WASHINGTON—When Pat Shanahan, who now serves as acting defense secretary, arrived at the Pentagon in 2017 as the Defense Department’s No. 2, he aimed to inject the massive bureaucracy with lessons he had learned as a successful executive at aerospace giant Boeing Co. Borrowing from Japanese corporate culture, Mr. Shanahan began by creating an “Obeya,” a war room of sorts for communications and decision-making—a perfect remedy to what he saw as a broken bureaucracy. The Pentagon’s new Obeya was a large, classified room with...

Source: Wall Street Journal February 03, 2019 17:03 UTC