Contracting for Rapid Acquisition: A Practical & Personal Guide to Disrupting the Status Quo for a More Responsive Future

The Federal acquisition system hasn't changed as much as you think. And neither have the people trying to fix it.

In 2025, Lorna E. Tedder shelved this book before publication. The government landscape had shifted dramatically as the result of leadership changes, regulatory rewrites, and upheaval at every level. She wondered if three decades of hard-won acquisition expertise had suddenly become obsolete.

Then she remembered 2014. And 2007. And 2001. And 1995. She'd lived through this exact scenario before. The same problems, under new names, with new people who were just as certain they were the first to encounter them.

So she published the book anyway. The best of the best of her acquisition advice

Contracting for Rapid Acquisition is not a regulatory guide, a policy manual, or an innovation manifesto. It's what thirty-plus years as a Federal contracting professional, with rapid acquisition as her special sauce, actually looks like when distilled into the frameworks and mindsets that outlast every regime change, every new administration, and every round of acquisition reform.

What you'll find inside:

• The Trifecta of Effectiveness - the three-pronged concept that separates contracting officers who get things done from those who process paperwork
• The Crumblestones of Acquisition - six structural weak points that show up in every acquisition organization, regardless of budget or leadership
• The Fourth Turning lens - a framework for understanding where we are in the historical cycle of acquisition reform, and why the current chaos is not unprecedented
• How to set up your own rapid contracting office - the pattern-reading, portfolio-building, team-developing approach Tedder used to build an office that turned studies to contract, solving urgent needs in record time, but without heroics

This is not a book for people who have already decided nothing will work. It's for contracting professionals who want to move faster, for program managers who want to be better partners, and for anyone in the acquisition ecosystem who has ever sensed that there has to be a better way - and was right.

About the Author

Lorna E. Tedder spent more than thirty-five years in Federal acquisition, retiring as a Department of Defense contracting officer before spending five years as an Agile Acquisition Subject Matter Expert supporting multiple agencies.. She is the originator of acquisition techniques that have been adopted across the defense community, a past frequent speaker at acquisition conferences, and the author of multiple books across fiction and nonfiction. She writes at the intersection of lived experience and enduring principle.