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Richard Games
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Putting Leadership Ideas to Work
Richard Games
June 2008
Richard Games has some specific beliefs about leadership. "It's about enabling people and giving them opportunities to grow," he says. "It's about cultivating relationships and making connections inside and outside of the company. Above all, it's about seeing the big picture, about crossing boundaries."
But Games doesn't just think about leadership—he practices it. During his 25-year career at MITRE, he has had many opportunities to hone his leadership skills. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he led several mathematical research efforts in communications and sensor applications such as spread spectrum communications, digital signal processors, and neural networks. Later, Games led a variety of internal and external research and development projects in real-time embedded high performance computing and supported much of our sponsors' work in developing their own high performance computing systems. Most recently, he has led MITRE's efforts in Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) forensics.
To recognize his many leadership achievements, last year the MITRE Board of Trustees presented Games with its inaugural Trustees' Award for his leadership in the new field of GMTI forensics. This honor will be given periodically to recognize that great teams need great leaders.
"This first award sets the bar for future recipients," says MITRE President and CEO Al Grasso. "The role Games has played in this challenging area cannot be praised enough. GMTI forensics already stands as a significant success for our sponsors, resulting in the saving of lives in the field." In a letter to Games that accompanied his award, James Schlesinger, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, noted that "These activities have transformed the way the Intelligence Community views the effectiveness of GMTI sensors."
Pushing the Comfort Zone
As the chief engineer of MITRE's Center for Integrated Intelligence Systems (which operates within our Department of Defense federally funded research and development center), Games conceptualized this groundbreaking work area and has led it for more than three years. Spreading the word about GMTI forensics allows him to put many of his leadership ideas to work. For instance, leadership is also about knowing when to stand on the sidelines and cheer: He often encourages junior members of the team to brief MITRE's progress to key customers or the Board of Trustees.
"Giving people opportunities to grow in different ways is important," Games says. "And sometimes that means taking them outside of their comfort zone—out of the lab and into the real world meeting sponsors, for example."
He also believes in planting the seeds of leadership by expanding perspectives. For GMTI forensics, he tapped many of the engineers who helped build the GMTI sensor platforms to perform the analysis that moved this concept from a "fanciful idea" to an operational reality.
"The analysis part in the beginning was pretty intense—long hours, travel," Games says. "But the engineers were really jazzed about the work because of its urgency, even though it wasn't their background. The real payback has been that many of them came back and now support their regular acquisition programs with a broadened outlook about how everything fits together. They can see the big picture for themselves."
Crossing Boundaries
Demonstrating outwardly facing leadership has been equally critical to the success of GMTI forensics. "When this started, we weren't even sure our idea would work," Games remembers. "We had to build relationships with the various organizations and contractors that provided us with the data we needed to prove the concept." Fortunately, during a test exercise in the summer of 2004, the technology came through as promised—which caught the user community's attention. Since then, the program has spread. "Now, when you google 'GMTI forensics' you get lists of job opportunities for analysts," he says.
"It's all about connections, on many levels," Games explains. "Not only on the technical side, but in the way we're connecting to work programs across MITRE and to the different groups with which we collaborate: the military, the intelligence community, the commercial sector, and the research world. Above all, we're connecting directly to the tactical warfighters—the people who most benefit from this."
"Ultimately, my job as chief engineer is to enhance the support we provide to our sponsors—the quality and impact of our work," he says. "For future leaders, I believe that's what you have to do—find ways to integrate across those three communities—R&D, ops, and acquisition. When you can do that, there is sure to be a huge payoff to increasing MITRE's value to our sponsors."
—by Alison Stern-Dunyak
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