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The MITRE Corporation or MITRE is a nationally recognized not-for-profit organization that operates research and development centers sponsored by the federal government. It works in the public interest to discover new possibilities, create unexpected opportunities, and lead by pioneering together for the public good to bring innovative ideas into existence. Through its federally funded R&D centers and public-private partnerships, MITRE works across government to tackle challenges to the safety, stability, and well-being of the country. Specifically, MITRE operates in seven federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) which are unique organizations serving as long-term strategic partners to the United States government. They provide objective guidance in an environment free of conflicts of interest in the areas of scientific research and analysis; development and acquisition; and systems engineering and integration. MITRE's resource strength comprises of 8,500 scientists, engineers, and support specialists. With over 7,000 of its employees working directly on customer programs, MITRE's mission-driven teams are dedicated to fueling innovation and solving problems for a safer world.
Usha Chaudhary is the Senior Vice President for Corporate Operations and Chief Transformation Officer at MITRE. In this role, she is responsible for the organization's business and digital transformation as well as corporate operations functions, including strategy, finance, information technology and security, contracts, knowledge management, business analytics, and real estate. She oversees a team of nearly 1,000 employees, a revenue base of approximately US$2 billion, and a department budget of US$250 million. In light of the strategic and organizational changes necessitated by COVID-19, Usha has decided to leave MITRE in September, to complete her doctoral program and pursue social entrepreneurship opportunities.
Usha Chaudhary has demonstrated pioneer leadership skills in transforming organizations and establishing best-in-class operations focused on business growth, fiscal discipline, and operational excellence. She has extensive executive experience in strategy, finance, operations, technology, and risk management functions in both public and privately-held companies in multiple sectors including financial services, media, global non-profit, multifamily real estate investment, development and management, and most recently, in technology and engineering. Her many strengths include developing and executing business and technology strategy and financial plans; executing M&A transactions; building innovative product, process, and technology capabilities; identifying and managing enterprise risks; transforming businesses and re-engineering operations to achieve growth, improving organizational efficiency and scalability in order to maximize investor/shareholder value and meet the needs of customers and sponsors.
Prior to MITRE, Usha served as the President and Chief Operating Officer of Kettler, a leading multifamily real estate developer and manager in the USA, overseeing all aspects of the organization. Previously, she was Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of The Pew Charitable Trusts; Chief Financial Officer at The Washington Post; and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at United Way of America. She has also held several executive positions at Freddie Mac in the areas of finance, strategy, risk management, and corporate operations for its investments and capital markets, multifamily housing, single- family operations, and risk management divisions.
Usha has served on several non-profit and trade association boards over the past 15 years and on a private corporate board over the past 6 years, including as Treasurer, chair of Finance, Audit, and Governance & Nominating Committees, and member of the Executive, Strategy, and Compensation committees. She is currently on the Boards of Nathan Associates, an international economic consulting organization; The George Mason University Honors College; Northern Virginia Technology Council; Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce; Greater Washington Board of Trade, and Tysons Partnership. Usha is a strong advocate for education and is a supporter of a number of charitable organizations geared towards bettering youth through structured enrichment programs. Her philanthropic involvements include serving on the Boards of India International School, a well-established Northern Virginia Indian American education and cultural center and a recent startup called RENEW (Reform Education for a New World).
Usha has received numerous awards and honors over the past decade, including being named finalist in the March of Dimes 'Heroines of Washington" in 2018; named Washingtonian's "Most Powerful Women in Washington" in 2017; Bisnow's "Women of Influence in Commercial Real Estate" in 2017; Washington Business Journal's "Women Who Mean Business" in 2016; The Women's Center's "Leadership Award" nominee in 2016; and was awarded Washington's "Non-Profit CFO of the Year Award for Innovation" in 2007.
Usha is a graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She has also earned a world executive MBA from the George Washington University and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from St. Stephen's College in New Delhi, India. She is currently enrolled in Drexel University's Doctorate of Business Administration program which she is expected to complete by mid-2022.
Usha learned the value of speaking up and being heard very early in her career. She learned that "good things don't always happen to those who wait" and therefore, hard work doesn't often get noticed or automatically rewarded. She also learned the importance of leaning in, taking risks and stepping out of her comfort zone. She challenged herself to take on roles and assignments that she knew little about, going on to quickly mastering it, and then transforming it. Usha's comfort with the unknown led to her embracing change, which enabled her passion for transformative work. Consequently, she has led and supported business and technology transformation at Freddie Mac, United Way, The Washington Post, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Kettler, and most recently at The MITRE Corporation, which paved the way for strategic shifts and innovation, leading to business growth, scalability, and operational efficiency.
Usha has faced numerous challenges throughout her career spanning a few decades. Being accepted in male-dominant sectors, (such as mortgage banking, media, real estate investment, and technology) have been a challenge which has made Usha appreciate and embrace a leadership style that is collaborative, inclusive, and empathetic. Usha is truly a transformational leader. She is a demonstrated champion of change, takes bold actions, and has the ability to both re-imagine/re-invent the vision and strategy of an organization, and to execute it. She encourages, inspires, and motivates her team to innovate, all the while, leading by example. She practices what Jim Collins describes as level 5 leadership traits of humility, asking others for help when needed, being extremely disciplined, taking responsibility for her actions, and surrounding herself with the right people in the right jobs. She extends level 5 leadership even further by exhibiting servant leadership in placing the greatest emphasis on the needs of the company, its' customers and employees, and society at large.
Usha believes that, innovation begins with not just knowing but also anticipating the needs of the customers. She asserts that making data-driven decisions is critical, based on applicable models and analytics regarding the market, competition, industry and technology trends, emerging disruptive forces, etc., however, the underlying data has to be balanced with intuition. Innovative ideas have to be assessed for feasibility of execution. This then leads to development (internally, off-the-shelf solution, or outsourced), testing and adoption. Though the process may seem laborious and lengthy, speed is of the essence! Usha believes that the COVID-19 environment has certainly helped to radically improve our capacity and capability to respond with speed, agility, and decisiveness in developing innovative products and solutions that both address this pandemic and effectively plan for the next one.
In the words of Usha, disruptive technologies have re-shaped virtually all industries and the pace of change/disruption is becoming more pronounced. Undoubtedly, these technologies present significant transformation opportunities for organizations to re-invent themselves in remaining relevant and achieving competitive advantage. For example, this provides opportunities to adopt multi-cloud service offerings for core business systems; move to the adoption of 5G, zero trust networks, and intelligent content layers to enable digital transformation; the use of mobility, IoT, and collaboration to transform the way we operate and conduct business (this has been a major acceleration point in order to operate in the COVID-19 environment); the increased application of AI, robotics, and machine learning into the information, systems, and processes; and enabling our ability to address the increased demand for technical computing capacity. The resulting speed of decision-making and the ability to house and use knowledge in enabling organizational wisdom ultimately leads to a technology-driven intelligent enterprise.
MITRE corporation is on the path to transforming to an intelligent enterprise that will seamlessly integrate knowledge, processes, human expertise, and data-driven decisions with adaptable and trusted intelligent systems and services to enable the delivery of innovative outcomes and opportunities. The pace of technological disruption will require organizations to be extremely agile and adopt an ongoing experimentation approach, i.e., establishing a test-bed/lab to experiment with emerging technology in order to remain competitive and relevant in the industry.
Usha says that she has lived with a few core values or mantras that have guided her throughout her career. She offers the same advice to the emerging and future women leaders:
* The future women leaders should choose a career that makes them truly happy, something that they are passionate about and are good at.
* They must take risks and be bold in their actions and decisions. They should never settle for mediocrity and should have the highest expectations of themselves and others.
* The future women leaders must be open to learning and continue to acquire new skills, continue to re-invent themselves and grow/evolve throughout their career.
* Collaboration and teamwork are extremely important values as well. The women leaders of tomorrow must surround themselves with people who they can help/mentor and who they can learn from. In doing so, the women leaders must embrace diversity and inclusion, not because it sounds good and is politically correct, but because it is the right thing to do – both in the office in order to achieve optimal results, but also in how they live their lives every day.
* Last but not least, women leaders should focus on making an impact – personal, professional, and societal. By becoming champions of change and transformation, we are all capable of leading and enabling positive impact in all aspects of life.
