The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies

I highly recommend this book for contracting pros. It's a little bit inscrutable, but I found some insights that helped me understand what happened to our career field. One of the main points of the book is that the pursuit of "maximizing shareholder value" stripped away organizational ability to manage complexity. He writes, "If a manager or management team doesn't have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing they're in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated." (Page 105) I would posit that the procurement system is, under this definition, effectively unregulated.

The answer isn't a FAR rewrite. (I might even argue that the FAR can be broken down into small enough pieces in order to be basically manageable.)

As Vern said a dozen times in the first Wifcon podcast (listened to it this morning, well done!), it's about people. Here's Davies at length on people:

"...if you are promising to restore the broken communication channels, you need to say how. These channels used to be made up of layer upon layer of middle managers and civil servants. Not only would it be extremely costly to bring them back, it's not obvious anyone would thank you for doing so. It's definitely not what the populists are proposing--there's no March for Bureaucracy, nobody's slogan is 'Red Tape Holds Us Together.'" (Page 254)

At the current moment, we're reducing the number of 1102s, at a time when the complexity and variety of things we are buying--especially services--is increasing.