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Sid Polk

Sometimes an ending can be a new beginning. Consider the case of Sid Polk. He served for nearly 20 years as the deputy director of MITRE's Naval Systems and Technology division, and was named executive director last year. It's a position he'd wanted for a long time, and his achievements certainly merited the promotion. But at the time he accepted the new position, Polk had already celebrated his 62nd birthday—and retirement is around the corner. "I believed that I could do the job if given the chance," says Polk. "But, to be honest, I thought I was too old for a promotion; I'm glad the company felt differently. There is more that I can accomplish here. It's a great way to end my career."

No one is more pleased for Polk than his predecessor, John Burt, who is now the director of business operations for MITRE's Washington Command, Control and Communications Center. "Sid is doing a superb job in his role as executive director. We were great partners when he was my ATD (Associate Technical Director). He really knows MITRE. He knows almost everything about our work and our sponsor's needs, or he knows who knows. His extensive experience and knowledge of people and programs made it very easy for me to step aside and take on other responsibilities."

As a long-time employee—who has worked with many MITRE staff over the years—Polk's appointment didn't fall on deaf ears. In fact, when then-department head Varley Wrick announced Polk's promotion at a staff meeting, the group began to applaud. "It's not often people applaud when they hear about someone else's promotion," says Wrick, who has worked with Polk at MITRE's McLean, Virginia, campus for more than a decade. "Everyone was truly pleased and excited for Sid. He'd been an ATD for many years, and we were glad that he got the opportunity to take command. His promotion was very good for him, for the Division and for MITRE."

A Long Career

Polk joined MITRE in 1968 after having spent five years at Bell Labs. "MITRE seemed like a company with more opportunities," he says. During his career, he has supported a wide variety of sponsors in the intelligence world, the civilian community, and—since 1984—the Navy. "I've always found our work interesting and important, and there have been many opportunities to transfer to different parts of the corporation and gain new experiences."

When he joined the Naval division, it felt like a good fit from the start. "I have a communications background from my days at Bell Labs, and Purdue [where he earned his bachelor's degree] and the University of Pennsylvania [where he earned his MSE in systems engineering]—and a lot of the work in the Navy division was communications-systems oriented," explains Polk. "That was attractive to me, because it was a fertile area with the all the developments in Naval communications associated with the Cold War."

Over the years, Polk has seen many changes take place at MITRE and many changes in the Navy and the naval work program. For example our focus has grown from strategic communication to include Naval combat systems, signal processing, intelligence programs, and a host of other high profile Naval projects.

Polk is also a recognized expert in the process of allocating scarce resources to the myriad government projects requesting MITRE support. In fact, he was instrumental in establishing a more formalized process for allocating staff years with the Department of the Navy through the Office of Naval Research. Today, the process allows for greater flexibility in bringing MITRE's technical skills and institutional character to the most important projects in the Department of Navy.

Polk also played a key role in establishing the corporation's Signal Processing Center. "In 1988 we set out to get involved in anti-submarine warfare, which was a tremendous challenge for the Navy and it seemed like a natural off-shoot of our key skills, especially communications signal detection processing," he recalls. "We made a proposal to the MITRE Officers to set up a lab to get started. We were given $3 million over several years and quickly built up a sizable and influential work program anchored by the Signal Processing Center." Today, MITRE's naval division has evolved again to meet its customer's needs, now focusing on FORCEnet, the Navy's network-centric initiative for communications, intelligence, and surveillance. Polk is keenly involved in putting MITRE resources to work for this important Navy enterprise.

Perhaps Fortune Magazine had Sid Polk in mind when it selected MITRE as a "best company to work for" in 2003, the third year in a row the company has received such honors. "We value maturity and experience at MITRE and have found our older workers are great contributors in satisfying our needs and the needs of our customers," says Bill Albright, MITRE's director of quality of work life. "Sid brings so much to his position and to the company."

—by Nadine Monaco