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 Executive Officer, Public Company finalist Mike Loomis, general manager of Nokia Federal Systems. Here, he shares stories of achievements, focus areas, learning from failure and more
What key achievements did you have in 2022/2023?
I’m most proud of when Nokia made a joint announcement with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (OUSD) that we were extending the Hill Air Force Base (AFB) Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) tranche 1 project. This project included Nokia’s RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) supporting an O-RAN E2 interface into the testbed.
This is important because conversations about O-RAN have been focused on the front haul interface, designed to extend an already interoperable 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile network system to the Radio Unit to Baseband interface. What hasn’t been getting a lot of attention is the other work in O-RAN, particularly around the RIC.
The E2 interface and RIC allow third-party applications to directly interface into a 5G network and execute fine-grain control. Tactically, this announcement allowed us to enable the application vendors at Hill to directly control the Nokia testbed to execute the mission around DSS.
This is one of the first operational deployments of an O-RAN RIC, which will open a new ecosystem of applications and application vendors to help create meaningful new use cases for 5G in the public and private sector.
What has made you successful in your current role?
This sounds pretty cliche, but the people in my organization. People typically get the opportunity to become a leader because they were individually highly proficient. You need to learn early on that as soon as you move into leadership, the focus needs to shift from being good at doing things to enabling people to be good at doing things.
I believe that finding the best people, convincing them to work in the organization, and enabling them is the best way to have a meaningful impact on the organization’s success.
What are your primary focus areas going forward, and why are those so important to the future of the nation?
There are two main vectors in Nokia’s strategic initiative with the U.S. Federal Government. The first is the most obvious — building 5G networks. The second is building secure natively encrypted networks.
As a B2B technology innovation leader, we’ve been successful in both and we are looking to adapt this to fit the U.S. Federal Government’s needs. Secure and reliable communications are one of the most important pillars of the next-generation battlefield, enabling rapid information collection, decision making and information distribution. We can help make a difference here.
What’s one key thing you learned from a failure you had?
Recovery. Failures are always difficult and uncomfortable, but they are an opportunity to learn and recover. How people behave under adverse conditions is a true test of character and it’s one of the best opportunities to build real trust.
I don’t like failure and try to avoid it, but the reality is that it’s inevitable. If you recover well, you can build trust and then leverage that trust to create future success.