Some Reading Recommendations for Contracting Professionals

[Matthew Fleharty]

I put together the following reading list at the request of some young contracting professionals and figured it'd be worth sharing here for anyone who might be looking for a book (or ten) to read. The list is broken into categories with a brief explanation before the book(s) followed by a few excerpts to hopefully whet the prospective reader's appetite. I hope others find these reads as useful and enjoyable as I did.

 

Some Reading Recommendations for Contracting Professionals

Contracting Essentials – Ask yourself, when was the last time you read the FAR or a GAO/COFC decision just to learn (i.e. not to look up a rule or reference for a particular issue)? For most, the answer is probably longer than it should be. Reading the FAR and case law just to learn is essential to becoming a contracting professional. My personal tip – start with FAR Part 1 (the part I’ve heard from too many people that they were told to skip…).

1+.      The FAR & Cibinic & Nash Series

FAR 1.102(d) “The role of each member of the Acquisition Team is to exercise personal initiative and sound business judgment in providing the best value product or service to meet the customer’s needs. In exercising initiative, Government members of the Acquisition team may assume that if a specific strategy, practice, policy or procedure is in the best interests of the Government and is not addressed in the FAR, nor prohibited by law (statute or case law), Executive order or other regulation, that the strategy, practice, policy or procedure is a permissible exercise of authority.”

 

Core Skills (Reading & Writing) – Contracting professionals are words people – we must use words to create contracts. To do that effectively we must read and write well. Reading and writing are skills and, like any other skill, we get better at them with practice. These two books will help you develop those skills.

2.      How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler

“learning is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.”

“just as there is a difference in the art of teaching in different fields, so there is a reciprocal difference in the art of being taught. The activity of the student must somehow be responsive to the activity of the instructor. The relation between books and their readers is the same as that between teachers and their students. Hence, as books differ in the kinds of knowledge they have to communicate, they proceed to instruct us differently; and, if we are to follow them, we must learn to read each kind in an appropriate manner.”

3.      Do I Make Myself Clear by Harold Evans

“We know that the right worlds are oxygen, that dead English pollutes our minds every day.”

“Writers generally set out with good intentions, but something happens along the way. We don’t really know what we want to say until we try to write it, and in the gap between the thought and its expression we realize the bold idea has to be qualified or elaborated. We write more sentences. Then more. We are soon in the territory defined by the French mathematician Blasé Pascal but associated with others, too: I would have written something shorter, but I didn’t have time.”

 

Acquisition History – History consistently fascinates me and I think we ignore it at our own peril. We are not the first people to write contracts or manage acquisition programs so we should learn from the successes and struggles of those who came before us. In an era where there are too many half-baked ideas masquerading as acquisition innovations, history can serve as a guide to figure out what might be helpful and what might be hurtful.

4.      The Weapons Acquisition Process by Peck & Scherer

“In brief, these comparisons demonstrate that weapons development is like few other activities in the American economy. Rather, it is characterized by unique elements of uncertainty resulting from the combination of, first, the extent to which weapons press the limits of existing engineering art and scientific knowledge and, second, the character of the demand for weapons in a cold war environment. The better performance of commercial developments in staying within budgets, meeting schedules, and achieving performance objectives is explained largely by the fact that most commercial project developments are not initiated until major state of the art and marketing uncertainties have been resolved. Under extraordinary competitive pressures, a commercial development occasionally does push the state of the art in a weapons-like way. On such occasions, weapons-like problems tend to occur; cost targets are exceeded, schedules are slipped, and the product fails to meet its performance promises. This would suggest that comparison of weapons and typical commercial developments is hardly a fair index of relative efficiency, and that the direct transfer of business practice to weapons efforts is not, in and of itself, a meaningful solution for improving the acquisition of technically advanced weapons.”

“the uncertainties connected with weapons acquisition preclude the development of a market system in anything approaching the usual meaning of that term.”

5.      The General and The Genius by James Kunetka

“The conception and development of a theoretically complex and technologically advanced weapon, made from materials heretofore unimagined, in two and a half years is an extraordinary tale in its own right.”

6.      Stealth by Peter Westwick

“The initiative for Stealth did not come from presidents or generals operating from a grand strategic vision. Nor did it come from the bottom up, from the soldiers—or, in this case, pilots—who would be the ones to wield the new technology. It came rather from the middle, from engineers and program managers who translated technology into strategy and policy, and vice versa…much of the history was not romantic or heroic. It consisted of countless mundane meetings, memos, and briefings, interspersed with trips to the remote, ramshackle outposts of RATSCAT and Area 51. No Eureka moment made Stealth aircraft possible…the concept’s strategic importance and technological challenge inspired a large number of smart people to work exceptionally hard for a long time to realize it. That was the true secret of Stealth.”

 

Thinking & Decision Making – Contracting professionals must know how to think and make sound decisions. These books are essentials for understanding different ways for how we may think and act better. Economic thought, in particular, is but one way of thinking – but what we cannot afford to do is ignore the costs and tradeoffs inherent in many of our decisions.

7.      Thinking: Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman

“A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language.”

“many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.”

“Maintaining one’s vigilance against biases is a chore—but the chance to avoid a costly mistake is sometimes worth the effort.”

8.      Radical Uncertainty by Kay & King

“The world is inherently uncertain and to pretend otherwise is to create risk, not to minimize it.”

“There is an alternative story to that told by behavioral economics. It is that many of the characteristics of human reasoning which behavioral economics describes as biases are in fact adaptive—beneficial to success—in the large real worlds in which people live, even if they are sometimes misleading in the small worlds created for the purposes of economic modelling and experimental psychology. It is an account which substitutes evolutionary rationality for axiomatic rationality.”

“The false assumption that good process leads to good outcomes is pervasive in public sector organizations, where good often means lengthy, involves many people with little responsibility for the result, and is imbued with ill-defined concepts of fairness centered around issues of representativeness and statistical discrimination. Process has become the policy, with deleterious effects on outcomes.”

9.      Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell

“Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses…life does not ask us what we want. It presents us with options. Economics is one of the ways of trying to make the most of those options.”

“Competition among people for scarce resources is inherent. It is not a question whether we like or dislike competition. Scarcity means that we do not have the option to choose whether or not to have an economy in which people compete. That is the only kind of economy that is possible—and our only choice is among the particular methods that can be used for that competition.”

 

Bonus Books – Contracting professionals are both leaders and honest brokers, so the following two selections are on those topics. “The Strategist” is a particularly interesting read about an Air Force Lt Gen who set the standard for what an “honest broker” can and should be.

10.  On Leadership by John Gardner

“Confusion between leadership and official authority has a deadly effect on large organizations. Corporations and government agencies everywhere have executives who imagine that their place on the organization chart has given them a body of followers. And of course it has not. They have been given subordinates. Whether the subordinates become followers depends on whether the executives act like leaders.”

“we must not think rigidly or mechanically about the attributes of leaders. The attributes required of a leader depend on the kind of leadership being exercised, the context, the nature of followers, and so on.”

“Leaders discover that the great systems over which they preside require continuous renewal…It is not a question of excellence. A society that has reached heights of excellence may already be caught in the rigidities that will bring it down. An institution may hold itself to the highest standards and yet already be doomed by the complacency that foreshadows decline.”

“Mentors are ‘growers,’ good farmers rather than inventors or mechanics. Growers have to accept that the main ingredients and processes with which they work are not under their own control. They are in a patient partnership with nature, with an eye to the weather and a feeling for cultivation. A recognition that seeds sometimes fall on barren ground, a willingness to keep trying, a concern for the growing thing, patience—such are the virtues of the grower. And the mentor.”

11.  The Strategist by Bartholomew Sparrow

“Scowcroft’s sense of organizational politics, his willingness to act as the president’s agent, the control he exercised on the quality of the NSC process, and his respect for the views of others in government had, in combination, that much more effect because his actions were infused by his ability as a strategist: his ability to discern the people and organizations in play, to understand their backgrounds and origins, and to see how they interacted and what the likely consequences would be in relation to the desired objectives of US policy.”

“his own approach to almost every question is to view it with informed skepticism…”

“It is utterly amazing how one person…can make all the difference in the world.”

[joel hoffman]

22 hours ago, Matthew Fleharty said:

Cibinic & Nash Series

For Starters, read two of the Bible’s of Federal Contracting:

Formation of Government Contracts

Administration of Government Contracts

Also one can read various relatively short books available in soft copy on the fundamentals of negotiating.

Also, a Must Read: Stephen R. Covey’s book: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Daily: WIFCON.com Home Page and the protests and disputes cases. You can also save links to the various legal forum home pages.

Your organization should subscribe to The Nash and Cibinic Report. If you have a legal office, check to see what subscriptions and periodicals they maintain.