Air Force leader reflects on his time at MIT

  • Published
  • By Brian Brackens
  • Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Public Affairs
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio – Uprooting from Dayton, Ohio to spend a year as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT, was an experience of a life-time for John Bailey, an engineer and deputy director of the Agile Development Office within the Fighters and Advanced Aircraft Directorate.

Nominated by the U.S. Air Force in 2019, Bailey was one of 103 individuals ultimately selected for the prestigious and highly competitive MIT Sloan Fellows MBA Program, class of 2020.

The origins of the fellowship program go back more than 80 years to Alfred P. Sloan an automotive and management pioneer and legendary president of General Motors.

In the 1920s Sloan had a problem. His high performing mid-level engineers at GM were not turning into good managers and leaders. Reaching out to his alma mater, MIT, Sloan helped established a program for talented engineers to develop the business and leadership skills needed to become successful company executives.

Today, the fellowship draws not only engineers but successful individuals from a variety of professions and industries from all over the world and count many distinguished alumni including former United Nations Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Kofi Annan.

During a recent interview, Bailey reflected on his time at MIT and the impact on his career. 
 
Q: Tell me about your experience in the MIT Sloan Fellows MBA Program?
Bailey: It was an amazing experience. I had a lot of flexibility and was able to design a curriculum for the year. During my time in the program, I focused on enterprise leadership, artificial intelligence, and innovation. Some of the classes I took were strategic organizational design, strategic communication, and all of the core business classes; financial management, corporate finance, accounting, and micro-economics. I also had a couple of special focus areas, with analytics and artificial intelligence, and was able to write codes and scripts for deep learning algorithms and look at different business applications for them. One of my favorite projects was writing an optimization algorithm for figuring out where to place different warehouses and retail stores for a shoe company that was looking to expand in a new region.
 
Another focus area was entrepreneurship. That ended up being a lot of fun. Having the opportunity to create your own business and building a business strategy, business plan and speaking to potential investors and getting them to buy in or not on your idea and tell you what’s working or not working. It was just a fun class and really helped demystify what it would be like to start a business.
  
Q: What did class assignments look like?
Bailey: Just about everything was group work, and they [MIT] really prioritized collaboration in diverse teams. I remember my first week, one of the professors said that great creativity comes out of conflict and collaboration and that one of the key skills he wanted everyone to leave with was the ability to construct and resolve conflict with people from different backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, providing their unique insight to what the solution should be. So every setting was a team setting and every setting was with someone from a different background. I would say that of all the things about the program that I love, this was perhaps the most unique and special.
 
Q: How has your experience at MIT helped you in your current job?
Bailey: I currently work in the Agile Development Office, which is pioneering digital acquisition and how the Air Force can modernize the way we buy aircraft.  Having the opportunity to take a year and detach from my role with the Air Force, and reflect on how I worked then and what my leadership values are, has made me more open minded towards new ideas, and new ways of doing business.
I also learned a lot about artificial intelligence and data analytics. As we studied the state of the world, the state of business, the trajectory that all of this is moving, it gave me convictions that we [Air Force] need to digitize. The Air Force has to modernize and move towards software defined capabilities to become a leader in analytics and artificial intelligence, because that’s what will accelerate decision making. So much of winning wars comes down to the speed of making decisions.

Q: How was the move or transition from Dayton to Massachusetts?
Bailey: The kids [four girls], wife and I had some trepidation leaving our home here in Dayton, but there was also a lot of excitement. Of course it was a big transition for the kids. My oldest daughter was in eighth grade, and switching junior high schools was a big challenge. But they [kids] got to experience much more diversity in their classes and curriculum that will make them better, more open minded people.  They flourished socially and academically, and I’m very proud of how well they did.

A big part of our year was the transition to remote learning. That was significant part of our experience. We basically went from an experience that was very outdoors, that was surrounded by lots of people, experiencing new things, new locations, to being locked into our rental house in a place very far from our home. That required a lot of adaptation for us, like everyone. But overall, we had a positive experience.
 
Q: What’s next for you?
Bailey: I started working my current job back in June of 2020, three days after graduating from the MIT Program. I’ve been working on some challenging and new programs for the Air Force, including Next-Generation Air Dominance and Skyborg.  I know I want to keep serving, and I’m passionate about our mission, modernizing Air Force systems and the way we do business. Right now, I’m in a spot where I’m using every bit of what I learned both in my previous jobs and year at MIT.