Change Agent Pod Cast Interview with Louis Andre - Chief of Staff, Defense Intelligence Agency - Part 2
June 30, 2006
Here is the second part to our change agent interview inside the Pentagon with Louis Andre. He begins this interview discussing the challenges of hiring the right talent and finding, what he believes, are the three most important qualities in a new hire; passion, creativity, and curiosity. As he continues to discuss how important creative thinking is, he quickly steers the conversation into a truly fascinating topic of harnessing innovation from within the agency. Mr. Andre recounted a fascinating story about an effort he prototyped to compile a focus group made up of Gen-Y, early twenty something’s that were tasked with the challenge of rethinking some fundamental process’s in DIA. He said, in a short amount of time the outputs from the this focus group were remarkable. This particular example created a lot of discussion among the contributors of GCA.com; we believe that this idea of leveraging the generation who has grown up with the internet to help rethink information flow, is extremely powerful. We plan to focus on and explore this concept in future posts.
In this podcast Louis Andre discusses the following topics:
- Hiring the right talent
- Building an environment that embraces creative thinking
- A hunt for "dumb policies"
- Training approaches for DIA employees
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