“I think the agony that we felt as a country after the killing of George Floyd and the things that followed—the conversations we had internally—they were too powerful to not talk about…
Until we got that done, we really could not talk about the [quarterly] numbers,” Rozanski told Goldman Sachs president and COO John Waldron in an episode of Talks at GS. In the ensuing months, Booz Allen has undertaken an analysis of its own efforts related to racial equity. “We’ve done a very comprehensive, intense assessment of ourselves to try and figure out, OK, we’ve had some success—how do we leverage that going forward, but where are we falling down? Where do we have to step it up?,” Rozanski notes.
“It’s uncomfortable and it’s sobering. And it’s frankly what gives me the optimism, because if [everyone] came back and said, ‘Hey, you’re great, don’t change,’ I would feel short-changed by that.” Rozanski’s own story at Booz Allen—where he started as an intern in 1991, as an immigrant from Argentina—reflects the firm’s underlying commitment to diverse backgrounds and perspectives, he says.
“The fact that a company that does so much work in defense and intelligence would choose an immigrant with an accent to have these jobs tells you that a lot of people smarter than I am are willing to put these concepts into action.”
