Mike Keebaugh says growth should be the top priority for any
company or any business leader.
If you’re not growing, you’re well on your way toward personal
and professional stagnation.
“It’s very important for the organization to be a growing company,” says Keebaugh, president of Garland-based Raytheon
Intelligence and Information Systems, a $2.7 billion unit of
Raytheon Co. “Your stakeholders and shareholders expect it, and
your employees deserve it. There are two models for how you
get promoted. One is your boss dies. The other one is that you
grow as a company and create more opportunity and get promoted into that. I don’t subscribe to the former.”
Keebaugh challenged Raytheon IIS’ 9,000 employees to new
growth targets when he became president in 2002. As he saw it,
the business wasn’t growing as much as he thought it could be.
The company had a solid reputation with its legacy customers —
those being the intelligence community and the Department of
Defense. The long-standing customers were regularly sending
Raytheon business, but, most of the time, that was because
Raytheon was the only company that could supply what they
needed. But Raytheon was beginning to see more competition in
some of its niche areas.
Keebaugh wanted the company to aim for high single-digit
growth, ratcheting it up from about 5 percent a year to about 9 percent. But the only way to do it was to sell the employees on the
idea first.