Ken Dahlberg wants to play big.  Bigger than his company is right now.

 

That’s why the recently named CEO and president of San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation, better known as SAIC, has reorganized the company, turning six large divisions into three that are bigger.

 

“If you are a company that is made up of hundreds of small businesses, then you will continue to act small,” says the leader of a 43,000 employee-owned research and engineering firm specializing in information technology, systems integration and e-solutions for commercial and government customers. “If, on occasion, you bring some of those businesses together, and have them interact and collaborate on larger pursuits, then we can act bigger than we are and gain market share from some of the larger companies.”

A self-admitted “goal freak” and “Type A personality,” Dahlberg got his nose for business by diving into it as early as he could. In the mid-1960s, he co-oped at General Dynamics in Groton, Connecticut, while earning his bachelor’s of science degree in electrical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia.  In 1967, he took a job at Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo, Calif., so that he could enter a master’s fellows program in electrical engineering at USC.

 

Among his favorite professors was former Engineering Dean Zohrab Kaprielian, a “terrific guy, whose heart and soul was in applying all of the fundamentals, all of the theorems, all of the axioms to difficult, challenging, breakthrough technical solutions,” Dahlberg recalled.  “He loved to rap with us.”

 

The 59-year-old CEO, formerly a top executive at General Dynamics, was named chief executive officer and president of SAIC November 3, 2003.  SAIC is the world’s largest research and engineering company owned by employees, with offices in 150 cities worldwide and core businesses in high-tech, electronics and defense contracting. Three short months after his appointment, Dahlberg implemented sweeping changes to streamline the organization and pull disparate business segments into a more unified chain of command.   

 

From his earliest days at Hughes, Dahlberg has been building up companies by consolidating business units and streamlining operations.  He has a sixth sense about the process of team building, a critical ingredient in consolidation, which he attributes in large part to a lifelong involvement in sports.

 

“Actually, quite a bit of it [business sense] came from sports,” he says. “I was very active in baseball and basketball, team-based activities, so I learned how to translate that into business acumen and lead people.”  Long before the terms “empowerment,” “team-based culture,” and “integrated product teams” came along, Dahlberg was already putting it into practice.  It caught on at Hughes.   

 

Dahlberg started at SAIC without a management team, but that didn’t faze him.  “I’ve always been parachuted into companies without a team,” he says.  But as an outsider facing skepticism from company employees, he was quick to announce his intentions of preserving “the entrepreneurial spirit that’s made this company great.”

 

“I knew after the first two months on the job that SAIC was yearning for consolidation, the next step,” Dahlberg explains.  “The company had a lot of entrepreneurs and the technical competence for competitiveness. We were in some strong markets, such as homeland defense, intelligence and some commercial information technology (IT) businesses.  So the challenge, really, was to develop a strategic direction and a vision that the employees, the share-holders really, could be passionate about.”

 

He set about restructuring a company that had been characterized as a “loose federation of entrepreneurial companies” into larger businesses. Creating synergy among employees and new business divisions wasn’t new to Dahlberg either.  Former colleagues have praised his friendly manner and called him “people oriented.”  Delighted to be at SAIC, Dahlberg has already turned his attention to that issue.  “I like leading scientists and engineers, because that’s me.  I talk their lingo.”

 

He’s focused on developing next-generation leaders for SAIC.  “And if I can get every one of our 43,000 employees to understand how they help us meet our goals and objectives, then we’d have the world.”

 

That’s not the only major change at SAIC.  Dahlberg intends to double the company’s value – taking it from a $6 billion enterprise to a $12- to- $15-billion enterprise -- in the next five years. His strategy is to leverage up.  The smaller companies that have merged into larger groups will be able to bid for the bigger contracts.  His integration work at General Dynamics is proof that the strategy works.  In his three years there, Dahlberg tripled General Dynamics’s assets, building it from a $2 billion business into a $6 billion business.   

 

“It really spirited passion and enthusiasm and zeal to grow the business,” he says.  “It got people aligned to the strategic objectives.”

 

Dahlberg is optimistic about SAIC’s growth potential.  He sees emerging markets in homeland security and increasing demands for intelligence systems.  In fact, one of SAIC’s highest profile contracts has sent 100 employees to Athens, Greece, to set up security systems for this summer’s Olympic Games.  But other, more staid industries, such as telecommunications, are beginning to rebound, Dahlberg says, and the company is now branching into new markets such as the pharmaceutical industry.

 

“We’re not everywhere, we’re not a mile wide and an inch deep, but we’ve got a strong presence in focused areas,” Dahlberg explains, “and we approach those businesses, I think, from a unique perspective, from the science and technology side, rather than from a purely IT services-oriented side.”

 

Dahlberg, whose oldest daughter, Melissa, earned a bachelor's degree in finance in 1999 from USC, resides in the Carmel Valley area of San Diego with his wife, Joy.