Navy Expert Gives Keynote Speech At Alma Mater

Michael D. Hardee graduated from Old Dominion in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and every intention of becoming an environmental scientist. “But life is what happens to you while you are planning something else,” the U.S. Navy rear admiral said in July as he toured the campus for the first time in 30 years.

Hardee was back at his alma mater as keynote speaker for the International Conference on Agile Manufacturing, sponsored by the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology’s Lean Institute. Just a few months earlier he had been promoted to rear admiral, and since earlier he had been promoted to rear admiral, and since 2005 he has been the Navy’s senior expert on aircraft maintenance.

Hardee, who received his master’s in material logistics from the Naval Postgraduate School, has become one of the Navy’s primary proponents of modern industry tactics. He has been responsible for bringing Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma programs and Theory of Constraints to fleet aviation maintenance. He and his RCM team won the Department of Defense Value Engineering Award in 2001. “I am in both camps, with ‘lean’ and ‘agility.’ I use both tools to transform organizations,” he said. “Agile thinking is necessary in a world so technologically advanced, and with customer demands and operations demands ever changing.”

Hardee’s decision to join the Navy in 1977 was partially due to a dearth of jobs in environmental science, but also influenced by his genes. “I am from five generations of Navy people, all enlisted,” he said. As NAVAIR’s commander of aviation depots, Hardee now works in and around Washington, D.C. But his career has mostly kept him on the West Coast.

Although these days he is more concerned with business and engineering, Hardee remembers fondly the botany courses he took at ODU from a young professor at the time, Lytton Musselman, now the Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany and chair of biological sciences. ODU’s coordinator of military affairs, Dick Whalen, arranged for him to meet with Musselman and President Roseann Runte on a return trip to campus in August.