Every MBA program teaches stakeholder management as a subject. Justin Fulcher says government is the only place that turns it into daily practice, and his six months as a senior advisor at the Defense Department gave him a close look at why the two rarely resemble each other.
A startup concentrates authority in a small founding team, so the distance between a decision and its execution stays short even when resources are tight. Government inverts that arrangement almost completely. Resources are abundant, but authority spreads across agencies, legal counsels, oversight bodies, appropriators, and career staff, each with a legitimate claim to slow, redirect, or block a proposal before it moves forward.
A Practicum Instead of a Case Study
Fulcher encountered this directly while working under Secretary Hegseth on acquisition reform and IT modernization across defense agencies. Compressing software procurement timelines from years to months, one of the projects he contributed to, was not primarily a technical challenge. It required building agreement among teams that carried different institutional histories, different legal boundaries, and different comfort levels with uncertainty.
“In an MBA program, stakeholder management is a case study,” Justin Fulcher has said. “In government, it is the entire job.”
Justin Fulcher points to that gap as the reason coalition building inside a federal agency runs on a different logic than it does in a private company. The private sector rewards speed and visible wins on a short timeline. Progress inside a large institution depends instead on patience, procedure, and credibility earned over time rather than authority handed down from a title. Justin Fulcher building telehealth and workforce programs across regulated markets before joining the Pentagon, says that logic transfers directly into any later work inside large, heavily regulated organizations, which is exactly where his attention has turned since completing his government service and returning to defense technology work. Read this article for additional information.
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