This ex-Microsoft executive-turned-CEO is betting on ‘gritty tech’

08/07/2024, 7:14 AM
fastcompany.com

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.

Modern CEO readers may have first met Toni Townes-Whitley in this newsletter a year ago, when she became CEO of Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, a technology company based in Reston, Virginia. She’s spent the past 12 months realigning the company for growth after it posted three or four years of fairly flat results. (Revenue for SAIC’s fiscal 2024 was $7.4 billion, down 3% from the year earlier, due partly to some divestitures and contract completions. Revenue in 2023 was up about 4%.)

Townes-Whitley, who previously served as president of U.S.-regulated industries at Microsoft, sees opportunity in providing higher-margin work such as “anything as a service” cloud services and consulting for SAIC’s core customers in the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies. She also sees opportunity in using SAIC’s collective expertise to increase work for other government-sector customers such as the State Department, Department of Veterans Affairs, and health agencies.

The gritty truth

While her counterparts at other tech companies often like to boast about their latest applications, systems, and software in futuristic or lofty ways, Townes-Whitley touts SAIC’s strength in what she calls “gritty tech.”

“Gritty is when you’re in a mission-critical environment. It’s how you receive data, how you integrate with old and new systems [in a way] that people think is seamless,” she says. “We do all that integration; we make all those connections. Does it feel a little blue collar? Maybe. But we love getting into technology at that level.”

Other engagements SAIC cites as examples of gritty tech include warfighter and flight simulations for different branches of the U.S. military and a portfolio of products for rocket artillery systems.

Smart tech made simpler

Townes-Whitley is quick to note that gritty doesn’t mean “old school.” She says SAIC has developed tools for using artificial intelligence (AI), the hottest topic in technology right now. But her customers aren’t sitting in skyscrapers or home offices using copilots to help them create images for a presentation. “When we think of AI, it has to be the most secure; it has to be low code or no code,” she says. “We’re supporting warfighters deployed where there’s no data center. They’re out in very tough environments. They’ve got to be able to access and understand this data very quickly. So, we’ve got to make easy and relatable AI.”

SAIC’s embrace of gritty, real-world technology in some ways mirrors Satya Nadella’s adoption of language that made Microsoft’s tech feel more connected to its customers. Shortly after Nadella became CEO of the software giant in 2014, he began describing its purpose as “empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Townes-Whitley says that shift helped woo talent to Microsoft, and she hopes an applied, adaptable, and entrepreneurial approach to tech will attract a new generation of employees at SAIC. “We are hands-on-keyboards, super secure, real time. There’s an energy around that,” she says. “I’m finding that young people, particularly with STEM careers, want to be purposeful [in their work].”

Indeed, for years, leaders have preached that purpose—a North Star tied to customer needs and corporate strategy—leads to greater employee productivity and engagement. Technologists, such as the ones SAIC employs, are no exception. “To me, the blinking cursor represents raw potential—a computer asking, nay begging, to be used to make the world different and better in some small way today,” software developer and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson once wrote in Fast Company.

Equity (still) in action

Townes-Whitley, who recently was named No. 95 on Fortune’s “Most Powerful Women in Business” list and who is one of only two Black women running a Fortune 500 company (Thasunda Brown Duckett at TIAA is the other), also believes SAIC’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) can be an asset in attracting and retaining talent. Her executive leadership team is 70% female or people of color, thanks in part to hires and promotions under her tenure.

And while she acknowledges that some companies have cooled in their commitments to DEI, she says she is comfortable with SAIC’s support for diversity, especially given its position as a government and public-sector supplier. “It is customer aligned, it is part of our core values, and it actually [has been] part of our mission statements over the last 55 years,” she says.

How is your team getting gritty?

What’s your company’s equivalent of “gritty tech”? What’s the not-so-sexy secret sauce that excites employees? Send your examples to me at [email protected] and your answer may form the basis of a future newsletter.