Rocio Bauer’s profile over at WashingtonExec is worth your time if you’re thinking about what leadership looks like when you’re serving the Army through technology. The through-line matters: she’s not leading tech for its own sake, but in service of a mission and the people executing it.
That distinction shows up in every search I run for senior technology roles on the federal side. The executives who land well — and stay — understand they’re inheritors of a mission that predates them and will outlast them. They’re comfortable operating inside constraints: clearance timelines, budget cycles, stakeholder density. They don’t treat those as friction; they treat them as the job.
When I’m mapping the market for a CTO or a program SVP in defense, I’m looking for people who can toggle between the strategic and the granular without losing sight of the customer in uniform. It’s a narrow aperture, and profiles like Bauer’s remind me why the work matters.