Stu Shea stepped down today from his position as president and chief operating officer of Leidos Holdings, Inc. effective April 6, according to a company press statement.
The resignation comes as a surprise to many and follows the company’s announcement last month that Leidos chief executive officer John Jumper was set to retire.
The departure was a mutual decision reached by Jumper, Shea and the Board of Directors, and signals the start of a slew of planned leadership transitions set to take place during the next several months.
Shea was critical in the strategy that separated the old Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) into two businesses — SAIC and Leidos. The companies completed the separation in Sept. 2013 with he and Jumper taking the helm of Leidos — the company’s technical, engineering and enterprise information technology services business.
Prior to serving with Leidos and SAIC, Shea served as vice president within the TASC unit at Northrop Grumman.
He also founded and served as the Chairman and CEO of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) approximately 11 years ago– a position from which he stepped down last April.
“Stu is a strong business leader that has had a tremendous impact on the growth of SAIC in his nine years with the company. His piece de resistance was architecting the bifurcation of SAIC into two more sensible corporate taxonomies allowing further value to be unlocked and realized for respective shareholders – not a remotely easy task to accomplish. Furthermore, Stu has been personally committed to bettering the state of the local and broader business, education, non-profit, and government communities both now and for the future. He founded USGIF, which has experienced major success with the GEOINT Symposium, the nation’s largest intelligence event with over 4,000 attendees coming together last year to strengthen collaboration across intel, defense, and homeland. More recently, he led Leidos to sponsor the K-12 STEM Symposium giving students in the National Capital region the opportunity to showcase their achievements and interact with leaders.
With his deep networks, board experience, and personal involvement in the community, I have no doubt Stu will find a number of exciting things in which to get involved. His absence will certainly be felt at Leidos, especially so quickly after the separation from SAIC. It will be imperative upon the board to find a replacement with similar visibility, strategic and operational discipline, and passion for the well-being of the GovCon community to realize success going forward,” said Mark HuYoung, Managing Partner, Northwind Partners.
The surprise announcement accompanied a summary of the company’s FY 2014 and fourth quarter results.
Revenue for the full fiscal year fell 11 percent from $6.47 billion in fiscal 2013 to $5.77 billion in 2014, according to Washington Business Journal.
Jumper attributed the revenue decrease to sequestration, delayed award decisions, unclear funding on awarded programs, high levels of protest decisions and health and engineering revenue declines.
“Despite these challenges, we were able to generate over $100 million of cash flow from operations in the fourth quarter and we are confident that our track record of robust cash flow generation will continue. Also in the quarter, we executed a $300 million accelerated share repurchase program,” Jumper said. “We continue to focus on strategies that increase returns and deepen our market penetration, especially in markets where we no longer face organizational conflicts of interest. Our commitment of returning capital to shareholders remains steadfast.”
Leidos provided no further information about the search to replace Shea and Jumper.
May 2013 Shea delivered a historic first commencement to the graduating class of for JMU’s College of Integrated Science and Engineering, read on.
