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2020 Virginia Business Person of the Year


CEO, Serbian-American lawyer Nicholas Chabraja, had been a successful Chicago trial attorney rather than starting as a company program manager. “Because I have a bit of an iconoclastic


background myself, I thought maybe there would be a place for me” at General Dynamics, she says. “And my intuition was correct.” She joined the company in 2001 as vice president for strategic planning.


Steady ascent General Dynamics traces its founding


to 1899, developing submarines for the U.S. Navy. After World War II, a series of mergers added aircraft manufacturing to its offerings, leading to the company’s current name. By the 1980s, General Dynamics was building F-16 fighter jets, Cessna aircraft and Abrams tanks. In the early to mid-1990s, when the defense industry contracted at the end of the Cold War, the company sold off divisions, including aircraft, space and data systems. But under Chabraja, General Dynamics began to rebuild in the late 1990s, expanding in Europe and buying high-end jet company Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. Chabraja became a mentor to


Novakovic and gave her increasingly prominent jobs. In 2005, she was pro- moted to senior vice president. When Chabraja retired in 2009, how-


ever, the CEO job went to a board member and former chief of Navy operations, Jay Johnson. Novakovic was promoted to executive vice president for the company’s marine systems group, which designs, builds and repairs ships and submarines and has shipyards in Norfolk; Groton, Connecticut; San Diego; and Bath, Maine. While Novakovic led acquisitions


that expanded the ship-repair business, Johnson’s leadership of General Dynamics was hitting choppy waters. A post-Iraq War drawdown shrank the defense budget. Meanwhile, Johnson bet big on informa- tion technology, paying almost $1 billion for a health care IT provider and millions more on smaller businesses. In May 2012, Novakovic became


General Dynamics’ president and chief operating officer. A month later, the company announced Johnson would be


22 | DECEMBER 2020


A former CIA operative who later became a top-level aide in the Department of Defense, Novakovic joined General Dynamics in 2001.


stepping down by the end of 2012 and named Novakovic as his replacement. In January 2013, weeks after Novakovic took over as CEO, the company reported that sales in its information systems business had fallen $1.2 billion in the previous year and, shockingly, that General Dynamics was taking a $2 billion writedown on a series of acquisitions in information systems and technology. It marked the first time in decades the company had posted an annual loss — $332 million.


Guiding philosophy As CEO, one of Novakovic’s first moves was to establish a set of simple,


consistent corporate rules. She called them an ethos because “ethos is a more pro- found word than ethics — it means your fundamental moral character.” She explained the principles to her


team: honesty, transparency, trust and alignment, the last of which Novakovic calls “code for teamwork.” And those who didn’t follow the ethos? “I fired them.” Novakovic makes it clear she does not


think much of employees who are dishon- est or try to hide problems. “The only way to get instantaneously


fired, at least in my realm, is to lie,” she explains, “because you have destroyed


Photo by Philip Bermingham


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