Note: ExecutiveGov recently spoke with Dr. Harvey Davis, director for installations and logistics at the National Security Agency. Dr. Davis has held a variety of roles over his 30 years of service to the agency, where his responsibilities have included leading recruitment and overseeing billions of dollars in infrastructure construction. This article is the third in a series.
ExecutiveGov: What’s the personal value that you’ve taken from your different roles? What’s given you a sense of appreciation for your job?
Dr. Davis: From the growth perspective, one of the things that I did during my career is to never say no to a job that was offered to me. And the jobs that are most attractive to me are the jobs that nobody wants. Which means that you can go in there and you can craft it and you can do the things that you need to do.
As I went through my career, the recruitment, the HR work, the contracts work, and the facilities and logistics work, they all had in common that there were areas that needed to be addressed from a problematic perspective and smoothed out. One of the great things about this agency is this agency is a city. A municipality requires every skill under the sun, and you can move and change focus. If I was in the private sector, I probably couldn’t move from being an HR director to somebody who was in charge of construction across the country and managing billions of dollars of construction.
From a psychological perspective, some of the construction that we’ve done across the country, to see it go from the back of a napkin, where we first thought about it, into brick and mortar, into big buildings, helps you get a psychological sense of achievement. It’s a more tangible sense of achievement than you would have gotten otherwise.
Keep reading this interview at: http://www.executivegov.com/2013/04/dr-harvey-davis-on-his-nsa-career-the-acquisition-process-and-overcoming-challenges/
