The winners for WashingtonExec’s Chief Officer Awards were announced on June 4, and we’ve been highlighting some of the finalists and winners in spotlight interviews.
Next is Bill Ballhaus, chairman and CEO of Mercury Systems, and the winner of WashingtonExec’s CEO of the Year (Annual Revenue Greater than $500M). In this spotlight, he reflects on Mercury’s key achievements, shares how the company’s culture impacts its results, and provides insights into the company’s vision moving forward.
What were Mercury’s most significant achievements in 2024 & 2025?
In 2024, we aligned Mercury around the “four + one” priority focus areas: delivering predictable performance, building a thriving growth engine, expanding margins, and driving improved free cash flow, plus an additional enabler of cultivating high-performing teams. We began embedding the “Mercury Way” in the organization, a cultural foundation for teams to reach their highest potential by operating with the same values, mindsets, and behaviors and a common set of leadership frameworks. We also instituted a new management operating system where the Mercury Way is applied in real-time to drive performance and deliver improved results.
With greater alignment and focus, the Mercury team has made significant progress toward our vision to be the leader in mission-critical processing at the edge. We reorganized into a more streamlined structure that eliminated stovepipes and reinforced integrated functions. We successfully completed or retired risk on many of the challenged development programs that had experienced significant cost growth and delays. And we renewed our focus on innovation and growth, establishing an Advanced Concepts Group to drive our technology roadmaps and bring leading-edge processing solutions to market.
How does the company’s culture impact its results?
Our culture is rooted in a shared belief that it’s the people and teams within an organization that drive results, and strong leadership is ultimately reflected in those results. Building and sustaining a high-performance culture, one driven by diverse teams aligned through shared values and mindsets, is foundational to achieving industry-leading outcomes.
A core tenet of our culture is fostering an integrated organizational mindset. This means each of us understands the bigger picture and approaches our work, challenges, and opportunities with a holistic, company-wide perspective. Our communication is networked, and we collaborate across organizational boundaries regardless of title or level.
This mindset has already led to significant company wins. In several cases, individuals from across the company independently came together to create customer solutions that would not have been possible through traditional hierarchical structures and mindsets.
We’ve also seen a clear link between this approach and employee engagement. Leaders who actively engage their teams in conversations about integrator mindset and shared performance have seen employee engagement scores rise dramatically, by as much as 40 points. These increases span areas such as sense of belonging, accountability, and understanding of our company strategy, underscoring the power of our cultural efforts on hard company results.
What are the next steps that will propel Mercury toward its vision?
We have been focused on building the highest performing team in the industry as measured by our results, and I am proud of our team and the performance improvements we have delivered. We are now set up to unlock the potential of Mercury and bring the full breadth of our innovative processing capabilities to bear for critical customer missions in every domain, all around the world.
National security imperatives like Golden Dome and next-generation air superiority will require new partnerships and collaborations to develop and deliver capabilities that are mission-ready, trusted and secure, software-defined, and open and modular. Mercury stands ready to leverage our unique position at the intersection of high-tech and defense, our end-to-end processing platform, our engineering design and systems integration expertise, and our deep understanding of the mission to field unrivaled capabilities at the speed and scale required to win.