The finalists for WashingtonExec’s Chief Officer Awards were announced March 17, and we’ll be highlighting some of them until the event takes place live, in-person May 10.
Next is Chief Technology Officer finalist in the Private Company category Dan Hushon, CTO of Guidehouse. Here, he talks about shaping the next generation of industry leaders, proud career moments, career advice and more.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
I believe strongly that building robust common solutions ⏤ that are built by automation from declarative recipes will reshape “transparent” engineering and integration. These approaches where automation creates high reproducibility while also providing a log stream for operational and security analytics creates a substrate for innovation, pace while controlling risk.
As our regulated commercial and government clients move to the cloud, and complexity is increased this reuse of patterns and deep logging of activities helps many stakeholders meet their regulatory audit hurdles while maintaining increased tempo.
How do you help shape the next generation of industry leaders?
Looking back at your career, what are you most proud of?
I cannot point to one moment, each of my steps in my career journey brought new challenges, new opportunities to learn, and the need to constantly demonstrate agility as different blockers invalidated previous strategies. I’m probably proud of the fact that I have been able to bring a number of teams with me on these journeys ⏤ the collaboration and shared vision of these teams has been remarkable ⏤ and better because each of the teams was multiplicative in terms of cooperative performance.
Learn something new every day, and make sure that you look at least 50% of the time for project learning that is outside your comfort zone. Find mentors along the way to close gaps, and who will later become your advocates when you create that idea that needs broader support.
Don’t forget that leaders clean the floor also, and that everyone on the team is more important than you are. Become a servant leader while constantly challenging yourself to keep up has worked well for me.