Class of 2009 Yearbook: The Honorees

Employer: Raytheon Co.

LOCATION: El Segundo, Calif.

First job: "Courtesy clerk in a supermarket. There, I learned the basics of customer service. Those lessons have been reflected in every job that I have had since then."

Most valuable career advice: "Having a good idea is not enough. You have to be able to sell it and be prepared to make it happen if it is accepted."

What do you love about IT? "I love positively impacting the way business gets done, knowing the work we do is reflected in the quality of worklife, the end product and, increasingly, enabling work/life balance."

Passion outside of work: "Spending quality time with my family."

Twenty years ago, I was ... "A systems programmer supporting large mainframe data centers for a large aerospace company."

Leadership philosophy in a nutshell: "Genius exists in everyone and can be tapped given capable, inspired leadership, resources and opportunity. Courage, hard work and discipline trumps everything else!"

Best new project: "The Raytheon Podcast Network team developed an automated, Web-based system that allows employees to create and distribute original audio content. The tool facilitates nationwide communication of Raytheon's technologies, diversity topics, leadership messages and other important information. The team used only open-source and freeware tools and worked with the proper organizations to ensure full compliance with all freeware and open-source software licenses. Using the Red Hat Linux operating system, Apache Web server and open audio encoding algorithms allowed us to keep software acquisition costs at zero while ensuring both stability and security."

"Aha" leadership moment: "The careful use of ‘as-is' information can be used to drive the right behavior when done properly. The old adage that the data must be clean before you use it is not always true."