Startup founders are used to short distances between a decision and its execution. A small team decides, and the company moves. Justin Fulcher, who spent six months as a senior advisor at the Department of Defense, says government flips that arrangement on its head.
Inside a federal agency, resources are vast but authority is scattered. Legal counsels, oversight bodies, appropriators, and career civil servants all hold legitimate power to delay, reshape, or block a proposal. The very institutions that protect the mission also make change difficult.
A Lesson Learned at the Pentagon
Fulcher saw this firsthand while working under Secretary Hegseth on acquisition reform and IT modernization across defense agencies. One initiative he contributed to aimed to shrink software procurement timelines from years to months. That goal, he found, had little to do with technology. It was an organizational puzzle requiring alignment among teams with distinct institutional histories, separate legal constraints, and differing tolerances for uncertainty.
“In an MBA program, stakeholder management is a case study,” Justin Fulcher has said. “In government, it is the entire job.”
Why the Skill Travels
Justin Fulcher argues that this kind of coalition building follows a separate logic from the private sector, which tends to reward speed and visibility. Federal work depends on patience, procedure, and credibility. Positional authority counts for less than newcomers expect.
That logic, he contends, carries directly into any later work with large regulated organizations. A founder who has navigated a defense bureaucracy understands how to move a proposal through competing interests without assuming that the loudest voice or the fastest timeline will win.
His broader view is that government offers something no classroom can match. “Government gives you something the private sector cannot manufacture,” Fulcher has said. “An understanding of how the systems that everything else depends on actually work.”
For Justin Fulcher, stakeholder management stopped being a theory once he started at the Pentagon. It became the daily substance of the work, and he believes other founders would gain from learning it the same way. Read this article for additional information.
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