A Day in the Life of an Advanced Study Program Student

Organizational learning brought Jay Fleming to MIT. Since he was commissioned in 1998, he has excelled in the Air Force’s rigorous internal career training and most recently served as chief of acquisitions for a Space and Missile Systems Center group in Los Angeles. Now, as a major, he had the opportunity to spend a year developing competencies outside the military. So he came to MIT.

Fleming, as a 2011-12 National Defense Fellow with the MIT Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI), enrolled in the MIT Advanced Study Program so he could learn how to apply organizational learning principles to the Air Force. When he began a new assignment at the Pentagon in July, he brought new learning tools to the job. “My new work involves an extremely technical, classified program,” Fleming says. “My time spent at MIT helped open the door to a fresh, new way of thinking.”

The Air Force does a good job on specific technical training, but not necessarily on strategic organizational learning, Fleming says. He focused on that topic in two courses led by Professor Debbie Nightingale, his advisor: Integrating the Lean Enterprise and Enterprise Architecting.

“We looked at more effective and efficient ways to organize enterprises, whether that is the breath of scale of the Air Force or small in scope like an office area.”

As a class project, Fleming and classmates worked with the Veteran Affairs’ Boston Healthcare System. From making rounds with the physicians and nurses to talking with the veterans, Fleming focused on enterprise evaluation as well as understanding the patients’ perspectives. “It’s been a great project and now we can follow through with recommendations for the future.”

So what was a typical day for Fleming?

On Wednesdays, for example, Fleming arrived on campus at 9 a.m. for his Energy Policy for a Sustainable Future class.

At Noon, he attended a weekly Security Studies seminar to hear discussions on topics from Defense Department budgets to the CIA disaster in Khost, Afghanistan.

About 1 pm, Fleming settled in to the Dewey Library to read, take notes, and conduct research online.

At the 4pm, LAI Research Seminar, he heard researchers share work in progress.

Around 5:30pm, Fleming often had dinner with colleagues or attended an MIT Advanced Study Program event.

About 8pm, he was on the last bus to his hotel near Hanscom Air Force base. He worked out most nights at a nearby gym from 9–11 p.m., and then he returned home to read and study until around 3 a.m. After a few hours of sleep, he was off again.

During Fleming’s year on campus, he also took courses that built on his background—he had earned a criminal studies bachelor’s degree in 1998 and an MBA in 2001. At MIT, he took a comparative politics seminar and Sloan courses including managerial psychology, systems optimization, business sustainability, and developing breakthrough products.

In his breakthrough products course, for example, he learned that the skate board industry was spawned during a California drought when kids were looking for something to do and there were a lot of empty swimming pools.

“There are so many different ways of looking at a problem,” Fleming notes. “One of the primary goals of the fellowship is to take Air Force officers out of their comfort zone and introduce them to a different ideas and different ways of thinking. My time spent working on LAI class projects served to introduce me not only to the course material and objectives, but to the different thoughts, opinions, and ideas of the diverse team I was working with. I was consistently amazed at the different ways we all approached a problem...with none of us being “right” or “wrong,” and then watching us compromise to the best solution for all. This was particular strength of the program and one that paid great dividends in my learning experience.”