GC 520 — Organizational Theory & Governance (14-week syllabus)
Every pursuit is run by an organization — a firm, a team, a coalition — and every organization is run by rules, incentives, and decision rights. This course supplies the organizational theory the discipline runs on: why organizations exist, how they govern, where the ethical walls are, and how the public side and the private side hold each other accountable.
Course number: GC 520 · Credits: 3 · Format: 14 weeks, one 75-minute session per week (plus reading and a weekly written deliverable). Audience: Graduate students in the MS in Capture Management & Government Business Development. Prerequisites: None beyond the program's foundations. Recommended companion: GC 501 (microeconomics) — this course is the firm-side companion to the market-side course. Texts: the doctrine and literacy folders of this repository; the course reader (agency theory, organization design, and procurement-governance materials). No software required — the course is stack-agnostic by design (doctrine/08).
Learning outcomes
By the end of this course, a student can:
- Explain why organizations exist (transaction costs, agency costs) and why the federal market is run through a particular set of organizational forms.
- Use agency theory to explain the fundamental problem of public procurement: the government (principal) buys from a firm (agent) under asymmetric information, and the rules are the mechanism that makes that relationship survivable.
- Explain the FAR as governance technology: a machinery for forcing fairness, disclosure, and accountability out of an inherently asymmetric relationship.
- Design a gate governance system for a pursuit organization: the criteria written in advance, the decision rights, the owners, and the accountability loop.
- Locate the ethical boundaries of the discipline: the procurement-integrity rules, the organizational-conflict-of-interest (OCI) regime, and the ethical walls that keep the game fair.
- Identify and manage conflicts of interest — both the legal kind (FAR 9.5 OCI) and the organizational kind (a capture leader who decides whether to pursue the project they hope to win).
- Analyze multi-organizational forms — prime/sub, joint venture, mentor-protege, consortium — as governance structures with distinct decision rights and risks.
- Diagnose governance failure from real procurement scandals and design the control that would have prevented it.
- Build the learning loop into the organization: debriefs, retrospectives, and the honest post-mortem.
Weekly schedule
| Week | Theme | In-session (75 min) | Reading / material | Assignment due next week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Organizations as governance structures | Why a firm, not a market, for pursuit work? The boundary of the firm; the ORBITAL as a governance skeleton for a single pursuit. | doctrine/06; the course reader on organizational theory | One-page analysis: which ORBITAL axes are governance mechanisms, and which are resource commitments? |
| 2 | The principal–agent problem | The government buys from a firm that knows more than it does. Adverse selection, moral hazard, and the information problem at the heart of procurement. | doctrine/04; the course reader on agency theory | Memo: locate the agency problem in a real solicitation — where does the buyer not know what the seller knows, and what does the rulebook force the seller to reveal? |
| 3 | The FAR as governance technology | The rulebook as a fairness machine: disclosure, competition, accountability. What the rules protect, and who bears the cost of following them. | doctrine/02; doctrine/04; literacy/how-to-read-an-rfp | Short paper: defend or attack the proposition that the FAR is a governance technology, not a burden. |
| 4 | Gates as decision systems | The four parts of a gate; owner-with-standing vs. owner-with-process; the ladder of governance for a full pursuit. Designing gates that survive pressure. | doctrine/04; the gate canon at concept altitude | Gate charter: write the complete gate structure for a case pursuit — criteria, evidence, decision owner, escalation. |
| 5 | Procurement integrity | The integrity regime: what the rules prohibit, why the system treats integrity as structural rather than personal, and the professional's obligation inside it. | doctrine/04; the course reader on procurement integrity | Integrity memo: map the integrity exposure of a typical pursuit org and the controls that contain it. |
| 6 | Ethical walls and ethical firewalls | Information barriers inside a firm: the wall between capture and evaluation, between business development and proposal, between teammates who compete elsewhere. When a wall is structural, not a matter of trust. | doctrine/04; the course reader on ethical walls | Case analysis: design the ethical wall for a firm that both primes one pursuit and subs on a competitor's team for another. |
| 7 | Organizational conflicts of interest | FAR 9.5 OCI: biased ground rules, unequal access to information, impaired objectivity. Why OCI is a knockout, not a risk. The relationship between OCI and the ethical wall. | the OCI canon at concept altitude; doctrine/04 | OCI screening: run a real solicitation and a case firm through the OCI categories; state the disposition for each. |
| 8 | Governance of the pursuit organization | Decision rights across the pipeline: who can say yes, who can say no, who can escalate. The RACI of a capture org; the accountability loop. | doctrine/03; doctrine/04 | Org design: draw the governance map of a pursuit organization — the gates, the owners, the escalation path, the accountability loop. |
| 9 | Midterm | In-class examination: analyze a real governance situation — an organization, its decision rights, its integrity exposure, its OCI posture — and redesign it. | (review weeks 1–8) | Midterm submission. |
| 10 | Multi-organizational forms | Prime/sub, JV, mentor-protege, consortium as governance structures. Who holds decision rights, where the seams are, and what each form's failure modes are. | the teaming/JV canon at concept altitude; doctrine/07 | Memo: compare two organizational forms for a case pursuit — decision rights, risk, and governance seams. |
| 11 | Incentive design inside the firm | Compensation, authority, and information inside a pursuit org. How the firm's own incentives align (or misalign) with the market's incentives. B&P budgets as governance. | doctrine/05; the course reader on organizational incentives | Memo: design an incentive structure for a capture team that rewards disciplined pursuit, not volume of chasing. |
| 12 | Governance failures | Real procurement scandals as case studies: what broke, which control was missing, what the lesson is. The anatomy of a governance failure. | the course reader on procurement failures; doctrine/04 | Post-mortem: take a published procurement scandal and write the control that would have prevented it. |
| 13 | The learning organization | Debriefs, retrospectives, the post-mortem that is not a blame exercise. The learning loop (analyze → sequence → evolve) as an organizational capability. | doctrine/03; doctrine/07 | Retrospective design: build a debrief-and-retrospective system for a pursuit org, with the honest-post-mortem rules stated. |
| 14 | Synthesis: the governed pursuit organization | The whole course in one frame: a pursuit organization is a governance system — gates, walls, decision rights, and a learning loop. Final panel defense of the governance design. | (course synthesis) | Final paper: "The governance of [your] pursuit organization," 2,500 words, defended before a panel. |
Assessment summary
- Weekly deliverables — 40%. Each a concrete governance artifact (a gate charter, a wall design, an OCI screening, a retrospective system).
- Midterm — 25%. In-class governance analysis and redesign.
- Final paper + panel defense — 25%. A complete governance design for a pursuit organization, defended before a panel that probes the seams.
- Participation and peer review — 10%.
The graduate rubric
| Criterion | Excellent | Proficient | Developing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organizational reasoning | Uses the right theory and applies it to the specific organization | Right theory, weaker application | Theory absent or decorative |
| Governance precision | Decision rights, criteria, owners, and escalation paths are explicit | Mostly explicit | Vague on who decides and how |
| Integrity discipline | Walls and OCI posture are structural, correct, and defensible | Sound but informal | Boundary unclear or unsafe |
| Accountability | The design closes the learning loop; failure is a design input | Loop present but weak | No learning loop |
Policies
- Integrity is the subject and the standard. This course teaches procurement integrity; it also enforces it. Fabricated evidence, invented cases, or misrepresented work fails the assessment.
- Real organizations, safe analysis. We analyze real organizations, real solicitations, and real published failures — never a live competition and never privileged information from a student's employer.
- Late work. An honest early warning beats a silent late submission.
The market trusts organizations that govern themselves. This course is where you learn to build one.