 Aloha and welcome to Business in Hawai'i with Reg Baker. We're a show that broadcasts live every Thursday from 2 to 2.30 from the ThinkTech studios in the Pioneer Plaza in downtown Hvalululu. We have finally got a really pretty day out there. We've got blue skies, a few little clouds and no rain. So it's good to be in Hawai'i. We're a show that focuses on success stories of businesses in Hawai'i. There are challenges of doing business here. There's a lot of regulations and taxes and costs are high. But we have some companies that do very well and they thrive and they have figured out how to work around some of these challenges. And today we've got a company called Booz Allen Hamilton and the Vice President who runs things out here is Bob Linsky. And he is going to explain to us a little bit about the company and what they do and how they make it work here. So Bob, welcome to the show today. Thanks, Reg. Pleasure to be here. You've actually been in Hawai'i for a while now. Yeah. Been here about 21 years total. All right. And how did you end up coming to Hawai'i? Would you tell us about that story? Okay. Well, I actually was born and raised in Michigan. And then... Cold country? Very cold. And went to college in Colorado, went to the Air Force Academy. Another cold country. Very cold there as well. But there was beautiful weather compared to Michigan. And anyways, while I was a cadet, I had the opportunity to come over here. And I spent a week here as a cadet. And during that, I pretty much fell in love with Hawai'i and said, first step, I got to get stationed here. Well, an interesting trivia story you were sharing with me earlier. Why were you here as a cadet at the Air Force Academy? I was on the football team and got the opportunity to come over here and play against the rainbows and playing that beautiful aloha stadium. And that was all part of it. But the way we were treated out here, just the people were so nice. And obviously the weather is nice compared to Colorado. We were freezing before we left and played in December. But there was so much more just about the culture and the people. And decided I want to come back to Hawai'i someday. And it took me a while. I had to apply three different times every time I was transferring, kept trying to get a job in Hawai'i. And eventually I did. While you were in the Air Force? While I was in the Air Force, right. So eventually I was able to get out here on active duty and spent three years here on active duty and then left. And I very clearly remember that flight out of the islands, heading back to Colorado Springs, which is a great place. But I was a little tear in my eye, leaving Hawai'i behind. But I knew I'd be back. And three years later, I moved back. You know, I came over here in the military as well. And one of the things that I remember about that flight is that they put you in backwards. It was on a C-130 and they flew us backwards the whole way over. So when you left, did you fly backwards when you left? No, I was on a commercial flight. Oh, you're so lucky. Yeah, so you ended up leaving. But then you went other places too. So you worked in different locations while you were in the Air Force. Yeah. I had the opportunity to move around a little bit. I lived in Mississippi for a little while, Colorado Springs, Southern California. That was my first assignment. So that wasn't too bad. Southern California is a young second lieutenant. In fact, while I was there, my old roommate, he was stationed at LA Air Base. So I went out and visited him a lot and he taught me how to surf. So that had a little something to do with it as well. Learned to just love the ocean and that was part of the reason to say, let's see if we can get out to Hawaii. Today, my wife surfs. My kids surf. We're kind of a water family and just all of us love being around and in the ocean. This is certainly a place to not only surf, but to be in the water because there's a lot of water activities out here. So you got his whole family out here still? Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Got my wife, Mila. And kids, I got a senior in high school, Zachary, and a sophomore in high school, Dillon. So aloha. And where do they go to high school? They're at Puneau. Oh, very good. So they're all enjoying the weather now, I hope. You're all in the water and you're working for a company called Booz Allen. And you spent 20 years in the Air Force? No. Actually, I did 10 years active and got out at mid-career and my wife and I were both active duty and we both separated and transitioned to the reserves. At that time, we said, you know what, of all the places we've been stationed, we'd like Hawaii the best. Let's go back there for a few years. So we moved back here thinking it was going to be two to five years and here we are. And so how did you end up finding this company Booz Allen and getting a job with them? Was that something you had always had your sights on or how did that play out? No. That's a great question. I knew I wanted to come back to Hawaii and through the service academies in general, we have a thing called the Service Academy Resource Directory. Today it's all online but back then it was literally a book you had to buy. And so I turned to the Hawaii page and I started calling, cold calling, grads. And the first two I happened to call were Navy grads. The second one that I called was a guy named Ted Peck. Actually, the first person said, hey, I don't have anything here. It was Sun Microsystems but called Ted Peck over at Booz Allen. He might have something. It was the first time I'd heard of Booz Allen. And so I reached out to him, had a conversation and one thing led to another and I got a job out here. But one thing I would tell you is as I was transitioning from the military, we go through a thing called Transition Assistance. I mean, you probably know that being from a military yourself. In Transition Assistance they told us 70% of you will leave your first job within a year. So I knew right then that I'd better get a job that looks good on my resume. And so as I started looking into this thing called Booz Allen, looking at the website, doing some research, it looked like a pretty good company. And a couple of things that stood out were they had on the website they had a thing that celebrated come back kids. People would left the firm, found out the grass wasn't necessarily greener and come back. And that happens more often than people think. Yeah. And the other thing was they celebrated their alumni. So people that had been in Booz Allen and left and gone off to other careers and they celebrated that too. And I saw some quotes in there that said things like, I got my MBA at Booz Allen. And so anyway, long story there, but I felt like that's going to look good on my resume. You know, because I'm not going to be here in a year, right? So now I've been at Booz Allen for 18 years. Well congratulations. Thanks. And just out of curiosity, and this always helps with the transition, but there's, does Booz Allen hire veterans? Is there a good contingent of veterans within the company? Yeah, we certainly do. Formwide, I think the number I heard the other day was somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of Booz Allen employees or former, have some tie to the military. Out here it might be a little higher just because of our client base, but it's, I want to say it's less than 40 percent. It's probably 35, 36 percent right around there. See that helps in a couple different ways, you know, with the transition into the company and picking up the culture and also with retention and keeping employees around. Because it's an environment that you're comfortable with, you know, your former military moving into a company that's got a lot of military people working there already. You know what to expect. They know what to expect. There's not a clash, you know, sometimes, you know, from my experience, personal experience is that when you go to work for a company that doesn't have that. They don't know, you don't know, and it takes a while before people can be comfortable with the communication and the different cultures that may exist. I was used to having a very structured environment, clear definition of what was expected and what the results were supposed to be. Some companies aren't always set up that way. Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of synergy with the values between the military and Booz Allen, and I think that attracts certain people, but not just veterans. I mean, we have a very diverse workforce, and I think that if, you know, in interviews people ask me all the time, you know, what do you love about Booz Allen? And I think the first answer is it's the people, and I think it's the culture and the values that attract those people and keep them in Booz Allen. Now, does Booz Allen have a regular recruiting process? Yeah, we sure do. In our industry, we're one of the few that have local recruiters here in Hawaii. So we actually have two full-time recruiters here in Hawaii, and we've got, I don't know, the number of firm-wide, but a very large network of recruiters. And so if we get to a point where we need to surge beyond the two local recruiters, it's a very fluid process of just extending that out. Yeah. And so how would somebody find out about the opportunities that might be at Booz Allen here in the Hello Little Office? Yeah. On our website, boozallan.com, boozallan.com, you can check it out. But you can look for the jobs, and they're sorted in a lot of different ways, and you have the ability to sort. So you can look specifically for jobs in Hawaii in there. We've got a lot of openings, even right now. So people need to go and take a look at that, and I guess there's instructions, and once they find something that they might want to be able to apply for, there's probably some instructions or some guidance on how to go through that. Very good. You know, that's something that I think, you know, we get a lot of students watching this, and I think we also have a lot of veterans watching this because of some of the history that we've had of guests on the show. So don't be surprised if all of a sudden your dashboard lights up with people tapping into that. They're welcome to. Just out of curiosity, what type of positions would boozallan have opened? Can you think of any offhand of what might be available, the type of work that they're looking for? Yeah, I mean, we do, what I would like to say or call it is, you know, we're a solutions company, right? So we work with our clients, whether they're U.S. government, which is out here, the majority of our clients, but we also have a few other areas that we support. So we help them solve problems, and we help them in a lot of different ways. But some of our strength areas are cybersecurity, engineering, data science and analytics is an area that we're investing heavily in to include artificial intelligence and machine learning and where that can take us into the future. Yeah, so I mean, there's a very broad spectrum. I'd say consulting. I mean, we're a 104-year-old consulting firm. And today we've kind of reemerged as really being known for technology and innovation. But what we're trying to do is make sure that we never lose sight of that 104 years of consulting heritage. So when we look at a problem, it's looking at it from a people process technology standpoint and really want to bring those consulting capabilities and skills to the situation. A good example of that would be, you know, if we're working with a client to transform an IT system or working on, you know, changing processes to make them more efficient. There's an aspect of that that really requires change management and strategic communications and a number of other things to make them successful. So that's kind of how we approach a problem and our jobs are going to be related to any number of things in those areas. You know, a couple opportunities come to mind pretty quick. You probably heard that the IRS servers went down and they're trying to figure out how to make sure that doesn't happen again. So, you know, I might refer the IRS over to you for some extra work. But the Department of Taxation also, they've got three different systems over there to try to figure out. So there's some opportunity there. I know there's probably aren't the type of jobs you're looking for, but they definitely need some help. But I would imagine that with the way technology is evolving so quickly and people are, you know, they may have state of the art technology and systems in place this year, but then all of a sudden two or three years later, maybe they're not so state of the art anymore and they have to transition and try to move things and stay current. Is that the type of work that you're involved in? Yeah, I mean, any technology that people work with today, the pace is incredible in how fast it moves. And, you know, talking with my own son, who is a senior, you know, he's getting ready to go off to college, he's thinking about computer science, and it's one of those that what our students are studying today, you know, it's for, in many cases, technologies that don't even exist yet. And so, you really, it's critical, one for us, you know, with our employees that we're all staying as current as we possibly can, and so we have a very robust education program and torsion assistance. It's a never-unding process. Yeah. You've constantly got to be refreshing, you know, your knowledge base. And you've got to sign over there on the wall, it says lifelong learning, and that, I mean, that's kind of how we think about it is when you come to Booz Allen, it's the beginning of a career, and we're going to continue to invest in you. And we have, as I said, you know, great development programs and includes internal and external trainings. We also have the opportunity for people to completely reinvent themselves over time. You know, we've got some people who've come in very focused in one area, maybe from their past experience, and saw that, you know what? In this particular case, there was an individual who looked at cybersecurity and said, I think that looks really interesting, and it took them a couple of years to get some of the education and the certifications, but completely transformed over into a line of work that they had never had any experience in prior to Booz Allen. Well, and that's why people will say that they got their MBA at Booz Allen, because it's a constant learning process and very valuable. So, we're going to have to take a short break here. We're going to be gone for about a minute, but when we come back, what I'd like to be able to do is maybe spend a little bit more time on Booz Allen, the company. I know we've touched on that already, but how is it structured? What does it do? I guess it's headquartered in D.C., but we'll spend a little bit of time on that. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're here today with Booz Allen. We're talking a little bit about the company, what it is, what it does, and we've got Bob Linsky here, who's the VP out here in Hololulu, and he's sharing all this information with us today. So, we'll be back in about one minute. Aloha. I'm Keeley Ikeena, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So, I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands, and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back. This is Business in Hawaii with Dr. Baker. We're here this week talking with Booz Allen. We're getting a crash course on exactly what that company is and what it does. One of our technicians over here thought it was a beer company. It's not. It does a little bit different. But Bob, what's your elevator speech? Describe Booz Allen for us. All right. That's a great question. I was talking to my dad not too long ago, and he was giving me a hard time because he's eight years old now, and I've been here 20 years, and he says, you've been there 20 years, and I still don't know what the heck you do every day. But yeah, like I said, it's a 104-year-old management and technology consulting firm. In fact, the consulting industry was really founded by Booz Allen. And it was Edwin Booz who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1914 and started a firm with the whole idea that organizations can be better if you bring someone in from the outside, fresh set of eyes, to partner with you and think about how you solve problems. Challenge some of the things that you've always done one way, but there might be better ways or best practices. Yeah, that's very healthy. So that was kind of the beginning. So we were really a pure commercial management consulting firm right up until World War II. And it was during World War II that the Department of the Navy reached out to Booz Allen, and we came in and helped them really create a lot more efficiency and capacity. So the Navy was looking at how can we ramp up and scale up in preparation for the war. And so we were very focused with them on processes and streamlining things and allowing them to invest that energy into building the capacity they needed. You may not be able to comment on it, and I can understand that. But I had an opportunity one time to do a tour of the Coronado, USS Coronado. And I was impressed because basically that ship is one floating computer. And it's a command center, I guess, for a battle group that goes out. But the systems and the technology and the accuracy and the efficiency that all of this technology brings to the table is a huge game changer. Yeah, well, and that's to maybe further amplify what kind of things Booz Allen does. So we worked with the Navy Postgraduate School over the last few years and developed a hackathon that tests out the ability to get into those systems on a Navy ship. And so it's working with the Navy, and it's a really innovative way of essentially crowdsourcing solutions. So as we all know, the military, the processes and the timeline for making change and investment, it can be a very slow process. And with the speed of technology, it's very difficult to stay ahead of the adversary. So the commander of the Navy, postgraduate school at the time, Commander Zach Staples came up with this idea and implemented it, working with us, brought us on to help him do it. So we built a machine, essentially, that has the communications computer systems of a Navy ship, and then invite hackers from all over the world to come in and spend a weekend trying to get into those systems and help us to figure out how they did it so that we can quickly get better. And it's really, I went to one of those down in Austin, and it's great because the Navy stands up there and says, all of you, and this is a very diverse crowd of hackers, you're here to serve your country this weekend. You know, I've always found it interesting that they actually have these hacker conventions across the country, across the world. I mean, they're all over the place, and it's kind of neat to think that there's actually an organization out there that's bringing them together. But what better place to test your vulnerabilities is to have some of the best people in the industry, if I can call it that, trying to get into the system and learning from that. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we're in the process. We have that machine here in Hawaii today in our office. And it was shipped here from Boston where we did the last one, it's gonna be shipped from here to Seattle later this year, but in the meantime, we're working to prepare to host one of those hackathons right here in Hawaii. Wow. So just out of curiosity, how does somebody get invited to one of these? Do you have to be an accomplished hacker? We're right now, we're still in the early stages of shaping it, but the way we do it is we work with our clients. So we're working with clients at US Pacific Command, the Navy, and others to kind of figure out exactly how large we wanna make it and how those invites will be. But this one will be a little bit more by invitation. It's gonna be a little bit smaller, but there will still be opportunities for many of you out there to get involved in it. It'd be interesting just to come out and be an observer and watch some, because I guess it would be an interesting place for some people watching. There's some real characters out there. But I guess the, where is Booz Allen Headquartered? It's in DC? Yeah, the headquarters is in McLean, Virginia, and we have offices all over the world. We have about 25,000 people in the firm. Wow, that's huge. Out here, Hawaii is kind of our hub for the Pacific Rim, and we have just under 300 people here in Hawaii, and 500 in the Pacific Rim. So we have offices in Seoul, Korea, Okinawa, Japan, Guam, and the latest, we just opened a commercial office in Singapore, and it's very focused on commercial cybersecurity, mostly for financial services. Nothing in China yet, huh? No, not yet. Not that we could admit to. But you actually came out here when the company was, the hollow operations was a little bit smaller. So you've seen some real big growth here. Yeah, yeah, I'm very fortunate to get the job with Booz Allen coming right out of the military, and we had 30 people in Hawaii at the time. 30. And that was 1999, and there was no office. Most of our people, we all worked on client site, and I got interviewed at the Hilton Wine Village, and, you know, it came at a good time, and we had some very good opportunities and projects over, you know, over many, many years to grow the business. And it just grew, and so from 30 to 300, that's an amazing growth. Yeah, congratulations. It's a fun company to be with, and that kind of growth mode. And so does Booz Allen have different departments, different divisions? Do they focus, I guess they got a consulting piece, but they got other pieces as well? Yeah, we're, first of all, it's one profit and loss center for 25,000 people. One P&L for the entire... That's really unique. You know, all of you in the business community understand how significant it is with 25,000 people, and what that does is creates a very collaborative, open environment where we're all incentivized to help each other be successful. And there's not a lot of that inherent competition that's going on, and where you are managing different departments with their own separate P&Ls. I mean, it can sometimes get a little nasty, you know, going after the limited resources that a company has, and infighting that takes place, but having just one P&L, if I can use the word, brings harmony to the process. Yeah, I think one of the key things about it, and you were asking, you know, how we're organized, is we have an arm called the Strategic Innovations Group, which we developed a few years ago, and it's like a skunkworks, right? It's a R&D shop internal investment to develop new cutting edge technologies and look over the horizon and see what's out there, what's coming. You know, I mentioned artificial intelligence, machine learning, that's an area where they're spending a lot of time in immersive learning through augmented reality and virtual reality, those kind of things, and our business here in Hawaii is one of their favorites to work with, because we face very operational clients, as you mentioned earlier, kind of at the tip of the spear. So the developers and the people that are helping develop that love coming out here and working with us, and we, you know, they come out here on a regular basis, spend time with our people, learning about the requirements, because our people are there working side by side every day with clients, and can say, hey, this is the project I'm working on, this is what my client's struggling with, how can you help me to make my client more successful? And that's the beginning of many prototype projects that we then deploy out here to our clients. Well, and that's, you know, we had that earlier conversation, it's a great laboratory to have out here, because you get to see what the needs are first hand, and then get involved in trying to figure out how to meet those needs. Yeah. You know, it's a very rewarding process, especially when you can meet the needs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's very good. Do you, what kind of people does Bird, Moose Allen look for when they're going out of, if there was somebody that was in college right now and are thinking about a degree, what is the most sought after degree that you're looking for? You know, it's really kind of all over because we find that even, you know, obviously we do a lot of recruiting for electrical engineering, communications, computer science, various engineering programs. Those are, we look very closely at those, but we find that, you know, the liberal arts side of it is also very critical. So when you can find somebody who's got both, that, you know, kind of left brain and right brain, working in tandem, those tend to be the most successful employees because you can think about a problem differently and yet you have the foundation and the technical understanding to work out. It's a pretty unique individual. That's a good skill set to have to be able to have that right and left brain capability. Yeah, and you know, speaking of that, I mean, I mentioned data science and we kind of joke about a data scientist being a purple unicorn because they're very, I mean, it's really unique skill set. You've got the coding experience and the analytics and also having the industry knowledge and the understanding domain experience. It's rare to find all of that in one person. So what we try to do is, we, one, we try and find some of those, but we also try and develop them. So if we can find people that have strength in one or two of those areas, let's train and grow data scientists and the other. And the other thing though that we do is team, right? So as you, you know, what are we looking for? We're looking for people who are very collaborative, very successful in a team environment because an example of that would be around data science. Our clients need a data science and analytics solution. Oftentimes their first reaction is, I want to hire a data science. Can you bring me a data scientist and put them here with me? And our answer is, we could do that, but it might be a lot more efficient if we use our team from downtown where maybe every one of those individuals is not a full on data scientist, but when you put them together, we can provide a very robust data science capability. And so it's a combination of having people there side by side partnering with the client and kind of the reach back to these capabilities that can bring additional insight and solutions. Sure. And you get the synergies of everybody's having the different skill sets working together to be able to identify things that maybe an individual wouldn't have necessarily seen. Right. And I was gonna joke a little bit. I said you get all these hardcore technical type people in there, but somewhere along the lines, it's got to have a little sprinkle of people skills too. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's a unique individual, could end up having a very rewarding career. Fortunately, we are out of time. We'd love to continue the conversation, but you do have a website that people can go to to find out more about the company and the opportunities, and what is that website again? It is boozeallon.com, no E on the booze. That's right, it's strictly booze. Okay, Alan, good job. Very good. Well, Bob, appreciate you being here today. Had a great conversation, looking forward to catching up with you again soon. Until then, we'll see you around town. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday from 2 to 2.30. We talk about successful businesses in Hawaii. Until next week, aloha.