Retired Leidos exec shares how the company instilled agility into its corporate culture

Gerry Fasano, now former chief growth officer for Leidos as of April 4, jokes that he worked at four companies over 40 years but never had to look for a job.

Fasano's career path in many ways mirrors the consolidation that has taken place across the defense industry since the early 1990s.

He started at GE Aerospace, the same company his father worked for. GE Aerospace was then acquired by Martin Marietta, which merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin. Then in 2016, Lockheed divested the Information Systems and Global Solutions business to Leidos.

Fasano had a front row seat for the Leidos-IS&GS merger.

"It was the best job I ever had,” he said. “You just don’t really get the chance to step back and start a company from scratch.”

Though IS&GS and Leidos had decades of tradition and work history behind them, the integration of the two roughly equal-sized businesses was about creating a new company.

Fasano led that effort and his team spent many nights at a now-defunct Italian restaurant n Reston, Virginia. They worked with an easel to sketch out the mission, values and vision for what became "New Leidos."

Eventually, there was a team of nearly 200 working on the integration effort. They were broken down into work streams.

“What is our go-to market strategy? A big decision. What are enterprise systems? A big decision. How do you want to organize? Another big decision,” Fasano said.

There also was the need to establish what Fasano called decision rights.

“What are the authorities that you have if you’re running a sector or a business or you’re running a program,” he said. “it’s really hard for a company to pull the brakes and say let’s start over.”

The merger and integration of two organizations, each with around $5 billion in revenue and 16,000 employees, created an opportunity to make something new.

“It forced us to do it and in doing it, we swept away the shortfalls or more positively, accentuated the strengths of each other and made sure we kept that,” he said.

That process from just over nine years ago created the competitive advantage he says the company still possesses today.

“We really are a new company that had to start over, and most companies don’t have that luxury,” he said.

Leidos created a flatter organization that can quickly make decisions and coupled that with a willingness to invest its own resources into a solution for customers, Fasano said.

One example is Artemis II, a Challenger 650 business jet that Leidos outfitted into an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft.

“This customer had a tough mission, but we had a vision that they could do it with a different platform and buy it as a service,” he said.

There was not a long-drawn-out debate at the company. Within four days, they bought a jet and began outfitting it.