One of the big opportunities the company sees is in the area of IT modernization and here the company plans to pursue a large Navy effort.
With the addition of Lockheed, Leidos is retaining that decentralized authority but also adding the discipline and structure from Lockheed that is need to pursue large government programs, he said. “The culture of Leidos and SAIC was lean and people had the authority to make decisions and operate at the lower levels,” Fasano said.
There are only four basic levels in the organization, Fasano said: But if it is something under $100 million for example, the decision can be made lower in the organization. If it is a large opportunity, it’ll flow to Krone’s level. The company has a four-page document known an authority to operate that guides when decisions need to flow up in the organization. “I think you can count them on two hands,” he said. “We were looking for the best athletes,” Fasano said.Īnother goal was to create agile and adaptable organization, which seems almost an impossibility for a company with total overall revenue now above $10 billion and 32,000 employees.īut Fasano explained that the corporate infrastructure – those reporting directly to Krone – is relatively small. That means that if a Leidos person was picked to run an operation, then a Lockheed person was picked as a deputy, and vice versa. One decision that was made early on by Leidos Chairman and CEO Roger Krone was that this wasn’t going to be a takeover but a real merger, Fasano told Washington Technology. When the decision was made to merge with Leidos, Fasano led that effort with Leidos counterpart Mike Leiter. In the beginning, it wasn’t known whether IS&GS would be acquired, spun out as its own entity or merged into another company. “We now have the ability to pursue any program in any country in the world,” said Gerry Fasano, executive vice president and chief of business development and strategy at Leidos.įasano came to Leidos from Lockheed and was charged with managing the separation of IS&GS from its former parent. The chatter in the market after the deal was announced included a lot of comments about why did Leidos need to be so large.īut for company executives the reasoning is clear. The next closest pure play is CSRA at No.
Size does matter here as Leidos is by far the largest pure play IT company on the Top 100 with $6.9 billion in prime contracts during fiscal year 2016. The rankings are a minor part of the transformation.
Both companies retained their status as top 20 companies in Washington Technology’s annual Top 100 rankings.īut three years into its new Leidos identity, the company turned that branding effort on its head last year when it made one of the biggest pure play IT deals ever in the market with the $5 billion merger into the former Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services segment. With that split in 2013, SAIC changed its name to Leidos and the portion spun off retained the SAIC name. You would think that orchestrating a split of its heritage company, Science Applications International Corp. Few companies have gone through these kinds of transformation in recent years.