Management – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

“You Will Do Your Best Creative Work by Yourself”

(p. A12) The value of gathering to swap loosely formed thoughts is highly suspect, despite being a major reason many companies want workers back in offices.

“You do not get your best ideas out of these freewheeling brainstorming sessions,” says Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School. “You will do your best creative work by yourself.”

Iyengar has compiled academic research on idea generation, including a decade of her own interviews with more than a thousand people, into a book called “Think Bigger.” It concludes that group brainstorming is usually a waste of time.

Pitfalls include blabbermouths with mediocre suggestions and introverts with brilliant ones that they keep to themselves.

. . .

Plenty of people have always bemoaned brainstorming. Longtime Wall Street Journal readers may recall a 2006 “Cubicle Culture” column that skewered the popular practice, and Harvard Business Review published a research-based case against the usefulness of brainstorming in 2015.

. . .

Sometimes leaders bring employees together to create the illusion of wide-open input, says Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design Studio, a management consulting firm in San Francisco. In-person brainstorming is part of the back-to-office rationale for many of her clients, and she generally advises the ones that truly want to improve collaboration to first carve out some alone time for their workers.

When Hall needs inspiration, she goes for a run.

“It’s freaky,” she says. “I will go run on a problem, and things will happen in my head that do not happen under any other circumstance.”

Others might find “Aha!” moments in the shower or while listening to music. Leaving breakthroughs to private serendipity can feel, to bosses, like losing control, she acknowledges, but it might be more effective than trying to schedule magic in a conference room.

For the full commentary, see:

Callum Borchers. “ON THE CLOCK; Switch Off Brainstorming If You Want Brighter Ideas.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 18, 2023): A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated May 18, 2023, and has the title “ON THE CLOCK; Office Brainstorms Are a Waste of Time.”)

The book by Iyengar mentioned above is:

Iyengar, Sheena. Think Bigger: How to Innovate. New York: Columbia Business School Publishing, 2023.

Experienced Nurses Can Be Disciplined If They Use Hunches from Clinical Observations to Override AI Protocols

(p. A1) Melissa Beebe, an oncology nurse, relies on her observation skills to make life-or-death decisions. A sleepy patient with dilated pupils could have had a hemorrhagic stroke. An elderly patient with foul-smelling breath could have an abdominal obstruction.

So when an alert said her patient in the oncology unit of UC Davis Medical Center had sepsis, she was sure it was wrong. “I’ve been working with cancer patients for 15 years so I know a septic patient when I see one,” she said. “I knew this patient wasn’t septic.”

The alert correlates elevated white blood cell count with septic infection. It wouldn’t take into account that this particular patient had leukemia, which can cause similar blood counts. The algorithm, which was based on artificial intelligence, triggers the alert when it detects patterns that match previous patients with sepsis. The algorithm didn’t explain (p. A9) its decision.

Hospital rules require nurses to follow protocols when a patient is flagged for sepsis. While Beebe can override the AI model if she gets doctor approval, she said she faces disciplinary action if she’s wrong. So she followed orders and drew blood from the patient, even though that could expose him to infection and run up his bill. “When an algorithm says, ‘Your patient looks septic,’ I can’t know why. I just have to do it,” said Beebe, who is a representative of the California Nurses Association union at the hospital.

As she suspected, the algorithm was wrong. “I’m not demonizing technology,” she said. “But I feel moral distress when I know the right thing to do and I can’t do it.”

. . .

In a survey of 1,042 registered nurses published this month by National Nurses United, a union, 24% of respondents said they had been prompted by a clinical algorithm to make choices they believed “were not in the best interest of patients based on their clinical judgment and scope of practice” about issues such as patient care and staffing.” Of those, 17% said they were permitted to override the decision, while 31% weren’t allowed and 34% said they needed doctor or supervisor’s permission.

. . .

Jeff Breslin, a registered nurse at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Mich., has been working at the Level 1 trauma center since 1995. He helps train new nurses and students on what signs to look for to assess and treat a critically ill or severely injured patient quickly.

“You get to a point in the profession where you can walk into a patient’s room, look at them and know this patient is in trouble,” he said. While their vital signs might be normal, “there are thousands of things we need to take into account,” he said. “Does he exhibit signs of confusion, difficulty breathing, a feeling of impending doom, or that something isn’t right?”

. . .

Nurses often describe their ability to sense a patient’s deterioration in emotional terms. “Nurses call it a ‘hunch,’ ” said Cato, the University of Pennsylvania professor who is also a data scientist and former nurse. “It’s something that causes them to increase surveillance of the patient.”

. . .

At UC Davis earlier this spring, Beebe, the oncology nurse, was treating a patient suffering from a bone cancer called myeloid leukemia. The condition fills the bones with cancer cells, “they’re almost swelling with cancer,” she said, causing excruciating pain. Seeing the patient wince, Beebe called his doctor to lobby for a stronger, longer-lasting pain killer. He agreed and prescribed one, which was scheduled to begin five hours later.

To bridge the gap, Beebe wanted to give the patient oxycodone. “I tell them, ‘Anytime you’re in pain, don’t keep quiet. I want to know.’ There’s a trust that builds,” she said.

When she started in oncology, nurses could give patients pain medication at their discretion, based on patient symptoms, within a doctor’s parameters. They gave up authority when the hospital changed its policies and adopted a tool that automated medication administration with bar-code scanners a few years ago.

In its statement, UC Davis said the medication tool exists as a second-check to help prevent human error. “Any nurse who doesn’t believe they are acting in the patient’s best interests…has an ethical and professional obligation to escalate those concerns immediately,” the hospital said.

Before giving the oxycodone, Beebe scanned the bar code. The system denied permission, adhering to the doctor’s earlier instructions to begin the longer-acting pain meds five hours later. “The computer doesn’t know the patient is in out-of-control pain,” she said.

Still, she didn’t act. “I know if I give the medication, I’m technically giving medication without an order and I can be disciplined,” she said. She watched her patient grimace in pain while she held the pain pill in her hand.

For the full story, see:

Lisa Bannon. “Nurses Clash With AI Over Patient Care.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 16, 2023): A1 & A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 15, 2023, and has the title “When AI Overrules the Nurses Caring for You.”)

Did Theranos Fail Because It Had a Flat Structure or Because It Had a Hierarchy with Holmes at the Top (Or Simply Because They Failed at Something Very Hard)?

André Spicer and Elizabeth Holmes infer that Theranos failed due to its flat structure. But weren’t there some employees, such as George Shultz’s grandson, whose efforts to identify the problems that led to failure and fraud, were suppressed by Elizabeth Holmes? If so, then can’t you say that the failure was due to Holmes’s power at the top of the firm? Meaning due to a kind of hierarchy rather than due to flatness? (I remain unclear and conflicted on whether and when flatness or hierarchy is better.)

(p. B2) . . . do flat structures work? André Spicer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Bayes Business School in London, said that, while the “cultural zeitgeist when I was growing up was that hierarchies are bad,” there’s been an increasing recognition of both the need for them and the fact that they often reappear in businesses ‌that, at least theoretically, reject them.

. . .

Mr. Spicer is particularly critical of start-ups that have attempted, or claimed to attempt, flat structures, suggesting that failures — and at least one major scandal — have emerged from these workplaces. He pointed to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, her health care technology start-up. In a 2015 interview, Ms. Holmes said that Theranos was “a very flat organization and if I have learned anything, we are only as good as the worst people on our team.”

“The claim that companies like Theranos had a flat structure meant the company fitted into a well-recognized type of agile tech firms,” Mr. Spicer said. In addition to attracting investors and employees, the myth “meant that these companies don’t have to do the difficult and tedious process of putting into place all the systems and controls you would normally find.”

He added that he believed those systems “would have likely stopped much of the wrongdoing.” Ms. Holmes and Ramesh Balwani, the former chief operating officer of Theranos, were each recently sentenced to prison time for defrauding investors and patients.

The notion that start-ups in particular are ill suited to a flat structure was supported in a 2021 study by Professor Lee of Wharton. A flat structure “can result in haphazard execution and commercial failure by overwhelming managers with the burden of direction and causing subordinates to drift into power struggles and aimless idea explorations,” he wrote.

For the full story, see:

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff. “‘Flat’ Company Structures Sound Appealing. But Do They Work?” The New York Times (Wednesday, July 5, 2023): B2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “In Business, ‘Flat’ Structures Rarely Work. Is There a Solution?” Where there are minor differences in wording between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The academic paper by Lee mentioned in the passage quoted above is:

Lee, Saerom. “The Myth of the Flat Start-Up: Reconsidering the Organizational Structure of Start-Ups.” Strategic Management Journal 43, no. 1 (Jan. 2022): 58-92.

For Musk “Hard Core” Means “Long Hours at High Intensity”

(p. A24) Have you ever gotten an email at midnight from the boss with an ominous subject line like “a fork in the road”? Granted, email etiquette today says we’re not supposed to get midnight emails from bosses at all. But Elon Musk is no ordinary boss, and it’s safe to assume he didn’t get the memo on empathetic leadership. So, true to form, as chief executive of Twitter, after laying off nearly half of his staff, bringing a sink to work and proclaiming he would be sleeping at the office “until the org is fixed,” Mr. Musk recently issued this late-night ultimatum to his remaining employees: From this point forward, Twitter was going to be “extremely hard core.” Were they ready to be hard core? They could select “yes” — or opt for three months of severance pay.

To Mr. Musk, “hard core” meant “long hours at high intensity,” a workplace where only the most “exceptional performance” would be accepted and a culture in which midnight emails would be just fine. I’d wager that more than a few workaholics, bosses or otherwise, weren’t entirely turned off by the philosophy behind that statement, and yet it immediately conjured images of sweaty Wall Street bankers collapsing at their desks, Silicon Valley wunderkinds sleeping under theirs and the high-intensity, bro-boss cultures of companies like Uber and WeWork, with their accompanying slogans about doing what you love and sleeping when you’re dead.

For the full commentary, see:

Jessica Bennett. “Elon, the Mosh Pit Called. It Wants ‘Hard Core’ Back.” The New York Times (Friday, November 25, 2022): A24.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 23, 2022, and has the title “The Worst Midnight Email From the Boss, Ever.”)

Some High Performers Find Ways to Avoid Accumulating Microstresses

(p. C5) Have you had days that exhaust you extraordinarily without any particular reason why?

. . .

There’s a common but little-understood reason for that exhaustion. We call it “microstress”—brief, frequent moments of everyday tension that accumulate and impede us even though we don’t register them.

. . .

One study published in the journal Biological Psychology in 2015 found that exposure to social stress within two hours of a meal leads your body to metabolize the food in a way that adds 104 calories on average. “If this happens daily, that’s 11 pounds gained per year,” noted Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University and author of “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.”

. . .

In our research, we observed that some of the high performers—a small subset that we came to call the “Ten Percenters”—were much better at coping with microstress than the rest of those we studied, and perhaps than the rest of us, too. What do they do differently?

. . .

. . ., they’re better at removing themselves from interactions that generate microstress in their lives, whether or not they realize the dynamic. Ten Percenters are more likely to shape these interactions by dealing with simmering disagreements head-on or by limiting such contacts.

. . .

Our Ten Percenters were also thoughtful about not creating the kinds of conditions that cause microstress for others. Think about what happens—to both of you—when you push your child too hard on their grades and it comes back in the form of a rebellious attitude. Or the stress you may create as a manager by unnecessarily shifting expectations. Stopping this cycle helps to prevent microstress from boomeranging back on us.

For the full essay, see:

Rob Cross and Karen Dillon. “Combating the ‘Microstress’ That Causes Burnout.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 22, 2023): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date April 21, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Cross and Dillon’s book:

Cross, Rob, and Karen Dillon. The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems—and What to Do About It. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2023.

Tim Cook’s Apple Is Silent on Communist China’s Suppression of Human Rights

(p. A19) Apple CEO Tim Cook has been taking a beating over his company’s coziness with Beijing. It comes amid protests across China against the government’s strict Covid-19 lockdowns, including at a factory in Zhengzhou where most of the world’s iPhones are made. Hillary Vaughn of Fox News perfectly captured Mr. Cook’s embarrassment on Capitol Hill Thursday [Dec. 1, 2022] when she peppered him with questions:

“Do you support the Chinese people’s right to protest? Do you have any reaction to the factory workers that were beaten and detained for protesting Covid lockdowns? Do you regret restricting AirDrop access that protesters used to evade surveillance from the Chinese government? Do you think it’s problematic to do business with the Communist Chinese Party when they suppress human rights?”

A stone-faced Mr. Cook responded with silence.

. . .

CEOs can always justify their operations by pointing to the economic benefits their companies bring to the communities in which they operate. Or CEOs can go the progressive route, presenting their companies as moral paragons. But they can’t have it both ways: holding themselves up as courageous in places where the risk from speaking out is low while keeping quiet about real oppression in places where speaking out can really hurt the bottom line.

For the full commentary, see:

William McGurn. “MAIN STREET; Tim Cook’s Bad Day on China.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2022): A19.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 5, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

The Role Disney “Fans Play in Creating the Disney Magic”

(p. 10) On Nov. 20, [2022],I was relieved to hear the news that Disney’s chief executive, Bob Chapek, had been fired and replaced with the former chief executive Robert Iger. The news was also met with near-unanimous celebration among my community of super fans.

While his ouster shocked investors and Hollywood, many in our community had been actively campaigning for Mr. Chapek’s firing for the past two years. A Change.org petition to fire Mr. Chapek that started in 2020 garnered over 117,000 signatures. (It now reads “Victory.”) Online forums teemed with complaints about Mr. Chapek’s management style and strategy.

. . .

We also pushed to have Mr. Chapek fired because he didn’t believe in Disney magic. Disney is so much more than just another big business. Understanding that is crucial to its success.

When Walt Disney opened Disneyland, he referred to his theme park customers as “guests,” an understanding that is explicitly reinforced in Disney employee training to this day, and by which Disney’s theme park community refers to itself.

. . .

What Mr. Chapek doesn’t understand is the role we fans play in creating the Disney magic. It is our Instagram accounts, our blogs and our websites that those out-of-towners refer to in order to prepare for that revenue-generating Disneyland trip. I get paid to do it, but many others do this work just because they love it. Mr. Chapek disregarded us.

Worse was the way Mr. Chapek treated “cast members,” as Disney’s park employees are known. The people who greet you at the park entrance, serve you food and get you safely on and off the rides have an enormous influence on the quality of your visit. I’ve talked to many cast members, from young people to older adults, about why they’re willing to wear polyester costumes in Florida’s summer heat for relatively low wages. To a person, they say something like, “I want to make people happy, and Disney is the best place to do that.”

So it was disheartening when, in September 2020, Mr. Chapek announced that the company was laying off 28,000 workers, most of them cast members. While many other businesses were laying off workers during that time, Mr. Chapek was also committing Disney to spending billions to ramp up content production for its Disney+ streaming service. As we saw it, Mr. Chapek viewed the incomes and health care of thousands of people — the people who make the magic — as less important than another season of “The Mandalorian.” Many cast members decided not to return to Disney’s parks when they reopened.

For the full commentary, see:

Len Testa. “Bob Chapek Didn’t Believe in Disney Magic.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, December 4, 2022): 10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 29, 2022, and has the same title as the print version. Where there is a slight difference in wording between versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

United Airlines CEO Gave Up on Flying United Airlines

United Airlines had major flight cancellations on Sun., June 25, 2023, on the day we were to fly United through O’Hare airport on our way to a European trip. Stress, exhaustion, chaos. United Airlines chaos continued for days. My brain has not yet totally processed the story quoted below. My gut, on the other hand, wants the CEO of United Airlines to be fired.

(p. B11) United Airlines Chief Executive Scott Kirby apologized for taking a private jet from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Denver this week as his airline grappled with widespread weather disruptions.

“Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because it was insensitive to our customers who were waiting to get home,” Kirby said in a statement Friday. “I sincerely apologize to our customers and our team members who have been working around-the-clock for several days—often through severe weather—to take care of our customers.”

A United spokeswoman said Kirby took the flight Wednesday because he was unable to secure a seat on a commercial flight. The company didn’t pay for the private flight, she said.

Wednesday was a hectic day for United: The carrier canceled over 750 mainline flights, according to FlightAware, over a quarter of what it had scheduled. The night before, a long stretch of bad storms in New York led to logjams at the area’s airports, including United’s Newark hub.

Some travelers over the past week have been stranded for days while waiting for space on flights home, in some cases sleeping in the airport. Travelers said they spent hours waiting in line for assistance or to be reunited with checked bags.

For the full story, see:

Alison Sider. “United CEO Apologizes for Flying on Private Jet Amid Airline’s Cancellations.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 1, 2023): B11.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 30, 2023, and has the title “United Airlines CEO Apologizes for Taking Private Jet During Flight Disruptions.”)

Langlois’s Entrepreneurs Allowed the Masses to Flourish in Spite of Chandler’s Corporatism

(p. D7)Students of business have long argued about why managerial capitalism arose and what led to its demise. At the heart of this debate is an age-old conundrum: What should the boundaries of a corporation be? What goods and services should it produce and which should it buy from others? Executives stake careers on such questions, but economists, historians and social critics have tried to answer them as well.

It is in such a context that Richard Langlois offers “The Corporation and the Twentieth Century,” a monumental history of American business during the eventful decades when managers ruled. Among much else, he makes the argument that firms embraced managerial capitalism in response to the century’s cataclysmic events and the heavy-handed government intercessions they prompted. When the crises and related policies finally fell away, we saw the resurgence of the focused, entrepreneurial enterprise that predominates today.

Mr. Langlois, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, pushes back in particular against the explanation laid out by Alfred Chandler, the father of American business history, in his great work, “The Visible Hand” (1977).

. . .

Once established, managerial capitalism took on a life of its own. “The hierarchy itself,” Chandler wrote, “became a source of permanence, power, and continued growth.”

But Mr. Langlois tells a different story, contending that managerial capitalism didn’t truly flourish until later. He notes that, despite a wave of mergers, most large firms in the early 20th century were still controlled by their owners, thanks to the extensive shareholdings of financiers such as John D. Rockefeller or investment banks such as J.P. Morgan—owners not especially known as silent partners. The real heyday of the managers was yet to come.

Enter the reform-minded Progressive movement, which aimed to curtail the excesses of just such tycoons. Easily distinguished from today’s progressives by their capital letter and lack of stated pronouns, the Progressives held that scientific techniques had solved the problems of industrial management and would do likewise for those of government administration, which was to be entrusted to “experts.”

These Progressives brought with them a hubristic “managerial model of the world” that called forth a managerial form of capitalism, one designed to clasp the meddlesome hand of government. The ensuing era of federal regulation offered big business relief from haphazard and potentially more radical state regulation, but it also shifted power over firms toward Washington and the federal judiciary.

The ground was thus laid for managerial capitalism to be turbocharged by “the great catastrophes” of World War I, the Depression and World War II.

. . .

(p. D8) Mr. Langlois recognizes that the deregulating spirit of the 1970s was part of a change in the Zeitgeist. He describes, for example, how the Bay Area’s hippie ethos intersected with the rise of the personal computer. The resulting digital revolution upended corporate hierarchies and changed much of America’s output from the physical to the intangible. Ascendant tech firms ushered in a new entrepreneurial paradigm. The center of business gravity shifted from Manhattan boardrooms and Midwestern factories to the freewheeling West Coast.

Vietnam and inflation, meanwhile, sapped faith in government as well as in the dollar, and a series of countries (lately China) would soon replace the U.S. as the world’s factory. The unbundling of corporations was accelerated by low-cost overseas manufacturing and by the new “barbarians at the gate” from Wall Street.

. . .

The questions at the heart of “The Corporation and the Twentieth Century” . . . serve as the engine of a remarkable alternative history of what Henry Luce famously called the American Century. It’s a work propelled by vast learning, a focus on business and a consistent point of view in favor of free markets.

For the full review see:

Daniel Akst. “BOOKSHELF; The Rise and Fall of Managers.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 1, 2023): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 30, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Corporation and the Twentieth Century’ Review: The Rise and Fall of Managers.”)

The book under review is:

Langlois, Richard N. The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

In Blackberry Movie “The Excitement of Disruption and the Thrill of Creation Become Tangible”

(p. C9) In Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” — a wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy — the emergence of the smartphone isn’t greeted with fizzing fireworks and popping champagne corks. Instead, Johnson and his co-writer, Matthew Miller (adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry”), have fashioned a tale of scrabbling toward success that tempers its humor with an oddly moving wistfulness.

. . .

. . ., we’re in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1996, where Mike Lazaridis (a perfect Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) — best friends and co-founders of a small tech company called Research in Motion (RIM) — are trying to sell a product they call PocketLink, a revolutionary combination of cellphone, email device and pager.

. . .

The corporate types don’t understand Mike and Doug’s invention, but a predatory salesman named Jim Balsillie (a fantastic Glenn Howerton), gets it. Recently fired and fired up, Jim sees the device’s potential, making a deal to acquire part of RIM in exchange for cash and expertise. Doug, a man-child invariably accessorized with a headband and a bewildered look, is doubtful; Mike, assisted by a shock of prematurely gray hair, is wiser. He knows that they’ll need an intermediary to succeed.

Reveling in a vibe — hopeful, testy, undisciplined — that’s an ideal match for its subject, “BlackBerry” finds much of its humor in Jim’s resolve to fashion productive employees from RIM’s ebulliently geeky staff, who look and act like middle schoolers and converse in a hybrid of tech-speak and movie quotes. It’s all Vogon poetry to Jim; but as Jared Raab’s restless camera careens around the chaotic work space, the excitement of disruption and the thrill of creation become tangible.

For the full movie review, see:

Jeannette Catsoulis. “When Geeks Clash With Suits, They’re All Thumbs.” The New York Times (Friday, May 12, 2023): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the movie review has the date May 11, 2023, and has the title “‘BlackBerry’ Review: Big Dreams, Little Keyboards.”)

The book that is the basis of the movie under review in the passages quoted above is:

McNish, Jacquie, and Sean Silcoff. Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry. New York: Flatiron Books, 2015.

“They Just Invest in How to Navigate This Bureaucracy”

(p. A1) Capella Space, a San Francisco-based start-up, is building a fleet of small, inexpensive satellites that can track enemy troops as they move at night, or under cloud cover that traditional optical satellites cannot see through.

Fortem Technologies, a small aerospace company in Utah, wants to supply the Pentagon with a new type of unmanned aircraft that can disable enemy drones.

HawkEye 360, a Virginia-based firm, has used private equity funds to launch its own satellites that use radio waves emitted by communications equipment and other electronic devices to detect the presence of enemy troop concentrations.

Each of these systems is getting real-world testing in the war in Ukraine, earning praise from top government officials there and validating investors who have been pouring money into the field.

But they are facing a stiff challenge on another field of battle: the Pentagon’s slow-moving, risk-averse military procurement bureaucracy.

When it comes to drones, satellites, artificial intelligence and other fields, start-up companies frequently offer the Pentagon cheaper, faster and more flexible options than the weapons systems produced by the handful of giant contractors the Pentagon normally relies on.

But while the military has provided small grants and short-term contracts to many start-ups, those agreements often expire too quickly and are not large enough for young companies to meet their payrolls — or grow as rapidly as their venture capital investors expect. Several have been forced to lay people off, delaying progress on new technologies and war-fighting tools.

. . .

(p. A8) From the early months of the war, SpaceX’s Starlink, the Elon Musk-founded satellite internet service, had played a critical role for frontline Ukrainian troops. But small drones and a denser collection of satellites are also helping to provide the capacity for pervasive surveillance, allowing Ukraine to identify and track threats and targets constantly.

A new generation of cheaper and more precise attack drones carrying bombs can loiter in the air autonomously until they find their targets. Artificial intelligence-backed computer systems can fuse this collected data and other feeds to make targeting decisions, faster than any human.

The Ukrainians have also innovated a great deal themselves, impressing Pentagon officials as they have converted commercial drones, for example, into mini bombers.

Taken together, said Thomas X. Hammes, who studies war-fighting history at the Pentagon-backed National Defense University, the developments represent a “genuine military revolution,” and one that is happening much more quickly than the shift from infantry that traveled by foot in World War I to the motorized and mechanized armies of World War II.

. . .

(p. A9) Perhaps the most revolutionary use of American technology in Ukraine has been the application of software that uses artificial intelligence, made by Palantir, to help with targeting efforts. The company’s chief executive, Alex Karp, traveled to Ukraine last year to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“If you go into battle with old school technology,” Mr. Karp said this year at an event to discuss artificial intelligence tools in warfare, “and you have an adversary that knows how to install and implement digitalized targeting in A.I., you obviously are at a massive disadvantage.”

Some experts say that artificial intelligence, which has been used in Ukraine to help sift through the massive loads of data being accumulated from surveillance, will ultimately prove as disruptive to the nature of war-fighting as nuclear weapons.

. . .

For Primer, the small artificial-intelligence firm based in downtown San Francisco, it was a breakthrough moment.

Not long after the war in Ukraine started, its engineers, working with Western allies, tapped into a tidal wave of intercepted Russian radio communications. It used advanced software to clean up the crackly sound, automatically translated the conversations, and most importantly, isolated moments when Russian soldiers in Ukraine were discussing weapons systems, locations and other tactically important information.

This same work would have taken hundreds of intelligence analysts to identify the few relevant clues in the mass of radio traffic. Now it was happening in a matter of minutes.

The findings were quickly matched up with other so-called open source intelligence streams, like geolocation data pulled from social media accounts, giving updates on the location of troops or equipment, that could be matched with surveillance video from drones or images from satellites.

“It’s getting situational awareness,” said Sean Gourley, the founder of Primer.

Yet at the same time, the Pentagon was still deciding when to move ahead with major purchases of its technology. The company was burning through its cash reserves too quickly, so Mr. Gourley laid off engineers and other staff members.

“These engineers are great at creating solutions to solve these problems, which is what matters,” Mr. Gourley said. “But there is the uncertainty: When is this contract going to close? It’s very, very hard to justify that spend.”

Mr. Gourley said he decided instead to invest more money in a government relations push, hiring a former top aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee to help the company promote its business in Washington.

“The big defense companies, they don’t really kind of invest in the tech,” he said. “They just invest in how to navigate this bureaucracy. That kind of sucks, but that’s how you’ve got to play this game.”

In interviews, nearly a dozen top executives of technology-oriented companies shared stories of stalled efforts or frustration.

For the full story, see:

Eric Lipton. “Pentagon Is Slow At Signing Deals With Innovators.” The New York Times (Monday, May 22, 2023): A1 & A8-A9.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 21, 2023, and has the title “Start-Ups Bring Silicon Valley Ethos to a Lumbering Military-Industrial Complex.”)