Acquisition

How Do You Start Your Executive Summaries?

I am working through the final edits of my workbook and instructional CD titled How to Write Persuasive Executive Summaries I am planning to release in the next few weeks. I am very excited because it introduces my six-part formula and goes step-by-step through helping people become real masters at writing hard-hitting executive summaries. Today,Read… Read more »

Federal Eye Eye Opener: Is EPA silencing Obama critics?

Happy Tuesday! The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered two agency attorneys to remove a YouTube video they produced that criticizes climate change legislation backed by the Obama administration. Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel, who are married and live in San Francisco, received clearance from EPA to post the video, but were told they could mentionRead… Read more »

The Future of Transparency-Effective Outreach

The dominant first year theme of the new Administration has been the importance of achieving “transparency” to build citizen trust. The transparency ideal—inarguable in principle—is difficult in execution. To this end, most of the available leadership bandwidth has been consumed by public promotion of a data centric portal strategy as a means to achieve transparency.Read… Read more »

Federal Eye: Obama dodges question on government contracting

Very few people really understand the complexities of government contracting, so perhaps it’s no surprise that President Obama dodged a very specific question Thursday morning about the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program. As The Eye has reported before, the program is designed to ensure that minority-owned small businesses — especially Native American-owned shopsRead… Read more »

Acquisition Reform Should Include Protest Actions

From The Acquisition Corner Recent reporting by Federal Computer Week (FCW) highlights an issue that is not being addressed by acquisition reform initiatives; reforming the contract protest process. Writing in the Editor’s Notebook blog at Washington Technology, Nick Wakeman discusses the protest by Unisys and General Dynamics of TSA’s contract award to Computer Sciences CorpRead… Read more »

DoD promises to fix Iraq contracting problems in 30 days

In August, the Commission on Wartime Contracting gave the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Contract Audit Agency sixty days to try to “harmonize their own approaches” to contract management in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then a “divergence in contractor-employee counts” has come to light, along with some confusion about who is overseeing theRead… Read more »

Agreeable to Disagreement

Students of leadership may recall a clever quotation from George S. Patton: No one is thinking if everyone is thinking alike. Although disagreements in the workplace can sometimes create emotionally charged situations, thoughtful disagreement can be quite constructive when managed appropriately. Many leaders have found success by not trying to prevent disagreement but rather byRead… Read more »

Federal News Radio Hosts CFC Progress Report

Linda Washington, LFCC Chairperson, was interviewed on The Federal Drive with anchors Tom Temin and Jane Norris. The Federal Drive is the morning drive show on Federal News Radio heard throughout the entire Washington Metro region at 1500 AM and in Frederick at 820 AM. Federal News Radio covers both the Federal Government and thoseRead… Read more »

Federal Eye: New stimulus reports correct early errors

More than 131,000 progress reports on stimulus funding will be posted Friday on Recovery.gov, the government’s stimulus-tracking Web site. Much of the data will include corrections to the first version of reports filed by fund recipients earlier this month. Several early reports overstated the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, accordingRead… Read more »