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2020 Virginia Business Person of the Year Novakovic demonstrated exactly that,


Mattis says. “Just the idea of setting the standards — what would close, what was kept open — shows you someone who is integrating just a mass of detail,” he adds.


“Any crisis is a race between time and knowl- edge. She could not delay decisions until all the information was available, because in a crisis all the information is never available. And she was able to make the right calls and do it when people were literally dying.” This year, in the midst of a worldwide


catastrophe, when other companies were posting significant losses, General Dynamics posted second-quarter and third-quarter revenues of $9.3 billion and $9.4 billion — not too much below the $9.6 billion and $9.8 billion it posted for the same periods in 2019. Last year, General Dynamics won the


largest Navy contract ever awarded, a $22.2 billion multiyear order to build nine nuclear-powered, fast-attack Virginia-class submarines, with a $2 billion option to build a 10th submarine. And this October, the company’s information technology division landed a $4.4 billion IT contract from the Department of Defense. A week later, in early November, General Dynamics received a $9.4 billion contract modification to build and test the Navy’s first two Columbia-class intercontinental ballistic missile submarines. Results like those are why Virginia


Business has named Novakovic its 2020 Business Person of the Year. The blunt- talking CEO has steered the defense, manufacturing, business aviation and IT services behemoth to consistent profit since 2013. And she’s done it through a straightforward philosophy: Be honest. Be direct. And know what you’re talking about.


Power player Considering she is often ranked one of


the world’s most powerful women (Forbes ranks her as more powerful than Queen Elizabeth II), Novakovic keeps a remark- ably low profile. Other than quarterly earnings calls and


occasional appearances at business confer- ences, Novakovic avoids the spotlight and rarely gives interviews to the press.


20 | DECEMBER 2020 That suits her role; defense companies


work mostly with government agencies rather than the public. It also suits her personal preferences. She agreed to speak to Virginia


Business, she says, as a way to honor the roughly 10,900 General Dynamics employees in Virginia. “Particularly this year, I think it’s important sometimes to be a little more public, to thank all the people who make this company what it is.” In conversation, Novakovic, a 62-year-


old mother of three grown children and grandmother of three, is direct and no-nonsense, with a wide and precisely deployed vocabulary. Novakovic’s father emigrated from


Serbia to the United States at age 17 after World War II. He met her mother, who had grown up in the U.S., at Syracuse University. After they married, he joined the U.S. Air Force’s intelligence service. As a child growing up in Europe during


the Cold War, Novakovic saw the dangers confronting the United States and felt the pride of being a U.S. citizen. She calls herself a fierce, unapologetic patriot. The family returned to the U.S. when she was a teen. She graduated from Smith College as a


liberal arts major. At the prestigious New England private women’s college (alumnae range from Sylvia Plath and Gloria Steinem to Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush), Novakovic studied history and learned to love literature. She’s read “War and Peace” a dozen times. At Smith, she says, she learned to


think and to understand human nature — assets in the defense industry. “A leader who fails to think is a leader who fails to lead,” Novakovic adds. “The abil- ity to take complex facts and mold them into a coherent set of information to make judgments and our best guesses on the way forward — that is an important skill.” After earning her bachelor’s degree,


Novakovic worked for a small military contractor and in 1983 joined the CIA. Like most former “spooks,” she doesn’t discuss her spy years, saying only that her career as a CIA operative was “an effort to serve my nation as best I could.”


During her time in the CIA, she met


her first husband, Michael Vickers, an ex-Green Beret who helped run a program to arm Afghan mujahedeen in their war to drive out the Soviet Union. Vickers and Novakovic married in 1985; a year later the couple enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where both earned MBAs. Novakovic’s Wharton degree proved no


guarantee for success. She mailed out 50 résumés and didn’t receive a single job offer. One manager said she was overqualified; another said she lacked relevant experience. In 1992 Novakovic landed a job at the federal Office of Management and Budget,


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