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: it’s not technology for its own sake, and it’s not leadership in the abstract. It’s both, in service of the mission.
I see this combination come up in every search we run for program leaders and technical executives in the defense space. The best candidates don’t just bring a track record in one or the other—they’ve learned to translate between the two. They can map a technical architecture and then walk a colonel through why it matters. That’s the fit that’s hard to surface and harder to replace.
If you’re building or leading teams that sit at that intersection, the profiles we place tend to share a few things: they’ve done time in both lanes, they don’t oversell, and they understand that serving the mission isn’t the same as serving the contract. Bauer’s story is a good reminder of what that looks like in practice.