Tom Barnett: Government Change Agent
Tuesday, February 21, 2006 at 3:01PM Google Alerts pointed me to the press release "Sapient Releases Findings from Change Agent Research; New Paper Provides Roadmap for Government Innovation".
From there I clicked to GovernmentChangeAgents.com
There I found a post dated February 10th entitled "Tom Barnett, a Change Agent and 'Horizontal Thinker' No One Can Ignore". In that post, Dan Forrester thanks Tom for all of his help with the paper Dan wrote for Sapient "The Government's New Breed of Change Agents, Leading the War on Terror". Tom is featured very prominently in that paper (Acrobat search returns 7 hits). Dan links Tom's original post from February 2005 where Tom mentions doing the interview. (How's that for circular linking! ;-)
In the next post at GovernmentChangeAgents.com, Dan writes about Art Cebrowski, Tom's mentor. Dan credits Tom for helping them get an interview with Admiral Cebrowski for the paper. The coolest thing about that post, to me, was the link Dan had to the tribute page the Office of Force Transformation has put up in the admiral's memory. One of the tributes they link is Zenpundit (have you seen it, Mark?). Strangely, they don't link anything by Tom, though Tom didn't write a tribute per se.
Tom writes:
This report is worth checking out. It's a rare piece that explores what it takes to create change leadership within the government, and Dan does an amazing job of describing and categorizing the types of change leaders, so much so that I learned a good deal about my relationship with Art Cebrowski by reading it.The paper reminds me of Gladwell's categorization of connecting types in Tipping Point, but again, pursuing a venue (the government) that's very rarely explored with this sort of approach, so truly path-breaking.
Reader Comments (2)
Thanks Sean ! I knew OSD had a ZP PDF file but not where it was located - a nice tribute page for the Admiral !
Tom is in the Wednesday Washington Post, in David Ignatius's column.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/21/AR2006022101148.html