Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Toni Townes-Whitley today officially becomes CEO of Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a technology integrator based in Reston, Virginia. Townes-Whitley’s appointment is notable for a number of reasons: She is one of two Black women currently running Fortune 500 companies (TIAA’s Thasunda Brown Duckett is the other; Rosalind Brewer left the top job at Walgreens Boots Alliance earlier this year). Townes-Whitley succeeds Nazzic S. Keene, a rare example of a woman CEO handing off to another woman at a large publicly-held company.
Townes-Whitley is well-positioned to lead SAIC, which provides tech and engineering services primarily to the U.S. government. Her father is a retired 3-star Army general, and for years, she served as president of U.S. regulated industries for Microsoft. She spoke with me exclusively ahead of officially taking the CEO reins about her historic ascent, lessons learned from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and her advice for corporate America on diversifying its CEO ranks. Edited excerpts follow:
Modern CEO: People have heard the name, but I think even someone who reads The Wall Street Journal every day would be hard pressed to describe SAIC. Give me your elevator-ride version of what SAIC does.
Toni Townes-Whitley: I would describe us in three ways. We provide mission support, mission IT, and mission engineering to the Department of Defense, the intelligence agencies, and to the space agencies, including Space Force, as well as government agencies in the civilian space.
MC: When you say “mission,” does that refer to projects or something more holistic?
TTW: The Army, Navy, and Air Force, for example, tend to run their services by major programs around how they execute their various efforts to secure national defense. We operate at a program level, where we are providing humans who extend their programs’ capability—experts on the ground. We [also] provide cloud data analytics as well as edge computing that allows them to get real-time data for decision-making, and engineering.
MC: How did your experience at Microsoft prepare you for this role?
TTW: I was managing a fairly large portfolio—not only government but regulated industries across the U.S.—and had an opportunity to run part of the global operation at Microsoft. It really gives you a sense of scalability and how you take a portfolio and scale it over time. I came out of the government business, but I quickly went into financial services, healthcare, state and local government, as well as higher education. All of these are highly regulated industries, and a lot of the technology tools being built for the future are starting to converge across these sectors. The Microsoft opportunity allowed me to go beyond government and apply some commercial best practice into the [regulated] space. Finally, Microsoft was in a shift when I joined in 2015. Satya Nadella, the CEO, was my final interview. He kind of had me at hello, but I tried to play hard-to-get for a few minutes there. When I decided to join, one of the pivots that I talked to Satya about was shifting the company from [building] innovation to having a purpose-driven approach to technology. As excited as we got about what we could build and innovate, if it wasn’t applicable to solving real-life problems, we weren’t going to spend a lot of time or attention there. I believe SAIC has some of that in its journey—[thinking] about how to continually drive toward applied innovation.
MC: What, if anything, did you learn from Satya Nadella about leadership that you’ll apply in this new role?
TTW: When I joined the company, Satya was on a journey toward the growth mindset. He had just talked about the growth mindset research from Carol Dweck at Stanford, and we had just laid out the principles of how to build curiosity in a company. That is one particular theme that I want to bring in and reinforce at SAIC. Another was around empathy. I’m an economist by training, and I call Satya a closet economist. Even though he’s an engineer’s engineer, he really had a sense of macro and micro economics of the work that we do, the impact that we could have way beyond the solution or a license or a software capability. SAIC already has such a strong sense of mission and impact, and the idea here is for us to expand the denominator beyond the defense industrial base, which has been our core, to all of the critical infrastructure across the U.S., and really be open to how we’re part of an ecosystem of securing this country.
MC: What are some of the things you are hoping to accomplish in your first 100 days?
TTW: I’m starting with a hypothesis that this company, with its rich legacy and its current portfolio, is undervalued by the market. And it is also slightly misunderstood. How do we differentiate? What is our unique capability? I think we have to articulate that better, and we actually have to execute against it. I’ve just hired a chief innovation officer coming right out of the Air Force. She’s going to bring some real-world perspective to our portfolio, how we go to market, and how we introduce more innovation to our customers. We have a culture of long-tenured, high-integrity relationships with our customers, but we’re also a large company, and it’s very easy to define yourself by your customer’s mission and lose sight of the company’s mission. And so [you want to shift to] having an enterprise mindset, as well as entrepreneurial execution, so that you feel like an owner, and you execute like an owner as part of your cultural transformation. And finally, our brand. I know SAIC, but I think our brand has been slightly diluted, as many in the system integration industry have during the last few years. So, we need to be crystal clear about our brand going forward.
MC: SAIC’s succession represents female-CEO–to–female-CEO handoff. (I remember when Anne Mulcahy handed the reins to Ursula Burns at Xerox—the first time a woman succeeded a woman as CEO of a Fortune 500 company.) What do you think it is about the SAIC board or the succession process that enabled this still all-too-rare female-to-female handoff?
TTW: I think you answered the question in your question. The board, the culture of the organization, and I would argue, maybe the experience of the two leaders, came together to create what has been for me personally the most seamless transition I’ve had professionally. The board was very clear on their expectations in their CEO search. They highlighted their focus on profitable organic growth, but also on becoming a leader in our peer group and getting back to leadership in the market. They created an environment where we had this three- to four-month transition where we had time and space to give each other, and to learn from each other. [Nazzic Keene] is a colleague and a friend, and quite frankly, I wouldn’t have taken this role had I not known this was her decision to move forward. [Keene announced her retirement on May 18.]
MC: With the departure of Roz Brewer from Walgreens, you’ll be one of just two Black women running a Fortune 500 company. What message do you want to send shareholders, boards, and corporate America about the need for greater diversity at the CEO level?
TTW: I was with the other female in our duo just a few days ago, and we were talking about the importance of how we show up and that we have a greater pipeline into these roles. And the way you build that greater pipeline begins with ensuring, in every company that you’re aware of, the diversity that exists at specific points of career and specific types of opportunities. For example, I remember years ago, I think it was Accenture that started something called assignment boards that [identified] the plum assignments that move a career. Maybe it’s a P&L opportunity or a [role] in innovation leadership. How diverse are we at those points? Are we diverse in the areas that are going to move people’s careers? And if we’re diverse there, you start to see career progression that looks in line with the greater population.
This is an opportunity for me not only as a female but as an African American female. We’ve never had an African American female as a CEO in national security. And yet, if you look at our security forces, they’re quite diverse. And so, we’ve got to ask ourselves, both by sector and by size of company, why are we not building that pipeline?
And then, quite frankly, people like myself and others—we have to show up. We have to demonstrate that we can make this happen. We can grow businesses, we understand top line, bottom line, and all of the shareholder pressures, and we can deliver. And I think the more that occurs, you’re going to start to see some changes.
Read and watch: women CEOs
TIAA’s Thasunda Brown Duckett talks love, loss, and legacy with Essence CEO Caroline Wanga
The surge in women CEOs is no coincidence
Lidiane Jones is the glue between Salesforce and Slack
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