Gearing up for my new jobs/titles connected with Oak Ridge National Laboratory

PR announcements ready to roll from Oak Ridge's side. My man Steve DeAngelis is on the road right now, so probably will wait until he returns to releash the hounds of PR!

Looking at a couple of "distinguished'": one with Oak Ridge itself (way cool) and one with the Howard Baker Center at U. Tennessee (also way cool). Between them, I figure I'll get that educational discount on my new desktop Mac (you know the one ...).

Spent afternoon with my new boss at Oak Ridge, a retired Army flag by the name of Frank Akers, who is one of the more amazing people I've met in my career.

Frank's career hits so many spots, it's unreal: BA from Naval Academy (that's right, an Army guy with an Annapolis degree!), attended Command General Staff College in Leavenworth and the Army War College in Carlisle, then MA and PhD from Duke. Typical slough-off, he.

Service stretching from Vietnam to Desert Storm, rises to one-star Chief of Staff at 82nd Airborne, so he's a Ranger to boot. Retires to become Associate Laboratory Director for National Security at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. What the hell kind of Ranger walks out of the service to that job?

At Oak Ridge, according to his bio, "he is responsible for managing a focused research and development portfolio that includes nonproliferation and threat reduction, arms and export control, homeland security, and counter terrorism technologies for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy. Dr. Akers also coordinates ORNL activities with the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies with a mission involving national security, law enforcement, and public safety."

Think I'm gonna have fun as a "distinguished BLANK"?

Well, Frank flies in from Oklahoma, where he told me he spent a fascinating couple of days with David Boren's university (yes, the former senator is now president there) and first thing he tells me is, he'd like to take me there some day to see all the interesting things they're doing to create a high-tempo learning environment. After working the Esquire piece on Quantico and Leavenworth, this is beginning to feel like a real groove, moving me more and more in the direction of casting Vol. III as a study of individual-level strategizing and transformational change. Frank says ORNL is also doing some fascinating stuff with Singapore, so I'm like, "You have me at distinguised!"

I head to Oak Ridge later this month to kick this baby off. I could not be more psyched.