Veridian

1. How successful has David Langstaff’s leadership been?

Through David Langstaff's leadership, a company emerged that was the place to work at for employees and the entity to merge with for other companies. When everyone wants to be on your team, it is a pretty good indication of success!

Stemming from his early work with NASA veterans, Langstaff highly valued the clarity of work that can come from teamwork striving towards a common goal. He fought to build a lasting company while staying away from the short-term goal of making a quick profit. This mentality was a huge contrast to many companies, particularly the Silicon Valley companies, during the dot com era.

Langstaff worked to run the company off a values-based leadership style. He wanted his employees to feel like they were serving the customers through challenging and interesting projects, while ultimately understanding the bigger picture. He realized that people work better and harder when they feel they are a part of something bigger than themselves. He created a vision and lived by that vision. He saw this as key to having Veridian be the place that top talent wanted to work.

Not only did prospective employees seek out Veridian based on its values based leadership, but so did companies looking to be acquired. Veridian was building a reputation of seeking out companies to buy that had similar values, in order to make transition easier. Company leaders felt their employees would be in good hands under Veridian, and were willing to take a lower price for that reason. After several acquisitions, Langstaff made sure to take time to piece together the segmented areas that were created and solidify them under Veridian.

Langstaff was constantly reinforcing his vision through his actions. He had a lot of internal communication on the core values, as well as basing a large part of employee compensation on cooperation and leadership. Supporting a vision, through consistency in internal...