business

It is a good thing Dr. Stanton D. Sloane loves the thrill of the hunt. As president and chief executive officer of SRA International Incorporated, Sloane will be scouring details of the $787 billion federal fiscal stimulus package and the new administration’s upcoming defense budgets for additional sources of revenue.

One could forgive Paul Domorski for running a little scared. How else can people describe an executive whose guiding business book is none other than Only the Paranoid Survive by former Intel Chairman Andy S. Grove?

Do not blame Don Herring if his business plan for the next decade seems simple at first glance. After all, the senior vice president in charge of AT&T Government Solutions believes he is poised to cement his division’s reputation as a key provider of federal information technology services with dozens of new civilian and defense contracts that could be worth billions of dollars.

When he is not selling software to federal agencies and major corporations, Curt Kolcun likes to unwind on his 26-acre “farm” near the historic town of Leesburg, Virginia, about 40 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The capital commute sometimes can seem like capital punishment, but Kolcun doesn’t seem to mind.

Chalk it all up to Melissa, a computer virus that spread rapidly on the Internet and shut down entire e-mail systems. For both the computing public and the information security industry, the Melissa virus—named for a Florida lap dancer, of all things—was a huge wakeup call.

As a young pilot in the U.S. Navy, S. Daniel Johnson liked the thrill of taking off from and landing on aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. And yet he knew in his heart he wanted something more out of life—an exciting career in business.
So when he shipped back to the United States in the early 1970s, Johnson enrolled in a master’s of business administration (MBA) program at The George Washington University in the nation’s capital. Earlier he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where the former high school athlete played shortstop on the academy’s baseball team.

If Howard Lance ever decides to sell his 22-foot motorboat docked at his home on the Intracoastal Waterway in central Florida, he could honestly advertise the craft as “hardly used.”

Steve Gaffney vividly recalls the day he literally got a whack upside the head that gave him a lifelong lesson in success—one that would come in handy this year.

Running a key sector in one of the world's largest information technology companies may not seem to have much in common with automobile repair. But one corporate leader draws from that discipline to drive a group that has undergone a complete overhaul since a serious breakdown little more than a decade ago.

Despite common interests and goals, the military and the information technology sector are hampered by cultural differences that thwart their ability to work together, according to a former U.S. Defense Department information technology leader now in the private sector.