Questions and Answers

The SAIC Solution M.A. Beyster with Peter Economy February 28, 2007

Q:  Where did the idea for the SAIC solution come from?

A:  The idea of a book about SAIC is not a new idea—there was an attempt to write such a book about seven years ago.  The focus then was the 30-year anniversary of the company, and that book was to be a chronological history. It was never finalized or published.

Q:  Why wasn’t it published?

A:  I heard a lot of different reasons for that.  It was a very thorough project and well researched, and it was a detailed chronology.  The idea of doing a book just wasn't on anybody's radar screen because it was going to be such a big project.  Dad would need to be very engaged too.  He had a lot of other things on his mind in 2000’s, and he retired in 2004. Whatever the reason, it was decided to not publish it, and the idea of writing a book went away. The re-emergence of the book idea came around the fall of 2005, after I joined the Foundation as President.

Q:  So, why this book? Why now?

A:  Dad was looking for things to do that would be interesting.  I looked around to see what we could do, what would be valuable to do at the Foundation, and how we could support the Beyster Institute. I had some discussions with my father and asked, “Why don't you revisit the book idea and get down on paper how you ran the company, why you started it, and what you thought was special?  Tell the story, and stay away from a chronological approach.”  He was willing to explore the idea of a book.  The idea was to use a book as a means to share the SAIC story with others for historical purposes but, more importantly, to see if others could learn from his experience.  Many of his friends encouraged him to proceed with the book.

Q:  What sparked you to take action?

A:  I think one small step forward leads to another small step forward.  One of the first small steps forward was finding a co-author to work with my father.  We wouldn't have been able to do this just on our own. I talked to Ray Smilor, Executive Director of the Beyster Institute, and I talked to a few other people about how they've approached books and who they wrote them with.  I relied heavily on Ray's recommendation, and there were a number of other people that we were going to contact about being an author.  We knew that it had to be somebody that understood the industry, somebody that would be patient, who would be working closely with my father, wouldn't overwhelm the book process and the direction of it.  We wanted this to be my father’s point of view, not someone else’s.  When we brought you on to work with my father on a book proposal, we made our first significant step forward.  Then it was, okay, let's start with the next small step—which was let's see if you could work with my father on writing an outline.  It was a huge challenge just to describe what the book was going to be about.  How is it going to be structured?  What are the themes?  You made it through the outline process and created a great book proposal.

Q:  Do you recall much debate about what the book would look like? 

A:  There was a lot of debate.  In fact, the debate actually didn't even stop after the book outline had been accepted by the publisher and you two went into writing mode.  We always questioned, “Is this the right structure?”  The initial alternative was taking the unfinished manuscript we had, and turning it into a much shorter story.  Then the other alternative that I remember was having the book describe big national programs and the technologies and solutions used to solve them. It would have been by business area—environment, or space or the internet business, or systems integration.  Another structure considered was to use major turning points in the company history and explore how the company dealt with them.  There were at least a half-dozen ways of cutting and slicing the SAIC story.  All could have been done and all probably could have been good approaches.  It came down to picking one way and figuring out how to matrix in some of these other really good suggestions.  I'd say it was exceptionally hard to come up with the outline because there are so many different stories that could be told.

Q: You said that you weren’t sure the book was meant to be.  Why?

A:  Because it had been tried before—huge amounts of effort, very smart people, a very good author—and it didn't work.  Here we were revisiting the idea seven years later and taking perhaps a different approach, but there wasn't really any reason to believe that we were going to be successful.  Dad had about two years away from the company and thus some time to reflect on his experience.  But he wasn’t 100 percent behind the book project.  He was, however, willing to let the project start. 

Q:  Was the project ever close to an early death?

A:  Yes, there were times where we could have killed it.  I wouldn't say it was limited just to the beginning.  Around each corner there was something new, a new struggle.  It was very frustrating, for example, going back and forth on the structure.  I think there were moments where my father could have put his foot down and said, "This isn't the kind of story that I want to tell," or "Nobody's going to be interested in this.  It's going to be boring.  There's nothing to be said or learned."  He was concerned about the quality. 

There were times—especially when you two had created a manuscript that was a mixture of third person and first person—where it just didn’t sound like him.  It didn't have succinctness—the messages and the hooks weren't clear.  There were accuracy problems, and it just looked like a disaster.  I think we were all kind of thinking, “Gee, how do we turn this thing into something great?”  My experience is mostly with proposal writing and white papers.  No books.  But with those you get critical input from people, and sometimes it doesn't look there's any hope in sight.  What you do is you start deconstructing the issues and chipping away at the critical ones.

I think what saved us was the transition from third person to first person.  If we hadn’t done that, I think we might have stopped the project.  I never said that to Dad, but I think we probably would have had some serious quality issues.  He was writing but strangely his voice wasn’t showing up.

Q:  It really became a different book once he agreed that he would embrace it in the first person.

A:  I think there was a period of time before that, and I don't know how long this period was, where it really wasn't his book.  He was accommodating us.  "Us" is collective.  It was you and me.  It was his friends, his colleagues.  He was accommodating us.  It was still kind of "Well this is the project you guys think we need to do, but that's not really right,” or “That's not really how it happened."  I think he was kind of on the fence about whether this was going to work.  I believe the day it moved into first person, he said, "I've got it.  This is my voice.  This is my message.  This is my view of how it worked."  That occurred around June 2006.  And that happened as a result of the red team's responses because people were saying, "Where's your father?  We want to hear your father, Dr. Beyster, his point of view." You and he had 350 pages written, every chapter except for maybe one was written.

Q:  What were some critical milestones in the beginning of the book project?

A:  Getting my father’s go ahead in October 2005.  Hiring you as a co-author to prepare a book proposal.  In January, having a red team review of the proposal. We notified SAIC in February because we didn't want the proposal going to publishers without SAIC knowing about it or without them having seen it first.  We had no idea how they would view this project.  I went right to the top to get a read on it—that was another critical step. 

Again, this was just on the outline, but we were planning to cover everything in this book, from the very beginnings to the last few years—including successes and failures, and lessons learned.  Here's a company that has historically been very private.  Now, with its announcement to go public, management had a few issues on their mind including what kind of public disclosure they were going to have during the IPO process. And into that mix we were throwing a book project about the company.  That step was much easier than I thought.  That positive decision was made out of, I think, trust for my father about what direction he was going and because we involved SAIC in the process early on.  Although we ran an independent book project, we had SAIC’s strong support from that point forward.  It was critical to getting access to people and information.

We moved on to the publisher side of things, and that was really a long process.  We started in March—developing a proposal, sending it out to 10 or 12 publishers and engaging in discussions with editors—and we signed the contract in June 2006. We went live with Dad’s blog in April. We thought a blog would be a good way to get some input for the book.  That idea came from Ron Arnold. 

Q:  That turned out to be a great way to gather input for the book.

A:  I wasn’t sure what a blog was. Turns out a lot people were figuring out that blogs were different from chat rooms and websites.  Remember when we pitched it to my father, sitting around the Great Room table?  We didn't know if he was going to say, “What are you guys doing?”  But he said, “Sure, let’s try it.”  What a big improvement from the old days of him faxing handwritten notes to people on their email messages to him. 

Q:  And our use of the blog to gather input for the book got picked up by the Union-Tribune newspaper, by Bruce Bigelow. 

A:  I think the blog had a big impact on the project.  I think it enabled more voices to be heard, more opinions to be expressed and it expanded the realm of perspectives.  There was variety.  We received perspectives from a university professor in the State of Washington, a leading professor in employee ownership from Rutgers University, former employees from all parts of the country, and from people who had left SAIC and started their own companies.

People familiar with the company knew how the company was run, and that it was a company of full participation.  They assumed, rightfully so, that the same standard would be used for the book.  That was a good assumption. 

I think the blog was a good experiment, and that's actually how we approached it.  In my mind, we’d run it for a month or so, and see if it worked.  If it doesn't work we can shut it down.  If it does, we can keep it running, or we can advance it.  I think that it worked out better than any of us could have expected. 

Q:  How did the Red Team work?

A:  It involved many people who helped grow SAIC, who built employee ownership into the company, and governed the company.  Some reviewers were academics and some were from the Beyster Institute. We applied a structured review process which, for the most part, worked.  I had transferred learnings from proposal writing into book writing.  Because the SAIC story is a personal journal for almost everyone involved in the Red Team, it came out much differently than in a proposal process.  Lots of story telling and reminiscing.

We actually had a huge amount of content coming from a number of people.  It was pretty amazing, but I can't say I was that surprised.  Let me say I was impressed by the sheer outpouring of excellent ideas, support, content, redirection, and story hooks.  We got turning points from that process.  We got first person from that discussion.  We got the timeline idea.  We got redirection on several chapters.

There were many reminders of what this book was going to mean to people and that it really needed to be his views.  It needed to be very concrete.  They set the bar very high. 

Q:  How was SAIC involved in the project?

A:  I communicated initially with executive management and legal.  I got initial edits from Doug Scott on the book proposal which were theme-oriented, not detailed legal edits. He knows the company well and asked what about this, what about that.

We asked permission for gaining access to certain documents and to certain people, and the only request that came back was to be sensitive to people’s time.  There were over 100 interviews with many people at the company or who had left, photographs collected, graphics support.

Q:  Why do you think Ken Dahlberg (the current CEO of SAIC) decided that it would be a good idea to cooperate? 

A:  Well, I don't know all the reasons, but a key message that came back to me from a number of people—managers and executives at SAIC—was that this is an opportunity to help capture the history and the culture of SAIC.  The founder was the one who needed to write this.  There was a certain level of excitement to get his story because it would help sustain the culture of SAIC. 

There was a quiet period for the IPO that was a bit challenging.  Unfortunately that quiet period got drawn out because the IPO process got drawn out.  During that period, communication dropped off, especially on the blog.

I think that with writing books about a company, it's absolutely important to take the approach that we did, which is to do it as a cooperative effort.  Again, they had to do what was important to them, so it was challenging at times just because of the amount of information that couldn't be disclosed and the restrictions with the IPO that were coming.  However, the private, one-on-one interviews never stopped. 

Q:  Right, SAIC’s cooperation with the project was key.

A:  Think about it.  The amount of cooperation is really quite impressive.  We got probably over 50 documents to reference.  Probably over 100 people participated in this project in one way or another, and a good portion were still employees.  Again, lots of people joined the red team at all different levels and places across SAIC.  My view is we couldn't have done it without SAIC.  This project lasted over a year.  Researching, discussions, characterizing what happened, fact finding to the extent that we could.  You couldn't have done it in any less time, and if it was, it would have been the wrong story.  It wouldn't have been accurate. 

On many of the basics, you and Dad had to keep going back over and over facts.  Even then, you have to had some leeway here.  This book isn't meant to be a factual history book.  You can't say 100 percent of this is going to be accurate even after a year of research, hundreds of people participating, the company participating, and my father constantly questioning how events occurred.  There's no way you could get the SAIC story even close to right without doing this level of effort.  There's just no way.  The story would definitely have been wrong.  Regarding the motivations and the rationale of why things happened, Dad would say, that's not how it happened, and that's not why we did it.

Q: What was it like reconnecting with many of your father's close business associates and friends? 

A: A couple takeaways that tell you about the character of these individuals.  Number one, they had absolutely sincere interests in the story being right.  That was just front and center. Everybody involved has an opinion on what happened, why it happened, and what should be told and was more than willing to state their case multiple times and multiple ways but also very respectful that this was my father’s book.  This was his story.  But that didn't stop anybody from giving their full opinion on how things went. 

This is an important project for many people way beyond just my father.  I think that was really neat to see. 

Q:  What did you learn as a result of this project? 

A:  Dad’s actually a good writer, but he needed to be prodded to do that.  He probably more enjoyed talking with you and reviewing materials than writing. But he really cranked at times.

I think we all underestimated exactly what this would take.  I can remember in the beginning when he said, “Well, you know all that material is there.  Take the unpublished manuscript, and take all of this other stuff.  It's all in my folders.  I've been talking about this stuff for 20 years, and it's all there.” Well, as it turned out, the project went well beyond this, and we all underestimated its full extent.  But, when we realized that this was a much bigger project, he didn't falter at all. 

His enthusiasm toward employee ownership came to life again during this project.  At the end of the day, that's it for him.  I think he is exceptionally realistic about it.  He's not idealistic about employee ownership.  He has a strong belief in its potential and its value to the customer, its value to the employees and its value as a capitalistic model.  This book, one of the challenges was to make sure chapters five and six—the ones that focused on employee ownership and participation in decision making—didn't completely overwhelm the book.

Q:  What did you learn about getting a book published?

A:  That it is really hard and the core has to be there.  There has to be a core story, an interesting story and then a relatively interesting person to tell that story.  That has to be there, but alone is not sufficient.  There are many pieces that have to come together, and they are diverse pieces…contracts, permissions, titles, endorsements.  It was very stressful at times. Lots of potential failure points.

He probably would have pulled the plug if the title didn’t improve.  We had a fine title in the beginning.  So we thought.  It was good enough, and then we went months and months and months without thinking about it.  It wasn't on the agenda, and then it popped back up.  It was an urgent item. 

Probably most surprising to me was the sheer extensiveness of legal involvement.  We had to get contracts in place because all rights would be owned by the FED.  Dad was going to write this at no cost.  Then the FED needed to execute contracts with you, and with our publisher, John Wiley & Sons.  I needed legal advice on all of this.  A book contract is a completely different type of contract than I've ever seen before, so I had to get expert advice on that.  You do need representation on your side for contracting with a publisher.  We also got legal advice on doing a blog, and on terms and conditions for those people who submitted to the blog so that we could use that content.  All of the various permissions required to publish specific content—from photographers, to cartoonists, to SAIC, and others quoted—were all a complete surprise.  And then, on the flipside, we gave the task of tracking down cartoonists to a very competent young lady, Adriana Solano, with a lot of initiative, and she found them.  We couldn't even read the signature on some of these cartoons. She found some of them within hours. 

Also very educational is what a publisher does and does not do.  Again, I would say that you and my father definitely did the heavy lifting on the editing.  When you write a book, you need to have full ownership and understanding it's your job to get this story right.  Don't expect a publisher to do it.  They're not going to embrace it nearly as much.  It's your baby.  Not having published a book before, I didn't realize that that the publisher wasn’t going to be heavily involved.  They had good insights along the way, but you can’t expect them to tell you how to write the story.

Q:  Anything that didn't surprise you?

A:  I liked how the book proposal process worked.  That didn't surprise me.  Actually, what surprises me is that people try to bypass that step and not write a book proposal. I felt that that gave the publisher the opportunity to understand what was really going to be done here.  If we had only put in a chapter or two without telling the whole story, I don't know how you would find the right publisher frankly. 

I think it was not a surprise that the proposal review process worked.  It was confirmation that in my view that's the way you should do it.  There are a few people that I know who have gone ahead and just decided to write their manuscript and then pitch their book.  I think that would be very, very challenging.  Our editor had significant comments up front that helped guide us.  I think Dad had a lot of anxiety about whether anyone would find the book to be of interest.  Wiley was very reassuring. It wasn't surprising to me that the publisher and you basically affirmed what I thought was an important story.  It wasn't a technical book and it wasn’t a memoir. What was not surprising to me that taking an approach that was thematically structured versus chronologically structured was the right way to tell the story. 

Q:  Are you happy with the results? 

A:  I'm extremely happy with the results because there are a number of results here that we have.  We have an excellent book.  Is it perfect?  No.  Is it excellent?  Yeah.   It does the job, which is getting the founder's perspective out there.  I think another result is my father is pleased with the product.  My view is it's been a good experience to reminisce about the good and the bad things, about choices that he made, people that he met, and he is in a much different place now mentally about the company and that experience.  His resolve around entrepreneurial employee ownership is renewed.  In my view, so is his resolve that one person can make a difference. Small things beget big things.  Let’s see where he and others take this renewed spirit.  That's an excellent result from this book. 

I think that this book process made him think more thoroughly about succession and governance of an employee owned company.  Plus, the red team forced him to think about it.  They pushed back hard on Chapter 13, succession and governance, because he was taking the easy way out.  He was blaming Sarbanes-Oxley and a few other things, and a few people called him on the carpet about that.  It seems to me that maybe he learned some things through this process and shared those in the book.

Q:  How did the Vanity Fair piece play into all this?

A:  I think even more than when we started, it's important that this book is out.  It has given even more importance to this book, and this company—SAIC—clearly is misunderstood.  It can be viewed through a narrow lens, and many will choose to do that.  That will be as far as they can get.  That is their lens, and you can't change that.  It's a chance to broaden that lens on this company.  Having the Vanity Fair article absolutely reaffirms the value of this project, because it is just so clear that having a narrow-lens perspective on the company can result in gross inaccuracies and false conclusions.

I think that what that article shows to me is that if you commit a very short period of time to research a topic or company and source narrowly with a bias, using only publicly available information, and without understanding the full story or seeking insider views on what SAIC is and who Dr. Beyster is, you will get it wrong.  We could have gotten it wrong, and we had the help of over 100 people, the founder, and access to information and documents from over three and a half decades of corporate history. 

Q:  If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

A:  I would do much the same.  I think that maybe I would broaden it even more, figure out a way to have a 500-page book.  I think maybe we can do that with a series.  There are some valuable stories and perspectives that didn't get full attention in the book, which we can address later. 

I would do the blog the same in many ways.  We could have spent a lot more time on the blog.  We probably could have gotten more dynamics from people if we had made it easier for them to read, but you know you only have so much time in the day.  It served its purpose. 

I think the fact that you were here and you had a significant amount of time, and you had the ability to adjust that time depending on what was required for this project was absolutely essential.

Q:  Well and I think my being local, too—here in La Jolla—helped.  I think having someone in New York or Washington would have been very difficult.

A:  No, it never would have worked because there were so many local sessions.  Remember, I used to join you for the beginning sessions because I didn't really know who you were.   I got a sense that you were a good listener.  You pushed and prodded. 

Again, I think to do something differently, I would like to use technology a lot more.  I am absolutely surprised the publishing industry hasn't come around sooner.  I think this is great, the use of blogs.  We've just scratched the surface on how to use technology in this way.

Q:  Clearly, the publishing industry is one of the last to come along with technology.  We were still doing handwritten changes on the final manuscript.

A:  That was surprising.  That we couldn't electronically redline the document really surprised me.  Who would have guessed that final changes would go in hand-written.  What an industry. We have to put that in the top-five surprises.  I'd say that if we had to do it all over again, we would.  I would do a lot of it the same and I think with a lot less anxiety (laughing). 
We worried about a lot of things that we shouldn't have, but I think we worried about a lot of good things just so we could get them right.  The fact that we went to everybody to get approval for their quotes—we were overly cautious on going back to people, even those with blog postings.  I think that was the right thing to take the time to do.  It was courteous.  This is an interesting thing because when people are quoted, and you pulled quotes that were older—say five years old—people changed their mind over that period of time. 

Q:  That’s true.

A:  The only thing that maybe has me a little scared is that Dad doesn't think the book is done.  He'll want to start capturing edits as soon as it comes out.  Although he refuses to do another book, he won't hesitate to make changes to this book.  Dad and others he has worked with like fixing things and making them better.  It took a lot of hard work to get this company where it is, today. Again, I think a lot of this got into the book. It's just a phenomenal group of people involved in the company. 

Q:  What also amplifies that is this whole alumni group, people who learned so much of the company then went on to carry these principles themselves to their own companies and found great success, many of them, spinning off their own companies based on the things that they learned at SAIC from their experiences with your father and their co-workers there.

A:  I think that this is a result of having a very focused and determined founder, but there is no way he could have done this without the talent that he had.  You cannot direct people to act this way.  They come this way, and they fit into this kind of company.  They took on the leadership qualities and demonstrated the leadership qualities that they had.  And why were the right people attracted to the company?  Because A, Dad is the kind of person that they respected and wanted to work for, B, employee ownership was special and pretty unique—they could actually own a piece of this company, and maybe it would grow through their efforts, and C, they had freedom to purse their own interests, important work, and essentially create their own businesses within the overall company.  What a combination for success.