Alumnus reflects on his global leadership program experience
By Paul A. Lucas, F08
When I joined The Fletcher School at Tufts University’s Graduate Master of Arts Program (renamed in 2026 the Executive Master of Arts in International Affairs), I was not looking to reinvent myself or change careers. I had trained as a chartered accountant, spent a decade at Deloitte, and moved into the United Nations system. I knew my profession well. What I wanted was breadth.
Much of my work was already international, and I was finding that the hardest problems rarely had purely technical answers. You could understand the financial, governance, or organizational issues, and still miss what was really going on if you did not understand the institution, politics, economics, culture, and people involved.
That was what attracted me to Fletcher along with its international reputation. But what I did not fully appreciate when I enrolled was how much I would value the people.
My class cohort brought together a remarkable group: diplomats, military officers, journalists, lawyers, law-enforcement professionals, people from finance, government and the private sector, and professionals working in international organizations. They came from different countries, cultures, and professional backgrounds, and many were already accomplished leaders.
That made the experience unusually rich. You could discuss an international issue and hear from someone who had negotiated it as a diplomat, dealt with something similar in the military, covered it as a journalist, approached it as a lawyer, or looked at it from government, finance, or business. Sometimes the most useful part was understanding why someone intelligent and experienced saw the same problem differently from you.
The caliber of the faculty was equally important. Fletcher brought together professors with deep academic expertise who also understood the institutions and events we were discussing. There was also real camaraderie. The program was demanding alongside senior jobs, travel, and family responsibilities, but you were going through it together.
I learned a great deal from the faculty, but genuinely just as much from my classmates. Some became close friends. Over the years, I have found Fletcher people in international organizations, governments, business, and other institutions around the world.
For me, that international network has been among the most valuable parts of the experience. Not networking in the transactional sense, but a community of people from whom I have continued to learn.
My own career continued to evolve. In the UN system, my responsibilities broadened across investigations, anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, governance, risk, and organizational oversight. I eventually led the internal audit and investigations group at UNOPS, working across an organization with operations in more than 80 countries.
I later joined the World Bank Group, where I served as the director in group internal audit and deputy chief audit executive.
By then, I had become increasingly interested in a broader question: how do you transform an organization or enterprise? How do you make an institution work better, use data and technology intelligently, identify emerging risks earlier, change entrenched ways of working and improve performance?
Those questions became a significant part of my work at the World Bank and continue to interest me today. They are also questions about leadership.
Over my career, I have become convinced that leadership is less about having all the answers and more about creating the conditions in which good people can do their best work. It requires judgment, curiosity, listening, and enough confidence to surround yourself with people who may know more than you do.
That is another lesson I connect with Fletcher. The GMAP program put me in a room with highly capable people who did not necessarily think like me. Leadership in an international environment requires comfort with different viewpoints and a willingness to change your mind when the evidence warrants it.
I have always valued technical expertise and continued professional development, maintaining credentials across accounting, governance, risk, technology, investigations, and financial crime. But the more senior I’ve become, the more I’ve realized that technical knowledge is only part of what matters.
Judgment matters. People matter. Context matters.
Much of my career has involved living or working internationally. One thing I’ve learned is that an approach that works in one country or institution may not work in another.
More recently, my work has moved further into organizational transformation, analytics, technology risk, and artificial intelligence. AI is changing how organizations operate while raising important questions about governance, accountability, risk, and leadership.
To me, that is not a completely new direction. The technology changes, but many of the underlying questions remain familiar. How do organizations make good decisions? How do leaders understand risk? How do institutions innovate while maintaining appropriate governance? And how do ways of working keep pace with change?
Since concluding my time at the World Bank, I have continued advising law firms and public- and private-sector organizations on governance, investigations, risk, and transformation, while developing work around AI governance, technology, and how organizations adapt to change.
Looking back, I did not plan my career as a straight line from Deloitte to the UN system to the World Bank and then into the work I am doing now. Opportunities arose, interests developed, and the world changed. Fletcher helped prepare me for that kind of career by making me look beyond the discipline I already knew.
If I were advising someone considering Fletcher today, particularly someone already established professionally, I would say: don’t go simply to add another qualification. Go to broaden yourself.
And don’t think of your classmates simply as a network. They are part of the education.
Get to know the diplomat, journalist, military officer, lawyer, law-enforcement professional, person from finance or business, and especially the person whose experience is completely different from yours. Learn from the faculty. Take subjects that move you outside what you already know. Listen when someone sees a problem differently.
The Fletcher name has stayed with me throughout my career, and the education certainly has. But when I think back on my experience, I think first about the people: classmates who became friends, the caliber of the faculty, the camaraderie of the cohort, perspectives I would never have encountered otherwise, and an international network that is still part of my life nearly two decades later.
That is probably the part of Fletcher I value most.
Learn more about the Executive Master of Arts in International Affairs.