Rick Thoman F71
Citizenship: United States
Current position: Managing Partner, Corporate Perspectives
Other notable positions: Over thirty-five years of senior executive business experience including: President and CEO, Xerox Corporation; Senior Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer, IBM Corporation; President and CEO, Nabisco International; and Chairman and co-CEO, American Express Travel Related Services.
In his many senior positions in multinational companies, Rick Thoman learned that it’s really all about change. “Change,” he says, “can be lethal to a company if it is not well-managed. Being able to make decisions around change in an integrated way is critical. It’s never just a marketing decision or just a finance decision.”
As a professor of Global Management at Fletcher, he brings this real-world expertise into the classroom. “Fifty years ago, 10 percent of workers in a large company were knowledge workers, and they were close to headquarters,” he explains. “Today, 60 to 70 percent of your employees are knowledge workers, and maybe only 30 percent are in your home country. Now we must operate real-time across these markets with people of different interest groups working together. A command-and-control organization doesn’t work. A Fletcher graduate has a big advantage in that scenario.”