As a captain in the U.S. Air Force in 1984, Darryl Moody was responsible for purchasing chemical warfare and chemical defense items. "This is almost a waste of time," he remembers thinking. "No one will ever use this stuff."
Those thoughts were quickly put to rest after the anthrax attacks in late 2001. Moody also didn't realize at the time that his chemical weapons experience would later prove valuable, along with his knowledge of weapons and electronic warfare systems from five years in the Air Force, in his current role as senior VP for Homeland Security at BearingPoint Inc.
Today, Moody, 45, serves on the front lines of the nation's security efforts. His team has helped build new Homeland Security branches, such as the Transportation Security Administration, from the ground up. His broad view of projects within TSA, the U.S. Coast Guard, Border and Transportation Security, and U.S. Customs has earned him influence at the highest levels of DHS.
After leaving the military in 1985, Moody joined then–Peat Marwick Mitchell and quickly found that consulting was in his blood. Building new organizations from scratch became his forte.
In his early years of doing projects for the federal government, Moody worked with the Defense Department's Joint Logistics Systems Center at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio to create a new, central organization for purchasing all supply systems. In 1997, he helped the Department of Housing and Urban Development create a central organization to inspect public housing. By 2001, BearingPoint was a logical choice to help build TSA from scratch.
Moody, then a vice president, joined TSA's early task force and quickly made two decisions that would position BearingPoint for future work. Instead of appointing midlevel managers as requested by TSA to serve as "action officers," he brought in two "very seasoned" senior managers. "We knew it was going to take more, and if we did a good job we would have other opportunities."
Next, when asked to develop an approach for performance management, he quickly made a bold decision to encode BearingPoint's performance management processes into the system, knowing that the small organization of 20 to 30 people would eventually grow to 50,000–60,000 TSA employees. "The new employees wouldn't have a choice, and had to do it our way. Had we said up front, out loud, to many people that this is the path we were going to take, it would have been a little too scary for folks to accept up front. It worked."
Today, with a staff of 700, Moody spends his time connecting the dots between multiple levels of federal, state, and local government; businesses; academia; and international concerns, all focused on homeland security and preventing terrorism.
"It's one of those few areas of consulting where failure is not an option. Mistakes are not tolerable — it's life-and-death situations," Moody says. But the heavy responsibility doesn't deter him from pursuing more DHS business. "As this new area matures, we intend to support it for eternity. We're digging a foundation, not just excavating a corner." — S.C.
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