George Goldsmith, Chairman and Founder

Places lived: United States (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, OR), United Kingdom (London)

Education: University of Rochester, BA, magna cum laude in cognitive psychology; University of Connecticut, MA in clinical psychology

Experience:

• TomorrowLab@McKinsey (McKinsey & Company), founder and CEO
• McKinsey & Company, senior advisor
• The Human Interface Group (acquired by Lotus Development Corporation), founder and CEO; co-founder and managing director of the Lotus Institute, senior director of the Lotus/IBM post-merger integration team
• YPO International Board of Directors, founder and chairman of Network Committee; chairman of IT Committee
• Portal Software (later acquired by Oracle), lead independent director
• Hoffman Institute Foundation, director

Focus: Creating, applying, and refining new models for governance and leadership for systems in transition

Intellectual influences: “My grandfather, one of the leading engineers of his era; my graduate school adviser; Thomas Kuhn; Alfred Korzybski, Julian Rotter, Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Clay Christenson, and Chris Argyris.”

Turning points: “After five years in a PhD program studying clinical psychology I realized that I did not want to be an academic or a practicing clinical psychologist. Instead, I started my first company, The Human Interface Group. Since then I have spent most of my life creating companies that help people work across boundaries that separate individuals, organizations, and disciplines.”

George grew up outside Philadelphia. His father was an application engineer at GE and his mother was a high school physics teacher. They instilled in him at a very early age curiosity about how things work and a desire to fix them when they weren’t working.

George says, “I taught myself computer programming when I was 13. These were the days of punch cards and FORTRAN. I took a summer course at Wharton when I was 14. After the second class, the professor asked me to coach the Wharton MBA students who were having a hard time with the course. I liked this so much, I started teaching programming to students and faculty at my school. I convinced IBM to provide equipment to the computer club I founded. It was my first entrepreneurial adventure. ”

George didn’t know it then, but he was embarking on a journey that has kept him on the edge of developments that have shaped our lives and the way we work. His early training and experience was a multi-disciplinary blending of cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, and computer science. This background has helped him anticipate not just the advances we have seen in information technology but their impact on the way we think and interact: “What became clear – very early in my career – was how system dynamics is an important determinant for driving progress and improving returns on investment.”

George’s first company, The Human Interface Group, became a pioneer in integrating process improvement and software to enhance team collaboration and performance. After selling the company to Lotus Development, George led the Lotus Institute and created software and services to support high-performance, distributed teamwork. He applied these approaches when serving on the post-merger integration team with Lotus and IBM: “It was a great opportunity to apply everything I had learned about providing high performance.”

George then created TomorrowLab, which began to shift his interest in collaboration from internal teams to leadership team collaboration with external stakeholders to shape strategy. At the same time, he became a senior advisor to McKinsey & Company. He eventually joined McKinsey as CEO of TomorrowLab@McKinsey,experimenting with new network-based models for professional services.

Subsequently, as a member of the Young Presidents Organization and its International Board of Directors, George founded YPO Networks. “YPO is a powerful experience for its member CEOs and their families. Yet its members had no systematic way of connecting with others beyond their local chapters. In 2001, we launched a network for YPOers on different sides of political conflicts to forge relationships, understanding, and joint ventures. Today, there are more than 7,000 members participating in dozens of business, social enterprise, and personal interest networks.”

George adds, “I have spent my life working with teams of leaders seeking to do extraordinary things. The best of them fight the tendency to accept zero-sum strategies and declare victory. They understand that we can create environments where people suspend disbelief, build trust, and chase unlikely combinations in the hope of making significant progress on vexing issues.”

Many people today think our leaders have let us down, but George is hopeful. “All around us, there are systems in transition brought about by the dramatic increases in complexity, interconnectedness, and interdependence. This is precisely the time when new governance and leadership structures are needed. Collective intelligence focused on producing collective impact is required. Creating real-world experiments to see what works and what doesn’t is critical to accelerating progress.”

In the last few years George has focused on healthcare. In particular, how innovation and drug development can be improved at the same time costs are reduced. He has been leading Tapestry’s European healthcare network, where people with very different objectives have established trust and pioneered new models of collaboration in drug development. Recently he became a member of the US State Department’s PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and UNAIDS Global Task Team to Eliminate New HIV Infections among Children and Keeping their Mothers Alive.

George and his wife, Katerina Malievskaia, divide their time between London and Boston, MA. They are currently working together to launch a new, multi-sectoral global health initiative in South Africa for Tapestry. “As we have spent time with major national donor countries, the UN, NGOs, the private sector, and countries receiving aid, we see huge opportunities for better alignment of global resources and national health priorities,” remarks George.

Download George Goldsmith's Formal Biography