James (Jamie) Millar, Partner

Places lived: Canada (Ottawa and Toronto), United States (New York and Boston)

Education: Harvard Business School, MBA; University of Toronto, BASc in industrial engineering (honors)

Experience: Bonfire Consulting, IntellectExchange, Fidelity Investments, Harvard Business School (chairman of MBA Admissions Board and director of Financial Aid), Morgan Stanley (Corporate Finance, M&A, Energy)

Focus: How to create the conditions that lead to innovation and systemic change

Intellectual influences: Too many to list

Turning points: The decision to go to business school. “I grew up in Ottawa. It is a government town and I didn’t know many business people.” The decision to stay at HBS after graduation and join its admissions and financial aid team.

Like others at Tapestry, Jamie has had a career that has been unpredictable yet somehow adds up and makes sense.

What he accomplished at Harvard Business School after earning his MBA provides some of the themes. “I had intended to go back to Canada, but the chance to get involved in admissions and financial aid was attractive to me,” Jamie recalls. “I thought the qualitative analysis and focus on people was just the right complement to my quantitative experiences in engineering and investment banking.”

Jamie threw himself into his job at HBS by doing what he believes is the secret to making progress, he asked the right questions. One question was, “What if you could say to every student admitted to HBS, 'You don’t need to worry about money. We have arranged guaranteed financing for you regardless of your nationality or creditworthiness.’ If you could do that,” he reasoned, “you could substantially change the profile of the student body.”

To answer that question, Jamie worked with Citibank to develop an innovative financing approach for students who could not otherwise afford to attend HBS. The resulting program was highlighted on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

For Jamie, innovation is a disciplined exercise that is often driven by the right set of questions. And many of those questions revolve around micro rather than macro events. “I started by focusing on the individual. I could make a big difference to Harvard by focusing on the 20% of the class who might not come. Then I thought about Harvard as a class. And someday maybe that class or those classes we assembled will have a lot more impact on society than they might otherwise have had. Small changes in a model can lead to big results.”

These themes are clearly present in Jamie’s work at Tapestry. “We have more than 150 corporate directors in our networks who say they want to engage with each other in a meaningful way. How can we make that happen? I think it takes thoughtful questions and empathy, not just research and analysis. It also takes curiosity and honesty; in short, authenticity. That leads to stronger relationships and greater alignment among people.”

Jamie is skeptical of simplistic solutions to complex problems, and he believes leaders need to embrace ambiguity. “Complex issues like the ones our networks address take time and trust, not frameworks and quick answers that assume everything is linear. There are not purely good or bad ideas. The world is shades of grey.”

Jamie has many friends among the members of Tapestry’s networks. They confide in him and offer ideas about what Tapestry might do next. As a result, Tapestry launched the Private Equity General Counsel Network. Its members include the general counsel from leading US and European private equity firms and senior private equity partners from three premier law firms.

“I am genuinely excited about this new initiative,” says Jamie. “It’s great to have network members who see where Tapestry’s approach can bring value to a particular constituency or problem.”

Jamie lives with his wife and three children in Bedford, MA.

Download James Millar's Formal Biography