MITRE management states all of the "right" thnigs they should be saying.....we serve in the public interest, we need to tell the government sponsors what they need to hear, not what we think will make them like us, we need to reach across government sponsors to facilitate system solutions. But, their day-to-day decision process does not follow this. The way to get ahead at MITRE is to get the government to send a lot of money to MITRE, find a General Officer who likes you personally and will send awards to MITRE, constantly promote yourself and your program, and never tell the truth in MITRE meetings it is critical of other MITRE management.
In truth, MITRE is a reasonably easy place to manage. We are non-profit and run FFRDCs, so we compete for the FFRDC contract, but after that the government can ask us to do work and send money without much effort for them or us. The hard part is running the FFRDCs in such a way as to acheive all of the goals stated in "The MITRE Way" - the "new" plan for how we should be running the organization. To really help the government at a system level across government sponsors is hard and takes real management. Since we have promoted people who instead follow the "MITRE Way to Get Ahead" we have ended up with people who either don't know how to manage effectively to acheive the stated goals, or have been rewarded and promoted through the years by following another set of rules.
In typical fashion, MITRE management hired an outside advisor to survey the customer and tell them what the senior staff already knew. Individual MITRE employees are very well thought of by their immediate customers, but those same customers both expect MITRE to be doing the system engineering job and at the same time don't think we are. So, MITRE established the new "MITRE Way" to present a good front about what we are doing without really doing what is necessary and that is to really understand how we got to where we are. What they either don't understand or don't care about is that the MITRE Way goals are the result of good management not the way to establish good management.
The end result is that a lot of senior staff have given up on MITRE as an organization and have instead decided to do what they can as individuals. It won't be easy to reengage the core of very capable people who have made that judgment. The organization also suffers from a feeling from more junior and mid-level staff that there is no where to go in their career at MITRE.
