James Idell Interview – November 30, 2016
WEISS: I'm Helen Weiss for the San Diego Technology Archive housed at the Special Collections at the UC San Diego Geisel Library. I'm interviewing Mr. James Idell on November 30, 2016 in the Geisel Library. Mr. Idell joined SAIC in 1977 and served in various capacities as a group level business develop lead, senior program manager and system engineer before becoming senior vice president of corporate development. When he retired in 2007, he had served for 21 years in this capacity where he was responsible for keeping track of business development throughout the corporation and for organizational development and change as SAIC expanded its scope and workforce. Thank you, Mr. Idell, for making time for this oral history interview. We'll be walking through your background, education and then find out about your experiences at SAIC especially here in San Diego. So tell me about your background before you joined SAIC. Where did you grow up?
IDELL: I grew up outside of Boston - my whole family is still back there - in the town of Wellesley, Massachusetts. I went to Cornell University undergraduate and then one year of graduate school. I got my master's in electrical engineering with a specialization in information theory. After leaving the graduate program, I spent four years in the Air Force. I had joined an Air Force ROTC detachment after my junior year at Cornell because my draft number was four and it was a way to go to grad school in the era of the Vietnam War and the draft. I had an opportunity with the Air Force to come to Southern California and worked as a project engineer for the Air Force Satellite Control Facility working on upgrade projects to ground data processing and telemetry support systems for both Air Force and classified satellites. In 1976 I left the Air Force. I spent a year with System Development Corporation in Santa Monica doing systems analysis work on various largely government contracts. Wasn't particularly happy there. Through a friend - we were on an outing one day - and I was complaining about my job. He said, "Well my neighbor works for this company called Science Applications, SAI, and he's looking for somebody with just your background." So through my friend, I met Don McPherson who was a division manager in El Segundo, a small office at SAI and within a month I had hired on. So that was January of '77. The company, at that time, had just finished a year of $44 million in annual revenues. Had about 1,400 employees. My employee number was in the 2,600s which were consecutively given. When I retired there were well over 150,000 numbers used and the company had grown to $10 billion annual revenue and over 44,000 employees worldwide. So my time at SAIC saw great growth, great change, and great opportunity. Joining SAIC turned out to be a life-changing decision.
WEISS: So before we move into your life at SAIC, tell me a little bit about the System Development Corporation. I understand that it was founded in 1955 in Santa Monica and was the first computer software company in the U.S. Tell me about that whole experience and also how your Air Force background transitioned to help you with what you were doing at that company.
IDELL: I was responsible for contracts that the Air Force had to upgrade ground data processing systems both for real time control and telemetry support systems for satellites. I was recruited by SDC through contacts that I had made as an Air Force officer and went to work on a program with the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program in Omaha, Nebraska looking at future upgrades to their support systems. So it was similar work from a contractor basis to a different Air Force organization than one I had worked on as a blue-suiter.
WEISS: As a blue-suiter - where were you actually trained and did you see any overseas posts?
IDELL: I was what they used to call a Hollywood Solider. My entire four years were spent in El Segundo, California living on the beach at Manhattan and Hermosa Beach. L.A. Air Force station is really an office park and has, other than the gym and the exchange, few of the trappings of a military base. So my hair was always just a little bit too long. I lived the life of a commuter who had an engineering job. I traveled as part of my job probably once or twice a month to Sunnyvale, California where the Satellite Control Facility's principal operating location was but never other than temporary duty never had any overseas commitments or responsibilities. I also traveled back to Washington on occasion.
WEISS: So you left Systems Development Corporation, got hired on to SAIC. When did you first meet Dr. Beyster? I understand he was an excellent recruiter himself, but you were then recruited through somebody else.
IDELL: I was, but Bob's recruiting skills had more to do with me staying in the company. As I said, through a friend, I met a man who had some contracts and needed help and I fit right in. I hired on and was working. I met Bob probably within a year of being hired. So in my mind, I was a fairly junior employee. In '77, I would have been 28, 29 rather, but I took responsibility for a contract that had some growth potential with the Air Force Space Division. Bob, at that time, was the chief business development officer of the company, informally. He took an interest in and traveled extensively to the various operating locations of the company and really wanted to meet the young people who were in charge of and who had the technical knowledge that were the guts of our support to important contractors. Through his normal travels to the various locations, he met me because the contract that I was responsible for had some growth potential. He knew of me and he used to truly enjoy meeting the young technical people and program management people that were in the company, because he wanted to get their ideas. He wanted to see who was smart, who was contributing in the long run. At that time the company was sized so that he could take an interest in every operation and wanted to meet personally ever key person in the company. A tall order even then but it was something that he endeavored to do.
WEISS: So you were based in the Santa Monica area?
IDELL: When I worked [for SDC]. SAIC, when I hired on to them, had an office in El Segundo, California right down the road from Air Force Base Division. Had maybe 40-45 people total in that office spread between a couple different SAIC divisions.
WEISS: When did you come to San Diego for SAIC?
IDELL: I will get to the recruiting part directly as it affected me. Two years into SAIC, I was fairly ambitious at the time. I was doing well at SAIC, but I had some friends who worked for Control Data Corporation, CDC. Back in the late '70s, they were industry leaders in super computing and also had classified technology for high-powered onboard spacecraft computers. They recruited me to come to the Bay area and be a salesman for the Air Force because of my background with classified space programs and my data processing information theory background. They had a very small group of people that supported the classified community and interfaced for the various products and research activities that CDC was involved in. It would have been a big pay jump for me and was exciting at the time to be back working with the classified community. So I told my immediate boss in El Segundo that I had taken this job. He said, "Oh my goodness. Good luck." He happened to tell his boss, the operations manager in San Diego and he said, "Well good luck." He told the group manager that I worked under at the time who was a fellow named Gene Ray. Gene said, "Wait a second." He sent me out to Dayton to meet a business development individual named Bill Hall who was working in the classified community and brought me down to La Jolla and said, "No, you're not leaving the company. First of all, I want you to sit down with Dr. Beyster." I had met Gene through program reviews. So he was somebody I knew but not well. I had met Bob one or two times. This was back in La Jolla in the 1200 Prospect Building. They brought me up to the fourth-floor corner office and I was ushered in to see Bob. We sat down. Before we really could get started, his administrator walked in with a very officious air and gave Bob a pamphlet and just said, "Excuse me, Mr. Idell. Dr. Beyster, you really have to look at this and sign this correspondence. It's very important." So he said, "Excuse me." Helen, Bob's administrator, left the room. He opens the folder and said, "Really, this has got nothing to do with any [correspondence]. This is a memo from Gene telling me what I'm supposed to say to keep you in the company." So this was typical of Bob's disarming, informal interactions - I mean he was recruiting me at the time. He said, "Well if you want to work in the classified community, we can make that happen." He got me introduced to an SAIC division in Tucson that had some classified contracts. He said, "You want to do business development? Well Gene's going to take you on his staff and you can be a business development staff person and work with the classified programs in Tucson and also in Space Division." He explained the equity system at SAIC and why there was long term benefit. At some time in this oral history discussion, I think you'll probably want me to talk about employee ownership. Let me do it in bits and pieces. At that time, it was the intent of Bob and the board that every key person in the company - and this was broadly speaking, not just some senior executives - should see 25 percent of their annual remuneration in unrealized capital gains based on SAIC stock holdings. That was the goal. I had had the opportunity when I first joined SAIC to participate in the equity, when I went from SDC to SAIC, I was very happy. One of the things that enticed me was the broad bonus program that included equity. Very shortly after I joined the company I got an offer to buy $2,000.00 worth of stock, receive $2,000.00 of vesting stock as a result and then receive options worth at the time $2,000.00. So for the first two years or so I had gotten grants like that. Then shortly before I got this offer from CDC, I got a third offer of this sort. $2,000.00 for a 29-year old in 1978, '79, I was living on the beach still. That was a lot of money. I said, "No, they're going to keep asking me if I want to buy stock until I turn them down." So I said no thank you to that one. Years later, I went back and tried to calculate what the value of that decision was or what I had lost. It was about a half a million dollars in the sense that if I found another $2,000.00 back in '79 when I retired that would have turned into a half a million dollars. Oh well. But back to Bob, his personality, I mean he was funny. He's warm. He's very informal and as I said, disarming relating to the people he's trying to hire, the people he works with. He answered all my questions. Just the exposure to him was important. He talked a bit about the company, about employee ownership, what he was trying to build, what his philosophy was and it was all enough to keep me in the company. That was the last time I had pursued an offer outside of the company. Twenty-eight years later, after 30 years I retired.
WEISS: Some of the SAIC pioneers who spoke at Dr. Beyster's Celebration of Life talked about the Beyster Book. Do you have any stories about the Beyster Book?
IDELL: Well in '86 when I went down to work directly - I guess it was '84 - it was '84 - I went down to work directly for Bob. It was clear that if I put a Beyster Book in my pocket and pulled it out on occasion, that would be deemed a smart thing to do. Bob kept notes. He had on his desk a spiral bound notebook, which I adopted as well for my active listening on phone conversations and in meetings. But the Beyster Book was more for when he left his desk. He always had a handy way to make a note of a name of somebody that he might have met, a contract or a contact or when he promised that he'd do something, a to-do list to follow-up on. It was just something that was ubiquitous in his person. He kept track of an incredible number of people personally in the company, contracts, opportunities, customers. So it was clear that it helped him keep straight what he needed to remember.
WEISS: So what does this Beyster Book look like? I understand you still use one today?
IDELL: I do. They are spiral bound at the end and perhaps they're chest-pocket size. So it's about two and a half by three and a half inches and you just flip it over to a new page. I still use them today when I travel to keep track of travel expenses, when we have addresses of what museum or when we have theater tickets or which restaurant and what phone number. It just helps me to have ready access when I'm in an unfamiliar place or even a familiar place outside of home of what we're doing next or what bus line or what subway line to take.
WEISS: Dr. Beyster convinces you to work for Gene Ray and that part of the company. So you go from where you are in Santa Monica area?
IDELL: El Segundo. I stayed in El Segundo for another couple of years. Let's see. So it was '79 where Bob convinced me to stay in the company and I was in El Segundo until September of '84. I worked for Gene on his staff and I was responsible for working across divisions and across groups on some major classified contracts that we had. The customer at the time was based in Los Angeles. So I stayed in L.A. I worked with the Porcello Division based in Tucson and the McPherson Division, which was my old division, based on El Segundo. I worked the vagaries of a larger contract that spanned multiple SAIC divisions. This was fairly unusual at the time where we had a contract big enough to need support from multiple divisions. So I was - my job was, number one, to support the customer and the customer's needs; number two, to ensure that SAIC or SAI at the time brought the appropriate technologies and technical support people to bear on the contract no matter where they were in the corporation. Now at this time, every individual division was incentivized to maximize the work that went to their own home organization. At some point, you'll want me to talk about Bob's overarching philosophy of keeping individual local organizations incentivized to do what was best for themselves to grow, keep their entrepreneurial zeal active, reward them fairly for growth that they saw in their own organizations and yet, in some ways contradictorily speaking, keeping those same people incentivized to understand that their long term benefit was for the corporation as a whole to grow. So as a division manager, you wanted to have contracts to feed your people, support your own customers, control your own customers, grow your own business because your annual bonus pool and success in the near term was based on what you kept in-house. At the time, divisions were like $3 to $5 million in annual revenues and anywhere from 20 to 60 people. But on the other hand, overall long-term growth through equity participation was based on the company as a whole succeeding. So I was an early-in the company's history-practitioner of getting organizations that have their own interest in the business to work together and share business for the good both of the customer and of the corporation as a whole. Sometimes that was easy and sometimes not as people struggled to balance their short term incentives of what they control themselves and the longer term incentives of how best to grow a contract and how best to serve a customer that benefitted the corporation as a whole.
WEISS: I understand these were classified? Were all your customers aerospace related vessels and satellite?
IDELL: Yes, even their existence was classified, but today you can talk about a government agency called the National Reconnaissance Office, which was responsible for reconnaissance satellites. That's probably all I should say. But its existence today is unclassified.
WEISS: That's good. So you were there until around '84. Then did you come to San Diego or go to Tucson?
IDELL: I got more exposure to Bob. I became program manager of a fairly high-visibility support program to this classified customer. Bob had come up for program reviews with the customer and I had brought the customer down to San Diego to talk to Bob. So I interacted with Bob in that regard. We sought the advice of Admiral Bob Inman, who was on the board at the time. Bob Inman suggested to Bob Beyster that they establish a special projects coordinating council that could, to the extent compartmentalization and classification rules allowed, talk to some degree and coordinate our activities across the corporation for what we're doing. We met quarterly and met in a vault, in a secure environment here in San Diego. I got to know Bob Inman. He asked me to be the secretary, if you will, of the council, to bring people and projects to this special projects coordinating council so that Bob Inman and Bob Beyster could make sure the corporation was acting in an appropriate way for these very important customers.
WEISS: You were dealing with classified information? I mean, over the years, had you kept some level of active security clearance?
IDELL: More so then, and as I transitioned down working for Bob directly - and probably through the end of the '80s, early '90s - but at that point my responsibilities were too diffuse to really require that level of classified access. So I dropped away from that.
WEISS: Were you responsible for bringing in colleagues that had been in the military and was that an appeal in your particular division because of having worked with classified material?
IDELL: Part of the culture of the company is that everybody in the broadest sense who supports customers would be looking to grow business and to find out what we can do better for our customers. We're also on the lookout - again, everybody's incentivized - to find smart people. Back in the '70s and '80s, we did not recruit at colleges very often because we wanted people with experience. So one of our informal strategies, in the aerospace side of things, was to look at companies like TRW, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed Martin. These companies would hire people out of college and they'd spend five years and train them and then they would get kind of stuck in a giant organization. That's when they were ripe for us to come in and say, "You've been trained. You have some skills. You understand customers. You understand contracts and technologies. [Your knowledge] has matured from scholastic to practical. Come join us and we'll give you the opportunity to build business, to be recognized much more quickly and with many more opportunities to grow than you will see in your large organization." So, whenever we met people, subcontractors, teammates, we were always on the lookout for younger people who had that five years after college to be trained by the bigger aerospace corps and bring them in and give them opportunities as we developed them. Bob was always looking out for the best and the brightest. His view was you grow the company with smart people and you incentivize them to be responsible for their own well-being, for their own customers, to build their own business and be rewarded fairly with equity for doing that.
WEISS: So Gene Ray at a certain point breaks off and starts Titan. Was he trying to lure you to Titan and how did that go over with the company and with Dr. Beyster?
IDELL: Well I know you've talked to Gene, so I'll let Gene speak for himself.
WEISS: I didn't personally.
IDELL: [I mean Gene's been interviewed by the archive initiative.] Gene and Bob had some differences about how the company should grow and the direction the company should take. I was there when the split between Bob and Gene happened, when Gene left. I was an observer. I was not a principal. I would say that there was one event that was contributory. I won't say that this is why Gene left, but it certainly was something that I knew he was bothered by. That had to do with something that I became very intimate with for the last 15 years of my role in the company. Bob believed in every year looking at the corporation and making organizational changes at the margins. He felt that every year conditions change, customer priorities and needs change. Addressing the situation in our company, we need to restructure on an annual basis to be best suited and to address the customers that we have and that we see in front of us and best able to exploit the technologies that we have in-house. Now you would say, "Well that sounds like it would throw the company into turmoil on an annual basis," but what he did was do it on the margins. So it's not like the whole company would be get tossed up in the air and rejiggered every year but he did some things every year and it grew to be known as reorg season, everybody would say with a wry smile. I'll get back to Gene in a minute. For 15 years I was responsible for bringing ideas to him. In many situations, I was responsible for affecting change or at least talking to the principles. We can talk more about this later. But back to Gene Ray. Within Gene's system group in the corporation, there was a fellow named John Warner who was an operations manager and John's organization had just won a fairly large, at the time, contract at the National Training Center in Northern California for simulation software and instrumentation for a range that did training exercises for Army [tanks and] units. It was a fairly large systems integration contract. It had a lot of growth potential. So John and his people had a big effort to swallow. As I said, John worked for Gene Ray - and John Warner I think felt at the time that he needed more independence to grow his business and he needed more resources. I mean every step up in the organizational line-the higher step took a bit of the discretionary resources from the lower organizations. So Bob certainly knew John well because, again, Bob doesn't necessarily respect organizational ties. He would go down to the principle people involved whether they were technical people, marketing people, management people and talk to them directly when there was a program as important as the NTC program was. So in conversations, John said, "Hey I can grow this business if I have more discretionary resources. Why don't you move me out from under Gene's organization and set me up as a parallel directly reporting operation?" This of course took away from the resources that Gene had to run his group. I think Gene felt it diminished the importance of what he and his group staff had done in support of getting the NTC contract. It was frankly something he was not pleased with at the time. That happened, I would say, within a year before Gene left the corporation. It was an example where Bob did not believe a senior manager should just rest on their laurels and grow a big organization. For all the time I was with SAIC, we looked for those younger people who had opportunities to build a bigger business and pull them out from under already successful senior managers and set them up and incentivize them to grow. Of course those already successful senior managers did not appreciate having the resources and control pulled out from under them. Now ironically, fast forward 20 years, in the 2000s, John Warner had a very large sector at the time. We changed names and the sector was the new name for a group. I had a couple of conversations with John where we wanted to take bits and pieces of his organization out from under him. It was the health care business, centered around a large health care contract, which we wanted to move out from John's organization. John had gotten a leg-up on his start by being pulled out from under Gene and 15 or 20 years later, Bob pulled big pieces out of John's organization to encourage the [healthcare] people to grow. We were always balancing it. But Bob was always most interested in the younger Turks who were hungry and trying to build something than people who had made their mark and had established their empires and might be content just to manage.
WEISS: You became senior vice president of corporate development in 1988, but the world's changing a lot at that point. We're talking about Glasnost. I assume that many of these contracts had to do with defense, the former Soviet Union.
IDELL: Certainly the company was [largely built on national security business]. But let me back up a bit. In '84, Bob recruited me to come down to La Jolla and work for him. He, at the time, was still trying to keep track of all the major new initiatives in the corporation. We had grown beyond just defense certainly at the time. We had health. We had energy. We had environment. We had the kernels of what would later grow and be major lines of business for SAIC. He put it simply, "I need somebody to understand what's important and tell me so I won't miss anything." At that point the company was a couple hundred million in revenue and he kept, in his little Beyster Book and in his head, track of everything that was important that he wanted to touch. He couldn't do it anymore and he wanted some help. His first task to me was, "Make a list. What are the top business development initiatives that we have ongoing in the company?" At that time, I spent a couple weeks and I called and talked to every senior business leader, every senior business development guy. Introduced myself to those that I didn't know. I was from corporate so at that point, there was always a bit of suspicion of how I was going to use the information and how I could help them. It was sensitive at first, but I worked my way into a position of trust with most of the senior people. I put together a 3-page, single-spaced memo with some 25 or 30 major opportunities. I said, "Bob, this is the hot list. This is what's important." He used that as a basis for going out and making his daily calls to people, to business leaders, to business developers, to technology people. As the company grew, that [list] grew into a marketing information system, which had 300 items. It was computer data bases. I had a little staff of IT people and we had administrators around the company who [managed the data]. Ten years later, it was a thick computer printout. My business development role first identified the things that were important. Then as Bob looked for ways to impact, hear about and understand what was going on, I developed a monthly teleconference for him, which we used to call a business acquisition council. I would tee up 6 to 8 major opportunities on the teleconference, get not just the line manager but the key business developer responsible for that business opportunity to speak for 15, 20 minutes to a broad council of leaders, including Bob, and answer questions. Now we had some money in corporate to invest in business development opportunities that were called 'guidelines.' It is just an arcane name related to our accounting systems but in effect it was discretionary resources that Bob could pass from corporate to a line organization to help them in a business development pursuit. It was a way we incentivized people to come to the business acquisition councils. It was the focal point for making decisions on allocating corporate resources in support of various business development activities.
WEISS: But this was all intra-SAIC, let's say. What did you see as the technological landscape, having seen early Silicon Valley from when you were just in the Air Force and looking around afterwards to when you first met Dr. Beyster here in San Diego to now you are in corporate? I mean what is going on in the technology community in San Diego, the software community? What did you see really happening here or did you really have time to think about that?
IDELL: Not as much as others. But major impacts in the mid-'80s were the strategic defense initiative, sensor technology, communications and satellite communications technologies, command and control, and complex systems integration, systems of systems, workstation development, simulation systems for training. Those were all technologies that were important that we were involved in and were working with others. Many other local companies were working in these areas as well. I would highlight, General Atomic, as a local example. That's where Bob came from, [prior to starting SAI], working on nuclear weapons, and weapons effects modeling and analysis.
WEISS: Were you competing against General Atomic? Were you competing against - was ViaSat in that level of business at that point and was there anybody else on that technology and software landscape?
IDELL: We competed not just here in San Diego but broadly around the country. All the aerospace businesses were involved in one extent or another and the smaller companies as well. There were many SAIC spinoffs. I am not best versed to tell this story but I think in Bob's book there's a list of all of the various companies that were started from people, by people who left SAIC and took their experiences at SAIC and formed technology related companies that to one extent or another were similar to Bob's model. I mean there are 50 or 60 technology concerns that here in San Diego and around the country - like Titan Systems - that resulted from people who got to a point at SAIC and wanted to run their own show and left.
WEISS: As Qualcomm came through, certainly the Cornell connection, another huge company on the landscape here. Did you ever have any interest in looking at Qualcomm?
IDELL: I had a good friend who came to SAIC who had worked at M/A-COM which was one of the companies that grew into what today is Qualcomm. I didn't pursue opportunities there but I got to know a little bit from - the fellow's name was Nick Del Vecchio - about his background. At that time, I was pretty much consumed with what I was doing at SAIC. I mean I was awfully busy and I was energized. The company was growing. Equity was growing. Bob's view of employee ownership was to manage the growth of the company so that we could see a steady year on year growth of let's say 15 percent in revenues. The idea was that stock price would double every five years. Bob never had the vision of SAIC being kind of a typical startup today of in three to five years you'll go from zero to a billion dollars. Bob was in it for the long haul. Money was one of the least important things for him. He gave a bit of equity away at the very start, but by the time he retired it was less than one percent of the company equity. So where did that equity go? It was distributed to the people who he brought into the company, who helped grow the company. To a large extent, SAIC was services based, people based. Frankly, what I'm good at is dealing with people. Working technology, corporate business development issues across organizational lines with customers, dealing with people. I was less interested in product development and understanding what's the next best thing we can build that we can sell hundreds or thousands of or whatever. So naively I would say, at the time and certainly in the '80s and the early '90s I was pretty locked into SAI's view and vision and not so much interested in a company, [like Qualcomm] that was a commercial venture that would have big years and lean years up and down.
WEISS: So as I understand, the whole vision for SAIC started off in [technology services]. You mention health care at a certain point. In the mid-'90s they secured a contract to provide computing and technological services for the National Cancer Institute.
IDELL: Right.
WEISS: This was life sciences. Were you involved at all in that?
IDELL: Only in support of the business development pursuit and some of the individuals who were chasing that contract. I noticed in your questions you asked, "Was that our big foray into health care?" In the early '70's we had contracts and I forget whether it was the VA - I believe so but it could have been the NIH -supporting epidemiological studies for the effects of Agent Orange on returning Vietnam veterans. So back in the early and mid-'70s we had people working with health care professionals, with veterans' groups understanding, pulling together data and making sense of epidemiological data. So we had entrees in a health related business where we had MDs on staff back as early as the mid-'70s. There was a long, slow run up to our NIH major contract. We had a reputation. We had people. That was not just something that grew out of whole cloth, so to speak. But no, in terms of personally involved with customers, no. I supported the business development pursuit with resources and peripheral help.
WEISS: So you talked about being quite busy and maybe not interacting that much in the more general business community here. I understand it was somewhat of a workaholic environment there.
IDELL: Bob's view was hire the smartest people you can find. Why was the company going to succeed? He said on many occasions early on, "Because I'm going to work harder than any of my peers at other companies." He expected people around him to work hard as well. Now I have to tell you a funny story, a Beyster story. When he recruited me to come down - this was '84. I went sailing with him. He was talking about what he wanted in the way of help. He said, "You know, Jim, I have to tell you this company is the most important thing in my life and I want the people around me - I want the company to be the most important thing in their lives as well." I looked at him and I said, "Bob, I can't do that. I've got two young sons who moved down here. I get involved in Little League. I get involved in this and that. It can't be the most important thing in my life." He looks at me. He kind of glares at me for a minute. He says, "Well you can lie to me at least, can't you?" I go, "Bob, fair enough." Years later, when Bob had moved and bought the facility on Cave Street in La Jolla, he had maybe a dozen people on his senior staff and various folks based in Cave Street. Bob worked a 12-hour day. He got to work, made phone calls on his way to work. A lot of times you'd find him in the parking lot back of the Cave Street building finishing up a phone call. He worked 12-hour days, 6:00 to 6:00 pretty much every day. But he always ran mid-day. He worked Saturdays from 6:00 or 7:00 till lunch at 2:00. He had a group of folks, senior staff that worked with him on Saturdays. Typically, they'd go for a run with him and then eat lunch. I never was part of that group. I didn't work Saturdays. At one point, one day, somebody said, "How come Idell doesn't work Saturdays?" He says, "Idell? Oh he doesn't work Saturdays." Bob said that because from the very start I had kind of laid the groundwork. So his expectations were such that, "Of course Idell doesn't work Saturdays. I mean he told me." It's like he said, "What are you talking about?" The unstated inference from the people around him was, "Why am I working Saturdays?" Because they didn't tell him they couldn't work Saturdays. I mean Bob was not going to look after your personal life, but if you told him, he [would respect it]. He could treat people as individuals. I won't say that he took advantage of people but people who didn't speak up and kind of declare their boundaries sometimes got overworked. Take vacations. I always took two to three weeks off every year. I would tell Bob when I would be gone. He'd grumble a little bit. Everyone would say, "How did you get three weeks off?" I didn't get three weeks off; I took three weeks off. It's like, "Okay, Idell's gone." So the best way to deal with him was kind of set your own boundaries, tell him what you would do and what you wouldn't do and then work like the dickens to perform within those constraints. He wasn't going to look out for you though. He wasn't going to ask you, "Are you working too hard? Are you working too late? Isn't it time to go home?" You were expected to set your own boundaries and live your own life. I never didn't tell him that the company was the most thing in my life. I kept to his early statement of, "You can lie to me."
WEISS: You mentioned going sailing with him originally. Were you ever part of the sailing group in the America's Cup venture?
IDELL: Well I certainly sailed a good bit with him especially in the early days. I got involved with some of the initial briefings about decision making of how we should get involved, after the loss of the America's Cup in I think it was '83 and I had been in Newport with the group that was following the races there. We looked at our technologies that could support the '87 rematch - not rematch but the '87 regatta to win back the Cup. I was in on some of the early discussions that we had internally of what we could do in terms of hull design and simulation of results, looking at different hull designs and especially different weather, wave and wind conditions, how different design concepts would work. We had been doing hydrodynamic modeling for the Navy and so it was an offshoot of this existing technology that led Bob to say, "Hey, I think we can help Dennis Connor. I think we can help the America's Cup campaign if we look to apply what we do know to the America's Cup racing platform." So once that decision was made to invest both in our own people to give them the time and resources to adapt hydrodynamic modeling from submersibles, Navy submersibles to America's Cup hull and keel design, I was out of it after that. I certainly [followed our activity]. I did not go down at Perth, Australia in '87. There was a crowd of SAIC-ers that did go down there to see the races. So I was involved only in the initial phases and in some of the initial discussions but once a decision had been made I was off on other things.
WEISS: So you mentioned having your own life outside of the company. SAIC made some efforts to get involved in charitable organizations. Did you ever try to pull them into community organizations of your world?
IDELL: While I was with the company, I certainly was involved in discussions related to decisions about where to invest charitable money, and was involved in some of the formative meetings of the FED, Foundation for Enterprise Development, but I cannot say that I was a principle. I was there. I was involved. But once things got started, [I was off on other things]. Since I left [the company], when I retired in 2007, to be honest, my interests grew away from technology and business. When I went to college, I was an engineering major. I studied engineering, math, science. I had the technology theme throughout my career. When I retired, it was my time to go back and be involved with the humanities subjects that I'd missed. My wife is an English major who was a high school teacher and then a docent at San Diego Museum of Art and Timken Museum of Art. Interests such as reading, art, history, music, opera, symphony, taking piano lessons, singing in choir, supporting my Unitarian Universalist church that I belong to, traveling and now grandkids fill up my life. I haven't followed up with either the technology or business interests that characterized my career. When I first retired I thought that I could get involved through CONNECT or through other means as a mentor for technology companies but it just didn't work out that way. I found myself most drawn to the humanities.
WEISS: You decide to remain with SAIC and you retired, you said, in 2007. Several years before, in 2004, Dr. Beyster had retired. Then there was the IPO. Can you tell me how it affected you? You were still an employee at that time and could observe the effect of these events on the company morale, the environment and company culture.
IDELL: Well it's complicated. Certainly the challenges that SAIC had to face as we grew, the more successful we were, the larger we grew, the harder it was to continue that growth. The model that Bob had developed worked great for the first 25 years but it became harder as we grew. We had to marshal our forces, so to speak, to go after larger and larger contracts to make a bigger impact on the company's top line and bottom line growth. To do that, we needed larger organizations. We needed more people who were [engineers], coders, systems integrators, people [to work on the larger contracts] and fewer, as a percentage, of key technologists, program managers, business developers, line managers. We needed bigger staffs to do these bigger contracts. So the percentage of people that were touched by and incentivized by the equity participation necessarily shrank as a percentage [of the employee population as a whole]. It still was broad. It still was a lot but we started having the challenges of the major aerospace corporations that we successfully competed against 20 years before for people and contracts. There were also challenges with respect to the type of work we did. We were broadly diverse in our support for customer communities and we would have organizations in the company who were providing system engineering and technical support to a customer agency who was letting a big system engineering contract. We had another piece of the company that wanted to compete for that big system integration prize but who might have a conflict of interest with the small group that was doing the support to the customer program office. So we had these situations where in some cases we had to decline contracts and in some cases we had to pass up major opportunities. In some cases, we had to walk a narrow line between the two. This meant we had to have more control, if you will, from corporate for the businesses we were in. We used the annual reorganization to prune and coalesce and bring together like businesses so that there would be fewer of these disparate parts of the company going after similar customers. But I think as the company grew, it was evident that it was harder and harder to have this decentralized focus. The other issue was that Bob was aging. The board was concerned about his ability to continue to manage the company as he was doing. There were a couple, three, succession plans that came on the horizon that just didn't work out for one reason or another. The board finally stepped in and insisted that there be a firm date for succession and a search for a new CEO. I would be disingenuous if I told you that Bob was fully on board with this. Now I was a bit in the middle because I certainly had worked directly for Bob from '84 till - what was this - 2003, 2004, somewhere along that line. But I was also involved with board members who were looking at ways to implement change. I was not the only one but I was one of the few people who got involved in negotiations between individual board members, factions of board members and Bob in terms of how to go about a transition. When Ken Dahlberg was hired to be a successor CEO, he kept me around to help with the transition. I suspect I could have stayed working for the company as long as I wanted. But my real value to him was in the first year to 18 months because he wanted to restructure the corporation to give a more significant role to the senior line managers and more of a traditional pyramid-shaped organization. At the time I was kind of the knowledge base, knew all the people, knew all the businesses, who did what. I helped him restructure and look at how he could consolidate and get fewer, larger organizations lined up. I did help him do that for 18 months to 2 years after he came on board. Once that reorganization was completed, his style of management was such that my role was significantly decreased. That led to the period when we went public. As a longtime SAIC-er, going public was a big deal. I understood why we were doing it - to create equity, liquidity and also because of the size of the corporation. The challenge of trying to get an external assessor to quarterly help the board set a price, I mean that was just becoming unwieldy. Others can speak better to this. Once we went public and because my role at that time wasn't as vital or as important and I didn't see a new role that I wanted to pick up, I thought that this would be a good time to leave and retire. I was lucky enough to be able to do this because of the equity that I had built up as a long-term employee. I was comfortably situated where I could make that transition. So in 2007, when I was 58, I left the company and have been thrilled to be retired ever since, to be quite honest.
WEISS: So was that the feeling among many of the people throughout the company?
IDELL: You know, there was an old-timer/new-timer kind of thing. Many of the old timers were unhappy when we went public. They were unhappy when Bob left because Bob was not happy leaving. We all were very thankful for him, for what he had done for the company, for what he had built, for the person he was. So it was not a happy time for those who knew him. I'm not talking about 20. I'm talking about 2,000, 3,000 old-timers. I mean there were lots of people that Bob had brought into his personal relationship web that really had some significant interaction with him on a regular basis. His capacity for reaching out and knowing the people who worked in his company was huge. So the people who had been around a long time, I think they were disheartened and certainly didn't appreciate the change. Many of them understood, but it just wasn't the same excitement. We had become a big company and many of us joined SAIC because we didn't want to work for big companies. But there was plenty of newer people, in the 10 to 15-year range for whom the challenges were still there. The excitement was still there and they believed probably more than the old-timers that this was the way to go. So there's not a uniform answer, but if you want kind of rough view, the longer you'd been at SAIC perhaps the less you were interested in the new vision of the company.
WEISS: In terms of the image of the company when it went public, you had been involved in some public relations and marketing. Did you have to get involved at all in explaining what the company was doing and why? How did that all play out?
IDELL: At the time we were going public, that was a very controlled message and had to be because of the SEC regulations. I was involved in helping working with our team crafting that message. But in terms of public statements surrounding and leading up to the IPO, that was a very controlled thing. What we said to customers was scripted.
IDELL: I did speak internally. I spent a lot of time talking to people within the company about the whys and the wherefores and what management was thinking. At this time, however, there were constraints about what could be said internally as well.
WEISS: Did you travel to many of the SAIC sites in the U.S. and internationally?
IDELL: Yes, in the U.S. I never took a business trip abroad with SAIC, but around the country absolutely. I visited just about all of the major office - places where we might have 75 to 100 people or more - to talk to business leaders, talk about business development opportunities. For several years, I also traveled with Bob.
WEISS: What was it like supporting him if he's doing a presentation or were you doing the presentation? Was he sitting there making notes?
IDELL: Well certainly I gave talks. Bob was more one on one or one on a few. When he had a "presentation" to give, it was usually to a customer where there was an SAIC person who was key to that customer that would be with Bob. I was there more when it was informal stuff. For both recruits and customers, I would go with Bob and just give him a second pair of ears to remind him of what was said, what he promised and to follow-up things that came from the meetings either with customers or with recruits.
WEISS: You talked about early on you were trying to build the workforce from people that had been at TRW and some of the other companies that had about five years in and would come ready to work for your company. Did this change and as San Diego evolved? Were you trying to then find ways or not you personally but somehow through people in your company to interface with UC San Diego, with San Diego State to draw in engineers, marketing people, science people?
IDELL: Some of our initial efforts at corporate recruiting when we grew to the point where we realized that entry level people were important were directed at SDSU and UCSD, certainly. In the local [technology] community, we were always trying to hire smart people from the other San Diego based companies. Bob was not the last person to come over from GA to SAIC, for instance. I was not personally involved in the corporate recruiting, or in on-campus initiatives. But we really in effect learned about what it would take to do corporate recruiting broadly using our experience with the local universities.
WEISS: So what did it take here in San Diego? Many people went to the Silicon Valley or off to other places but especially Silicon Valley. What did it take to keep people here in San Diego?
IDELL: I think the people who went to Silicon Valley, it depends on whether it was before or after the Internet bubble burst in the 2000s. The people who would be excited about going to Silicon Valley were really looking for the rockets, the companies that could take off - the companies that could get big in a hurry. We still had that slow but steady mantra. So what appealed? It was really more the type of personality that you had whether slow but steady was what you wanted or the exciting chance at a skyrocket. People are different. People break down in different ways. In terms of more senior level people, Bob could pull people in. For instance, I came here in '84 I would never leave San Diego. So there's another slice of folks that would say, "The notion of going to the Bay area, for instance, sounds interesting but really I'd just as soon stay here." So there's a San Diego bias. We exploited people who wanted to be around smart people, who were slow and steady, and who wanted to stay in San Diego. Is that fair?
WEISS: In the early days when the company was founded in 1969, there was mainly military. There was a little bit of technology. How has this whole landscape evolved now? I know SAIC has recently since 2013 done a split and has the Washington presence.
IDELL: Right.
WEISS: Within a few months after Dr. Beyster started the company it had to have a Washington, D.C. presence. Tell me about that whole Washington, D.C. presence because you manage so many contracts that were federally or military, large military contracts.
IDELL: Yes. Bob wanted to live in San Diego. He built his home in La Jolla Farms in the late '50s. This is where he was going to start his company. We did have the benefit of a substantial Navy customer that we built up over the years. When I left the company in 2007, 80 percent of our business was still to the federal government. The customers are in Washington. The ultimate customers are. It was very clear that we needed people in Washington to interact with federal customers. There were a much more diverse set of customers in the Washington area. We also had very early operations in Huntsville, Alabama, Dayton, Ohio, Omaha. Our idea was always to place an SAIC organization close to a customer. We wanted the customer to be able to walk across the street or down the road to see their project officer or program manager. Not get on an airplane. So we were quick to establish local offices. Certainly Washington was an obvious one. Bob's initial contracts for the Defense Nuclear Agency were in Washington and he needed somebody sitting there who could run over and talk to them on a heartbeat's notice. Because of the diversity of customers in the greater Washington area, that quickly became our largest location.
WEISS: On the board, there were some very high-ranking people in the U.S. military that came aboard with SAIC for periods of time. Could you talk about interacting with them and did that help since you did have a military background?
IDELL: We recruited from the government. You could say that I had four years in the Air Force and I had a way station at SDC but in effect, I have a government service background. For people who had served, it was a natural to join a company that was technology based but focused largely on serving the federal government. Eighty percent of our business. We diversified over the years, but we've never really had the character in my tenure to be other than a largely federal support entity. There was a significant belief in the importance of federal service, importance of federal government, importance of serving the country that did appeal to our customers both in the way we comported our business, trying to be in their best interests and also it was appealing for people leaving the government who are looking for expanded opportunities within the private sector. We certainly hired from the government being careful that people would work on things they weren't influential on while they were in the government but work on other things. In terms of our senior board members, we've had a number of former secretary of defenses on our board; Mel Laird, Bill Perry, Bob Gates. We did important work. We supported important agencies, helped solve important problems. They weren't always the biggest, splashiest or well-publicized activities that the company did and they weren't all stuff that we could tout. But we were recognized at senior levels of government. Bob sought out the advice and support and help of senior leadership like the Bob Inmans, the Mel Lairds, the Bill Perrys, the Harold Browns, and others that I'm not remembering, but several others, not just one or two. They would help guide us, help provide some perspective from a strategic standpoint of what's going to be important tomorrow. I mean we were always looking for what's next, where to hire people, where to place people, what's important, where are we going. Those senior people would have the perspective of understanding what a broader vision of the future.
WEISS: SAIC for many years did not have a huge name recognition in San Diego among emerging businesses, but was a huge company. How did that whole culture evolve and if you were involved in marketing at all, how did you deal with that?
IDELL: Bob did not believe in touting or flouting our existence or our name. It just wasn't in his personality. For decades, the company reflected that personality. We were low-key. We did not advertise. I mean we do now. We did after the turn of the 21st century. But we did not advertise. We did not tout our existence. We did not want to make ourselves a target for our competitors. I mean they knew who we were but we didn't want to push ourselves in that competitive landscape. We wanted to build our business through relationships, through having smart people who understand what customers' problems needed to be solved and how to best solve them. We built our business based on relationships and customer interactions. It was business development, very little of the classic marketing, positioning, branding. We had a couple of attempts at developing a brand. We had some consultants come in and talk about what would our brand be, how we could project that brand, but it never really took hold in the core company. When we bought Bellcore in the mid-'90s, they were a commercial business trying to expand beyond their niche as a captive software R&D house of AT&T before divestiture. We got involved in helping them with that branding but it never caught on in the company as a whole. Clearly, if you are a public company you have to tout the company, not so much who you are, what you can do for customers or to impress customers but rather you need to tout the company to the security analysts and the people who make buy/sell recommendations for public stock. If you're on the public market, it's appropriate to look out and project yourself. But since we weren't public, we had no reason to do that. The customers who knew us, knew us. And we weren't shy about going in and introducing ourselves to the ones who did know us.
WEISS: Well Dr. Beyster in the SAIC Solution, his book, he quoted you in terms of the yearly reorganization saying that you preferred "evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes that would have left our people feeling whipsawed and too internally focused." So what did that mean? What would have somebody seen as a revolutionary change versus an evolutionary change?
IDELL: Ken Dahlberg made a revolutionary change in the company when he came in, [changing the character of the organization]. What I meant by an evolutionary change is where we made some changes every year, [consistent with the existing organizational philosophy, but never affecting more than 10 to 15 per cent of the people]. People knew that. I would show up at a certain time of year in a sector manager's office and he'd say, "What are you going to do to me this year? What are you going to take from me?" They knew the process. If you only did it on the margins, affecting, say, five to ten percent [of the business], and you did it every year so that change was relentless, but largely pruning and trimming and if no one was a loser every year and no one was a big loser any year, the changes were viewed as evolutionary. In a reorg there's always people who feel better afterwards and there are people who feel not so good. The idea was you didn't want to make senior management feel like they got their apple cart overturned. We wanted to do it continually such that people understood that this was how we worked but we didn't want to upset people so much that they were either confused or so upset that they would leave. With some of the more senior people it was a balancing act. I got thrown into the situation where I would go in and tell a very senior guy what we were planning on doing and a couple of times they'd get very upset and then go back to Beyster. Of course before they saw Bob, I would say, "Okay, here is what he was upset about, here's what he'll give on, here's where he'll draw the line." The guy would come in all upset to Bob and Bob would say, "Oh Idell got that all wrong. He was going out on a limb. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Come talk to me." Of course, he would use what I'd tell him to negotiate the final deal. But the idea - we didn't want people feeling threatened. We want them to feel accustomed to a process that continually changed and evolved our organizational structure so that our technologies would be best focused towards customer needs without them feeling like they've built something for nothing.
WEISS: So in the non-classified projects that you brought in or managed over the years, are there any that you're particularly proud of as you look back? If this is an inappropriate question, that's fine.
IDELL: Oh sure. Bob had an interest in strategic weapons, strategic weapons employment. That grew out of his early work in nuclear technology and nuclear weapons effects. He was well known in the strategic community. He served on a strategic advisory council advising Air Force Strategic Air Command and Strategic Forces. He was a technical advisor. He kept active in that I think through the end of his career. So there were two different support contracts for [strategic forces customers] that were important to Bob and the line units. There was one to the Navy strategic systems program office back in Washington that the line organization that was following that business was not going to bid. There was two weeks left before proposals were due. Bob was furious. "What do you mean they're not going to bid?" I told him this wasn't a big dollar contract but it was in his interest area and it had a lot of growth potential. So he pointed his finger at me and started stabbing me in the chest and said, "Make it happen. Go win that contract." So I went and sat down with the group manager and said, "Look, here's the deal. We're going to bid this. I know you made the decision not to but I come with resources and a mandate." We assembled a team and put together a proposal. I led that effort and we won. There was a second example pretty similar to that of one at Omaha for a support contract for the Strategic Air Command where Bob asked me to go and be responsible for red team review of the proposal. Two weeks out I said, "It's a loser, Bob." I was supposed to fly back with him to Washington. He said, "You stay here and win it." So I stayed there and kind of pushed aside the proposal managers, called in people I knew from around the country and said, "It's important; come," and helped put together the cost proposal and made sure we were competitive. So those were examples when I was working for Bob that were important.
WEISS: How about SPAWAR here and the Navy? I mean what kind of relationship did you maintain here?
IDELL: Me personally, I was more blue suit Air Force than Navy. I met Navy customers but I was not directly involved. I certainly interacted with our organizations that interacted with NOSC, Navy Ocean Systems Command, then SPAWAR. But no, I had more of an Air Force experience base. In terms of the customers I interacted with, it was more in the Air Force and classified community than the Navy. Navy was crucial here to keeping a critical mass of SAIC people locally. Bob wanted to stay in San Diego. He did not want to move to Washington. He was comfortable going once or twice a month to Washington but his home was here. Here was where the company was going to be managed from. So we worked hard to keep a significant technical presence here in San Diego. The Navy support work had the bulk of our technical people locally. Other major programs supported locally were the National Training Center range activity that we had for many years. When we won the Comprehensive Health Care System for the automation of the VA health information systems, we had a good number of technical folks here on that, as well. Then we had lots of technology related smaller businesses that were led by people that wanted to live in San Diego. When Ken Dahlberg came on board, and certainly when he was replaced, there was no longer a personal imperative to keep our headquarters here. Certainly to outside eyes, looking at how the population in the greater Washington area expanded and the limits on the number of customers and the growth opportunities here in San Diego, it was clear that as long as the company was supporting the federal government that our headquarters should be back East.
WEISS: So the company physically split. Now there's Leidos - is it Leidos?
IDELL: I think so.
WEISS: Then SAIC. So I know this was 2013. You've been out of the company for a while. What was your understanding? Do you stay in touch with former SAIC colleagues?
IDELL: To be honest, after the IPO when I retired, I divested myself of the SAIC stock. I no longer had insight into how the company was doing and my interests in retirement pulled me away. Now there's a group of former SAIC employees that I see but it's because we're all Padre fans. So we see each other at the ballpark. But no, I have not - I could not give you even an uninformed opinion about Leidos and the split.
WEISS: Are there any other SAIC stories or anything about Dr. Beyster you just want to add because we're pretty well, yeah, wrapping unless there's something else important that you want to contribute.
IDELL: There's one thing I think is important. You might ask how did Bob, running a broadly decentralized organization incentivizing people at very low levels to build business, to gain equity, to run their own small businesses, how did he keep the company together? One of the things that Bob instituted very early was quarterly pre-board dinners. The board met four times a year. So we would have a dinner and invite senior people to that dinner to interact and mix with board members both to educate the board members about what we're doing and give people who were important in the company some visibility with the board members. So that was in the '70s. That grew into what became meetings weeks where four times a year we'd pull people from around the country together in the '90s and 2000s. There would be like 1,000 people coming for a series, 2, 3, 4 days of technology focused meetings, 2 or 3 parallel tracks, business development meetings culminating in a Thursday morning management council where Bob and senior leaders would speak. I used to give business development summaries at each management council and other senior leaders would speak to up to 1,000 people about the state of the company. Then we had a big dinner that night, the pre-board dinner. From what used to be back in the '70s maybe 40 or 50 people, now would be several hundreds. Board members would still attend and interact with people from around the company. This was an important way to pull people together. The meetings weeks served the larger purpose of cross-pollinating technologies, business development interests and also to give this disparate group of people an understanding that their real future is based on the long term goal of keeping the company strong, keeping the company solid and growing equity. The company's succeeding as a whole was important to them in the long term while their short term priorities were to gain contracts to support themselves and their staff. The other thing I'd like to say about Bob is he had an offbeat sense of humor. He was a very serious guy. He was capable of getting angry at people, at times. I've been yelled at plenty of times, but the thing I learned early on that Bob appreciated was for you to look him in the eyes and tell him, "Bob, I screwed up. That's on me." Then he wouldn't know what to say. Then you'd leave and it would be good to get back in front of him within 24 hours on some unrelated matter, tell him something and act like nothing had happened. It would totally disarm him. He would be able to vent his anger, he would able to give you the message and then it would be over. He respected people who took responsibility for their actions as opposed to evading, giving excuses or putting the blame on somebody else. If you acted like, "Okay, Bob, you yelled at me but you're not going to hurt my feelings and we've still got a business to build," then he could rely on you to be there, be supportive and if he got angry at you, not be intimidated. Back to his sense of humor. When I left the El Segundo office in '84 and came down to La Jolla, my coworkers put together a prank video where they went around to people in the office and said, "Well what do you remember about Idell," or, "What do you want to say to him." Everybody in the video had Groucho glasses on, you know the funny nose with moustache and big glasses. They would say their thing but they'd have on Groucho glasses. Well the guy who did the video came down to La Jolla before I got there. This was when I was kind of in the transition. He got Bob to wear a pair of Groucho glasses and speak to the video camera. "Why did you bring this guy down? What are your hopes?" So here's Bob giving rational answers except he's got Groucho glasses on. So they made me a transparency slide from the video. I probably am the only person who has an image of Bob with Groucho glasses on. So that's an example of his sense of humor. He had a nose for people who were nervous or uncertain about their thing and he would push at you if he sensed that you weren't quite sure of what you were saying. But on the other hand, if you acted like you knew or believed in what you were doing, if you were prepared you could get away with a lot. Every time I got up and talked, gave a business development report, all of those management councils, probably 70 in my career, 4 a year, I always told a bad joke. It was expected. My friends would tease me mercilessly if I didn't say something funny. I've got many fond recollections of my uncertain humor looking out on this crowd of 500 to 700 people and seeing Bob at the head table with his head in his hands shaking his head side to side. But he understood it. Anyway, it was part of the culture. He could take a joke. He could tell a joke. So I wanted to get that in.
WEISS: Well thank you so much Mr. Idell. It's been really interesting to hear about your perspectives on the company, your career journey and looking back over the years and your close working relationship with Dr. Beyster because that really helps us to understand a little bit more of his personality and his commitment as well as the way that the management team was evolving over the years.
IDELL: Well glad to be of help.
WEISS: Okay.
END OF INTERVIEW