of the day and deal with a variety of
industries and issues.”
Robert Kreeb
, Senior AssociateWhy did you choose Booz Allen?
I chose Booz Allen because of its reputation as one of the stronger firms in technology and management consulting, and because it served both government and industry clients, which was fairly unique at the time. I also felt that I connected with the group I interviewed with in terms of temperament and on a personal level.
Why have you chosen to stay at Booz Allen?
The number one reason is the satisfaction I get from helping clients through difficult issues or unique opportunities in their agency’s life cycle. You get to be in the middle of a situation that might be the biggest thing that has happened to that client in the past 10 years, and you keep going from one high-profile project to the next. So you tend to work on the hot topics of the day and deal with various industries and issues, which is something you could never get from any one industrial or manufacturing company, even if you changed careers 10 times.
What type of work do you do at Booz Allen?
I work in the Transportation Consulting division, and our primary clients include the U.S. Department of Transportation, the United States Postal Service, and more recently the U.S. Army. We do advanced transportation technology assessments, safety system analysis, regulatory support work, and field test and demonstration support. Projects, which range from 6 months to 1 year, typically involve visiting with leading automotive industry suppliers, meeting with regulators, analyzing market trends, and completing cost-benefit and life-cycle analyses.
What excites you about your work?
It’s establishing relationships that go beyond the current assignment, so that you become a trusted advisor to the client even when there’s no immediate engagement. It’s helping clients succeed, whether it’s enabling them to implement a new regulation in an efficient way, or to withstand challenges and criticism from outside groups. Ultimately, the work we do enables clients to understand their own businesses differently or better than before; that, in turn, helps improve transportation safety, mobility, and environmental sustainability—which is the
real end game.
Do you have a mentor at Booz Allen?
I don’t have a formal mentor, but one of the great things about our team is the accessibility of senior staff. The Officers and Principals in our group have good insight and understanding of the projects and clients I deal with—so they provide a good sounding board and a fresh perspective.
What differentiates Booz Allen from other companies that you could work for? What makes Booz Allen special?
For as big a company as we are, we remain extremely collaborative, and there’s collegiality between business groups. More than most big companies, we’re able to pull the best and brightest from within our organization to meet a client need, without being constrained by who’s reporting to someone directly. Ultimately, clients win because they’re getting very personalized attention from a single individual or team, but have access to the whole firm. And although Core Values are always key, Booz Allen people don’t look or think alike. We have a tremendous diversity of people and approaches, and that’s a great strength.
How has Booz Allen helped you be ready for what’s next in your career?
The leadership at Booz Allen provides a good balance of pushing you to expand your business financially and technically without sacrificing the quality of work you’re delivering at the moment. If you go too far one way, you do good work, but it’s the same work over and over, and if you go too far the other way, you can grow too fast and quality can suffer. The Booz Allen leadership helps shape, push, and motivate you to an appropriate degree, almost like a coach would.
How does the work you do help your clients be ready for what’s next? How has your work and your team’s work made an impact for your client?
Our work helps our clients very directly. It’s about applying leading-edge technology in the automotive industry and in highway transportation, whether it’s new mobile communication systems, propulsion technologies, or alternative fuels. We provide unbiased analysis to help clients have the best chance at understanding which trends are likely to take off and which will fizzle out. There’s almost an overload of information these days, so we take pride in being able to give advice that doesn’t change with tomorrow’s headlines. On every technology or policy issue, we never lose track of the fundamentals when analyzing the situation—fundamental market understanding, fundamental cost-benefit analysis, and fundamental engineering principles.
Can you talk about a time when you saw one or more of our Core Values displayed?
At Booz Allen, we tend not to walk around with the scope of work in our hip pockets. We’re committed to making the client successful—and then counseling our clients on what work needs to get done to make that happen. Instead of moving forward with blinders on, we follow the data and we follow our nose. For example, on a Fleet Sustainability Study for a large U.S. city, the initial focus of the project was to determine what new fuels and vehicle technologies could be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But as we got into the assignment, we learned that although these equipment issues were important in achieving the city’s environmental goals, even more important (and potentially more cost effective) were changes in how the fleet was operated, dispatched, and managed. The emphasis of the assignment changed, and we were able to help the client meet their end goals—but in a different and better way.
