Beyond Strategy is back with another episode, and this time, we’re diving deep into the creation and evolution of Amentum, a global leader in engineering and technology solutions serving the U.S. Government and allied partners.

In this episode, we sit down with John Heller, Chief Executive Officer, and Adam Harrison, SVP of Strategy & Corporate Development at Amentum, to explore the company’s transformation following its strategic combination with Jacobs Solutions’ Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber & Intelligence businesses.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode:

The story behind Amentum’s formation and go-public journey. The leadership challenges of integrating multiple mission-focused businesses. How John’s extensive CEO experience helped shape the company’s strategy. The decision-making process behind Amentum’s branding and messaging. How the leadership team was built to drive long-term success. Insights on optimizing a global workforce of 53,000 employees across 80 countries. The key differentiators that position Amentum for future success.

John and Adam also share personal lessons from their careers, reflect on leadership in a high-growth environment, and discuss what keeps them up at night as they lead one of the most impactful companies in the defense and government sector.

Tune in now for an inside look at Amentum’s bold strategy, leadership insights, and the future of mission-driven innovation!

Hi.

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Strategy, an ACG National Capital Region podcast

focused on the leaders that drive innovation, enhance understanding, and

achieve market-clearing outcomes in the National Capital Region.

I am Andy McEnroe of Raymond James' Defense and Government

Investment Banking team.

I am Jenn Wappaus of The Infinity Group at RBC Wealth Management.

We are excited to sit down today with John Heller, Chief Executive Officer, and Adam

Harrison, SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development of Amentum.

Amentum is a leading global engineering and technology services business serving

the US government and its allied partners.

The company provides full life cycle, advanced engineering, and technology

solutions across 5 key markets: space, environment, intelligence,

defense, and civilian.

Amentum has extensive scale and global reach supported by a highly skilled and

diverse work force of more than 53,000 people operating in

approximately 80 countries.

The new Amentum has been born out of a thoughtful private equity strategy that

brought together mission focused assets and combined the old Amentum with Jacobs'

Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber Intelligence Businesses.

I love how Adam mentions that it's the momentum in Amentum, but honestly,

it was a fantastic conversation.

I don't know how they could pull all the pieces together to put this deal together,

and it seemed like do it in such an organized way.

Our interview breaks down into two parts.

The first part, a detailed look at the Jacobs-Amentum

deal that formed the new Amentum.

This is a follow on to the ACG monthly meeting that occurred in January of 2025.

The second part of our interview focuses on the background and experiences of both

John and Adam and showcases some of the attributes and leadership skills required

to be successful in this industry.

Now, here is our discussion with John Heller, CEO, and Adam Harrison, SVP

of Strategy and Corporate Development.

We are excited to be joined today on

Beyond Strategy by John Heller, Chief

Executive Officer, and Adam Harrison, SVP of Strategy and Corporate

Development of Amentum.

Thank you both for being here.

Thanks for having us.

I actually thought we were on the Joe Rogan podcast.

This is not it.

This is the top-rated podcast in the National Capital Region.

I don't know much about Joe's podcast, but not this one.

We were fortunate enough to sit in the audience recently when the Amentum team

got their chance to tell the story in the most recent ACG monthly meeting and really

talk about how Amentum formed and ultimately went public.

For those that weren't in attendance, John, maybe we'll start with you.

Can you walk our audience through who Amentum is?

I think since I was there, I think it probably was the most heavily attended

ACG event that I've ever seen.

I would say it was pretty darn successful.

Who Amentum is?

You've been asleep for a while if you're not aware of Amentum because now,

with the combination with Jacobs, we are $14 billion in revenue, one of

the largest companies in the industry.

But it actually is a really cool story because it's a big success story in the

industry as we've seen the industry evolve over the last 25 years.

A lot of consolidation has happened that has enabled companies to really create

end-to-end capability for our customers because I think that's what they

want to see when they come to us.

Amentum was created as a spin-off out of AECOM, big engineering firm out of

California, spun off their government services

business about $4 billion to two private equity firms, Lindsay Goldberg and

American Securities, just about 5 years ago.

We're right in that 5-year anniversary window.

Over that time, that 5 years, we've done different

strategic activities to expand the business horizontally in

terms of adding customer capabilities, but also really putting a growth strategy

together to expand our addressable market.

I think we've been very successful at positioning the company, prior to the

Jacobs merger, at about $8 billion with access to

just about every government agency.

It's a tremendous story.

I mean, when you look at the spin-out from AECOM, the acquisition of assets like PAE,

DynCorp, and then you factor in the Jacobs CMS deal, what were some of those

obstacles or challenges that you had to navigate through as Amentum came

together and began to scale?

Especially when you look at this last transaction, but any significant

transaction, there's a couple things, operationally

as a CEO, I'm very concerned about.

Maybe Adam has some thoughts that are more macro strategy-related.

But operationally, A, you cannot let a transaction get in the way of

performing as a company on a day-to-day basis, so you have to think about how to

compartmentalize the activities that you have to do with any type of transaction,

because making sure you have outstanding customer performance is key.

There's nothing more important than delivering with your customer.

You don't want your customer to think you're more focused on growing

your company than delivering to them because they're why we're in business.

I think the second part is just the employee impact.

Employees sometimes feel overwhelmed by expanding the business.

You have a lot of people that work in functional departments that a transaction

requires them to work significantly more than just their typical

job of running a business.

I think those two, the customer and ensuring that you're not creating risk to

your customers and performance, and then that your employee experience is positive.

There's a lot of planning that goes into that.

The only thing I would add is communication is so critical when you're

putting these massive organizations together.

People can get lost in the day-to-day of not necessarily understanding what the

strategic vision is, what the long-term view of the

company will be moving forward.

Again, communicating not just on a day-to-day basis what we're doing as a

release to integration, but what the end goal here is and what we will become by

doing these mergers and acquisitions to become now a $14 billion company.

If you think about it, the last 5 years, where all these companies were separately

to where we are now, we're a leading engineering advanced technology solutions

company that I'd say, separately, was probably going to be very

hard to do organically.

Collectively now we've been able to short circuit that.

I think laying out the strategy and vision as we go through integration as these

companies combine is really important because the average employee just sees the

news, and sees the articles, and sees the internal communications that are coming

out around these companies coming together, and it's really important to

communicate what that strategy is long term.

How do you channel the right skill set, the right communication skills, if you

will, to be able to effectively manage through the transaction?

As you both know, and you've both experienced in your careers, a lot

of M&A happens in this industry.

A lot of M&A goes wrong because of what you just pointed out, the lack of

communication, the lack of foresight in articulating what an

integrated strategy looks like.

What skill sets do you pull on, and then how do you implement

them to be successful?

We all have the skills that operationally delivering to our customers.

But when you do a transaction, and it's a merger or an acquisition,

it requires some additional skills that aren't typical of just operating a

company, growing a company, or delivering services.

I think that's the key leadership trait there is planning.

That you have to put a plan together that lays out all the steps that were required

to get to the closing of a transaction, so all the due diligence steps, while

you're running a company, and then you have to plan out the integration,

the change management elements.

It puts a lot of stress on your leadership's ability to

put a plan together that's multifaceted, different work streams, laying that out,

laying out the timelines, and then the leadership of that plan and how you're

going to drive that plan to completion across 10 or 20 different work streams is

really key for success on a transaction.

I would add, there is never an easy transaction.

There's always a lot of complexity.

A lot of things come up last minute with regards to doing a deal.

I think it's even elevated even more once you do these bigger deals

that formed Amentum, right?

These are massive multibillion-dollar deals that came together.

That even adds the complexity.

That adds a lot of the variables in the equation to making sure that we're doing

what we need to do in order to be successful.

I think to John's point, laying all that out there, being very deliberate in terms

of what we're trying to do and making sure that the leadership team understands what

they need to do in order to make this successful is really important.

There were a lot of complexities that led to this deal.

John, you've served as a leader in the industry for a number of years—I just had

a big birthday, we don't have to talk about how many numbers there are—but how

did your previous experience as CEO help you navigate this

combination and go public for Amentum?

I just want to point out that you brought up age to me and not Adam.

I mean, Adam, obviously, I'm very similar in age to Adam-

You are.

-so I don't know why you would call a distinction to me.

There are so many parts of your past experience

as a CEO and having been a CEO several times prior.

Because you've been through those things, you build a repertoire of experience,

and oftentimes, it's through the mistakes you've learned, and you

try not to repeat those.

I think change management, and how you manage change, and having

better awareness of the impact of change is what comes from experience.

When you are younger, you just assume everyone's going to suck it up,

get through it, and support what you're telling them to do.

You don't get the sensitivity for what you're asking of

people and how that is requiring them to deal with stress.

A very different stress than normal day-to-day work.

I think, the experience that I have, I understand that a transaction creates a

very significant change event for all of all people in a company.

Doesn't matter if you're actually involved in the transaction, or you're just an

employee in the company because you're going to see that things are changing in

some respects and is going to impact you.

Being aware and laying out, and actually documenting all

what will be changing and who's going to be impacted is part of that process.

If you do that right, you can foresee those impacts, get out and

communicate or do things to mitigate that change impact, and you

can't mitigate it all.

But taking, what I think, one big thing is getting way out in front of communication,

letting people know that this change going to happen and that you're aware of it, and

you share the understanding with the people, and that way, they feel like

you're in their shoes, and you understand what they're going to go through.

Just to add, I think on this transaction, John and everyone did a fantastic job

getting out front of communicating and letting the people that were

read in on this transaction.

This is a point in time for Amentum, but also within the government services

market, we're fundamentally changing the landscape of the industrial base

for the government services sector.

We are creating now the second-largest government service company out there.

I think it was important for people to understand not just the employee-based

importance for what they're working on but also how this is actually transforming

the sector at a more market macro level.

I want to peel that back a little bit Adam because I think that's incredibly

important, and it may come back to what John was mentioning earlier about

having a plan and going through things.

How did you know that this was the right time for this type of transformational

deal in bringing in the Jacobs CMS business?

Was this a forethought of we need something that looks like this or was this

opportunistic, and then you had to articulate why this

was positive for both sets of employees?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I'd say, obviously, as part of strategy, and obviously, corporate development in my

role and working closely with John, we thought about

ideas, strategic alternatives and options through the last several years.

I think the first thing that came off the bat when we started to work through

this Jacobs transaction was culture.

Meeting them, first meeting, having dinner, and then obviously, the management

presentation, and hearing from their leadership, and seeing

our leadership and how we interact, and seeing how culturally

aligned both businesses were.

We spoke the same language. We're very focused on mission.

We do a lot of things for our customers, but in different ways.

They have a different capability set than we do, but we're all very mission-focused.

That was clearly seen when we first got together.

I don't think that comes around every day.

I think that's something that you just can't take lightly because that's, I

think, a critical part of how integration is successful and making sure the people

are signed up and aligned, but also that underlying culture.

They're very collaborative culture between both companies.

That's just the part of the DNA separately.

Even together, I think it even formed even a more collaborative, cohesive business

as we signed the deal, closed it, and then started actually putting

the businesses together.

To pull on that more, during the ACG monthly meeting, you both commented on how

having the right team was essential, and it was about what was

best for the business.

How do you pick the right players for each business to form this leadership team?

The first thing we looked at, because we did, by the way, and this is a merger.

This is merging together two very strong businesses, and we took that very

seriously in the sense that it was a whiteboard with no names.

The first thing we looked at is what kind of company?

What's the vision for the business?

Don't limit to the selection based on who you are today

or who you were, but on what do you want out of this company.

We understood what this company would be as a new business and such broader

capabilities that we're bringing together.

Therefore, what are the leaders we need for the future?

Based on that, you work backwards and then find the leaders, whether they're internal

at Amentum at Jacobs or external; and we had a mix.

I mean, if you look at the leadership team that we've pulled together, it's a

combination of all the above because we had an opportunity.

We were not going to just limit the leadership to what we had because what we

had might have been good to get us here, but not to get us where we wanted to go.

We did look externally to fill some of those roles as well.

We always knew that was likely to happen, and because we wanted to think

about the future, not the present.

Let's talk branding and messaging.

Post-merger, the Amentum name stayed, but the logo changed.

What was the decision calculus for this approach in the combination,

and how did the deal resonate with Amentum customers and employees?

I'll take this, I guess, John, and then please chime in.

Amentum is only 5 years old.

It's a new name, a new logo.

We've done a great job, and I credit the marketing communications

teams for working on this. It's really picked up.

At that time, it didn't really necessarily make sense to change the name, but what it

did give us is an opportunity, as the merger with Jacobs and Amentum came

and was complete, to really put together a new logo that

really signified, call it the new Amentum, or the Jacobs plus Amentum combination.

That logo signifies this new path moving forward.

I think that was really important for the legacy Jacobs folks coming over that

this is not an acquisition; this is a merger where

we're bringing in everyone together to move forward as now a newly

publicly traded company.

We've been well received with the Amentum customer base and employees.

Again, it's very exciting as we move forward.

We jumped in to the dynamics of the deal as a follow on to the ACG monthly meeting,

but I mentioned earlier, a lot of M&A happens in this market space.

A lot of M&A, when you reflect on it 3, 5, 10 years later, maybe isn't as

successful as the initial deal was.

A key to success is obviously the integration and optimization of

the operations around any business.

Amentum is now a substantial organization in this marketplace, over 53,000 employees

operating across nearly 80 countries.

As leaders in the business, how do you get your arms around that type of scale

in order to optimize the operations?

Definitely a challenge.

You don't want to lose the agility that you have to respond to customers' needs.

Even though we're almost 55,000 employees, we feel that that character trait of

the business needed to be maintained.

I think it's looking at your operations and looking at what can be more

effective centralized, and what could be more effective

decentralized, and it's a combination.

There's not a one-size-fits-all.

You need to look at each function.

I'll use a couple examples.

One would be business development.

For such a large company, you could centralize certain activities to

standardize certain practices to create efficiency and to allow in each

opportunity that you're bidding, capture the greatness of the entire enterprise.

If you decentralize that, you would then have pockets,

bidding things that are limited in what those teams would be limited in terms of

what they could bring to each opportunity, which is really what's around them.

I like the idea of us centralizing more business development because we

have this great organization.

I think the other part is operations, delivery to the customer.

That needs to be more decentralized because our customers are very different.

We're a diversified business.

They have different requirements, different expectations,

and each segment of the business that's servicing those customers knows what

those individual customers want.

We can't manage that centralized.

We need to allow leaders to do to support customers in a more decentralized manner.

Then, when you think of the other functions within the business,

I think it's a combination.

Finance, HR will have some centralized activities that

create efficiency, but you can't say, "We're just going to

centralize everything.

" Because you'll lose that agility, that nimbleness to really be

seen by the customer to be very responsive to their requirements.

The only other thing I'd add there is it was really important for us moving forward

to make sure we had the frameworks and tools for all employees to better

understand what this combination represents and brings.

We had legacy organizations that had this in the past, but collectively coming

together around things like employee resource networks,

business resource networks.

We have a technology advisory council.

We have these engineering centers of excellences that really allow everyone to

see all the different things we do around things like digital engineering,

artificial intelligence, data analytics, cybersecurity related initiatives.

It allows these tools and mechanisms and frameworks that

we have for the company allow everyone across the 53,000-employee base,

who may not be able to see that because they're on a given program, now see the

collective Amentum capability set and what we do across the globe.

I think that's really important moving forward and that's something

we really focused on.

Between the monthly meeting and our conversation here today, it's fairly clear

you had a very detailed plan when you set out to consummate the transaction and

ultimately execute the integration as well as the go-public effort.

But if you were to look back over the previous months,

were there any lessons learned from the deal or the integration efforts, or even

the go-public, that if you could do it again differently, you would?

I'd say it's too early to comment on this transaction because,

fortunately, things are going well, and it's very early.

We've only been together for a little over a quarter.

But what I will say is we definitely took pains to look at lessons learned

from previous transactions.

There was a lot of conversation.

I was very open to our employees and letting them know that we

learned from previous transactions certain things that were challenges and that we

were going to apply those lessons learned to this transaction.

What's an example there?

On integrating systems, you want to do that as quickly as possible.

Of course, you do, because you create synergies by doing that.

But I think in the past, by moving too quickly,

you could have hiccups in terms of data being not in the right format,

so that answers coming out of the system were wrong, and employees were having a

challenging time trying to get their payroll, get their leave

balances, other things.

I think you learn from that that the system part, you might want to be more

patient and add some time, not try to speed that part up because the

outcome could be much higher productivity both at the front end of the integration

and the back end than doing it faster.

We told our employees that we were going to learn those lessons and that systems

integration was going to be something that would likely take more time this time

than what we have tried to do in the past.

The flip side is we focused on integrating the go-to-market elements

of the business as quickly as possible.

We were fortunate to have a lot of time between the announcement of the deal and

the closing so that we could have our go-to-market organization,

business development strategy, and customer alignment all done by Day 1.

We focused on that, really did planning on systems, but it's

going to take another 12 to 18 months before we see systems being integrated.

Obviously, in any transaction, there are a lot of constituents at play between

advisers, principals within the organization.

How did the team, Adam, work together to drive this ultimately

to a successful outcome?

I've been part of this Amentum company through a previous transaction now for a

few years, and it's been great since Day 1 working with our private equity partners.

I call them partners because that's truly who they are.

We work very close with them side by side, talk to them daily.

I don't think there was really any gap in terms of how we were thinking about it.

I think everyone was on the same page, getting on daily phone calls as it relates

to this transaction, making sure we're moving forward collectively as a team.

It's two private equity firms and us.

I don't think if you looked at us, you would think that we were

three separate organizations.

It felt like we were one team.

It was something that you don't necessarily see.

It's tough to see from the outside, but it was really very

rewarding to see as somebody like myself in corporate development

working in that setting.

I think the key is that everyone has their role.

We have assets inside the company, and then we had these private equity partners.

Rather than overlap and then have a food fight,

we actually were very comfortable of saying the private equity team has

expertise in areas that we don't in the company, and they could

run with certain things.

We don't necessarily have to have employees also doing what they're doing.

Aligning and say, "Okay, you take that, you're private equity, you have certain

corporate finance expertise that is going to be far superior than

what the company has.

" You run with that, and then we'll take care of this and have

an understanding of who was doing what so that we weren't having food fights

or overlapping and being inefficient.

It really sounds like you have thought about everything that is bringing all

the pieces to this deal.

But let's pivot a little bit to get to know you both a little more individually.

Our audiences really like to get to know our guests.

In your careers that you've had so far, who's been an inspiration along this

journey for both of you?

As you've already pointed out, I'm pretty advanced in my career.

I have had the great opportunity to work with so many super people,

and mentors don't have to be…

They don't have to know that they're your mentor.

You could take on people as mentors from afar.

There's nothing wrong with that.

I would highly encourage that people look and have aspirational mentors, and they

could be public figures, they could be neighbors or friends, and they

don't have to know necessarily.

Some people, you want to confide, and you want to get feedback.

There have been so many in my career, but I will say going back to my very early,

which my first company commander in the army, I can't not remember

her, Captain Gladys Smith.

She was not very tall, but she was so powerful.

It just taught me how character and personality are so important

as leadership traits because I had this diminutive captain,

and I'm a lieutenant, and our soldiers would run through walls for her because of

how passionate she was, how engaged she was, the quality of her character.

Everyone knew that you could respect her.

I'm not saying she was the greatest military mind, but

as a leader, you build a team that have different skills, but you as a leader

have to set the character and the tone, and create the passion that

everyone's going to follow.

I saw that in her, and I've used her in so many ways as inspiration.

I wish I could find her because I'd love to see what she's doing

all these years later. But [crosstalk 00:29:27].

Hopefully she subscribes to the podcast. Maybe she'll hear this.

We can start a GoFundMe. There's millions tuning in.

But there are many more that, unfortunately, we don't

have the time to go through.

But I think just calling her out and what she meant to me was important.

For me, I mean, I didn't serve in the army, so I don't have a story like that,

which is obviously pretty cool to hear.

But prior to joining up with John, I did spend almost 10 years working as a

strategy and M&A advisor in industry.

With that time, I got to really see a lot of different industry executives and

leaders across government services, aerospace and defense firms, private

equity firms investing in the space.

I wouldn't say there's one particular person of inspiration for me, but it's

really a puzzle, if you will, of taking certain qualities from folks and different

CEOs and CFOs and chief growth officers that I was able to really take in

as I move forward in my career.

That was really helpful.

Each company is in different situations at the time.

Seeing, again, to John's point, how they deal with really key strategic decisions

that they need to make really allowed me to move forward and leverage a lot of that

hands-on knowledge that I was able to gain through that experience.

Let's talk about life lessons that may be additive to the audience.

What are life lessons in your career that have taught you…

That you've learned that you think everybody should learn at

some point in their career?

Life lessons, I'd like to share this as one of the things.

I always have three things that I share with people when I get the opportunity

to talk to college students or other.

But I think own your career is one of the keys.

You go into an organization, doesn't matter whether

it's a military, government, commercial business, and

you think that the HR department or your supervisor is going to

look out for your career.

Certainly, you hope that you'll gain some skills from that person.

But that person does not own your career.

They own their own career.

You own your career, and you need to manage it.

One of the things that I would say that's critical is diversify your experience by

choosing the work you're going to do.

You can stay in a position, and maybe it's single threaded in terms of the functional

responsibility or BD or operations.

But I think it's key to diversify within a company, or any organization to understand

the different facets of that organization.

At Amentum, I would say if people are asking me for advice, early career advice

would be, if you're in operations, try to find a way to get an opportunity

to work in business development.

Or if you're in either of those and have done both of those, try to find a way to

work in finance or accounting or strategy to diversify your

understanding of how the organization operates because there's

many perspectives.

If you want to be a general manager, a P&L leader,

or even a functional executive, you've got to know how to grow business,

you've got to know how to operate a business, and you have to know how to

support a business to all the functional organizations.

Take control and get that diversification.

I was going to go a slightly different route, but, I guess that point

really resonates with me because when I started my career, I was lucky enough to

be part of their leadership development program where I got to rotate and actually

see a diverse set of functions and areas within the company that

really, I think, built helped me build the foundation for my success in my career.

I would say with that, again, I really think I was lucky to have was actually to

sit down with the CEO at the time with a small group of us.

It was the second week, I'll just never forget this, of me working full time after

college and 20-something-year-old just trying to figure it out.

The first thing he said in our meeting was, "You treat me with the same respect

that you treat the people that are cleaning the floors at night.

" That has always stuck with me because I think that's so critical for successful

organizations, to making sure that just because you move up in your career

does not make you necessarily better than maybe a more junior person

or somebody starting out.

It's this idea of just we're all in this together as a team and

that we're not just a group of individuals who are a collection of individuals.

We're all in this together, and the success of any level is

dependent on a lot of the people that are underneath him or her in that role.

I think that really stuck with me.

A guy, Bob Stevens, highly respected as a great CEO, and I didn't really…

I've always appreciated it, but as I've grown up in my career I actually

feel it even more and more.

I think that's just a really important lesson.

I'll put it, hopefully, knock the tee on the ball or knock the ball

on the tee here, John.

That's one of the reasons why I came over to work with John and the team, because

that is the culture that I wanted to be part of.

I think because of that, I think there's a lot of things that have happened.

But I think that culture is a real key part of how we were able to

successfully grow to where we are today.

We end all of our interviews with what we think might be the most imperative

question that we ask, and that is, what's the most important thing

we should know about each of you?

As long as Adam doesn't bring up that college up in the middle of Pennsylvania-

We might have another alumni here, by the way.

As long as he doesn't do that, because I'm just tired of hearing about lions and

bears and whatever that mascot is.

I don't know.

It's no secret; I'm from Pittsburgh, and I love the city.

I really enjoyed my experience growing up there and being a Pittsburgh fan, but I

just love the whole city, the whole environment.

That's something maybe people find interesting, or maybe they don't.

I don't know.

Since he teed me up on that, just using the golf analogy again, I'm going to

say, yeah, I'm a huge Penn State fan. I love it.

We are. Yeah, we are Penn State.

John, can we get a "We are" from you?

That concludes our interview here today.

John Heller, Adam Harrison of Amentum, thank you both for joining us and for your

great insights on both the formation of Amentum, the deal with Jacobs,

and then the leadership practices that allow an organization to be successful.

Really appreciate all the thoughtful responses.

Thanks for having us. Jenn, Andy.

It was great.

Appreciate it.

Special thanks once again to John Heller

and Adam Harrison of Amentum for sitting

down with us on this episode of Beyond Strategy, an ACG National

Capital Region podcast.

Jenn, I loved the banter back and forth between John and Adam.

It's clear they have an outstanding working relationship,

and if that showcases the collaboration at Amentum, the company is

poised for continued success.

Yes, and I love how actually both John and Adam were talking about how communication

was key when bringing all the parts of this deal

together took place and talking to their employees about that, and

bringing the best team forward.

It was also clear in both of their responses that character was incredibly

important as a foundational tool of leadership,

and that the experience of previous mergers and acquisitions for both John and

Adam was critical in getting the Amentum-Jacobs merger right.

Absolutely.

A lot of lessons learned that they brought to that that they talk about.

If you enjoyed this conversation, I hope you'll subscribe to this podcast

wherever you get your podcasts from.

Once again, this is ACG National Capital Beyond Strategy.

For Jenn Wappaus, I am Andy McEnroe.

We hope you'll join us next time.