Whiz Kids was a name given to a group of experts from RAND Corporation with which Robert McNamara surrounded himself in order to turn around the management of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) in the 1960s. The purpose was to shape a modern defense strategy in the Nuclear Age by bringing in economic analysis, operations research, game theory, computing, as well as implementing modern management systems to coordinate the huge dimension of operations of the DoD with methods such as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS). They were called the Whiz Kids recalling the group at Ford Motor Company that McNamara was part of a decade earlier. The group included (among others):
- Harold Brown
- Alain Enthoven
- Patrick Gross
- William Kaufmann
- Jan Lodal
- Frank Nicolai
- Merton Joseph Peck
- Charles O. Rossotti
- Henry Rowen
- John H. Rubel
- Ivan Selin
- Pierre Sprey
- Adam Yarmolinsky
Famous quotes containing the word kids:
“I had heard so much about how hard it was supposed to be that, when they were little, I thought it would be horrible when they got married and left. But thats silly you know. . . . By the time they grow up, they change and you change. Eventually, theyre not the same little kids and youre not the same mother. Its as if everything just falls into a pattern and youre ready.”
—Anonymous Mother. As quoted in Women of a Certain Age, by Lillian B. Rubin, ch. 2 (1979)