• Support the design and development of an integrated solution set for your company’s competitive response.
• Store the rich context of how and why a deal was bid to increase overall company knowledge and value over time.
• Enable root cause analysis of both competitive wins and losses.
• Capture the company’s intellectual capital to enable future growth.
• Quantify the growth status of your enterprise.
• Have built-in training to easily ramp up inexperienced personnel on the pursuit team and remind all pursuit team members of what the standard of excellence is for a particular activity for the competitive pursuit.
• Lower the cost of capturing new business.
• Support collaboration and dialogue across the lifecycle of the pursuit in the post-COVID-19 hybrid work environment as if the members of the pursuit team were working face-to-face.
• Protect the customer business that your company already has.

Never Forget Admiral Rickover’s 7 Rules―The Life of Your Business Might Just Depend on Them

There is now available to the GovCon marketspace an innovative cloud-based or on-premises-based “Thinking-as-a-Service” capability.?The “Thinking-as-a-Service” capability is called “SET?, and it is designed to enable business developers, capture managers, and others involved in a competitive pursuit to do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.?Plus, SET makes application of Admiral Rickover’s 7 Rules easier. As a result, SET enables the winning of more competitive GovCon opportunities and increases the overall enterprise value of GovCon companies.

Author: Copyright 11 July 2023, Peter Lierni, Founder, Solutioneering, LLC

??www.solutioneering.company/www.solutionengineeringtool.company

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