Recruiting strong leaders

It’s the sort of test that comes at some point during every new career, only this particular moment came at Virginia Tech in the early ’70s.

John Thompson, an upperclassman resident advisor on weekend duty, waited for the dorm’s elevator to arrive. When its doors opened, “there were two women and two guys, nude,” he recalled. “They were wearing shoes and had a cow with them. You learn to deal with some somewhat bizarre things.”

No doubt the experience factored into the successful career that Thompson (ECON ’70, MBA ’72), of Atherton, California, has built over the decades since then. Today, he is recognized as one of the most respected CEO and board consultants in the nation, helping clients such as Intel, General Electric, Nike, Disney, Microsoft, and many more to build their management teams and boards. He helped place executives Eric Schmidt at Google and Tim Cook at Apple.

In all, Thompson has completed more than 200 CEO searches and more than 220 board searches over the last three decades.

“The CEOs I helped recruit have generated $850 billion of market cap increases at their companies,” Thompson said. “That’s created an awful lot of jobs and added an awful lot of value. I didn’t do that, but I helped recruit people that did make it happen. That’s something I ‘m really, really proud of.”

Education and Training

Thompson grew up in Southside Virginia’s South Boston. He applied and was accepted to Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia, and chose Tech because “it felt more like me.”

As an undergrad, Thompson was chairman of homecoming in 1969 and chairman of the ring committee for the class of 1970, the first year a separate women’s ring was designed. He also ran special events at Squires Student Center, booking concerts in conjunction with other universities, which resulted in campus shows by the Beach Boys, Simon and Garfunkel, and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

After obtaining a degree in economics, Thompson then completed an M.B.A. He was then hired by the school of business and extension division, where he headed up off-campus management education and developed faculty-consulting agreements with Virginia companies.

A trailblazing career

The Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Companies recruited Thompson to become director of organization development, an internal consulting group for its various enterprises, which included commercial real estate, oil & gas pipelines, agrichemicals, and telecommunications. He remained there for more than six years before he was recruited to Atari, Inc., a video-game manufacturer whose CEO and CFO were charged with insider-trading violations, just one month after Thompson was hired. Atari’s business suffered, and about a year later, Thompson was hired by David Powell for a Silicon Valley search firm.

“He hired me to give me a test drive, agreeing to take me on as a consultant for three months,” Thompson said. “Long story short, I really liked it. After three months, I went full time, and I worked for David about six years. We were the largest boutique search firm in Silicon Valley at the time, working primarily with tech companies but also natural resource companies.”

Thompson then was hired by Heidrick & Struggles. October will mark his 27th anniversary there. He spends his time between New York City and Silicon Valley, where he lives in Atherton with his wife and fellow Hokie Phyllis Newby Thompson (M.S. reading and an M.S. in learning disabilities ’73) who pursued her own, trailblazing career as one of Virginia’s first learning-disabilities teachers. They recently celebrated their 46th anniversary.

Indicators of successful leadership

In his job, Thompson often works with companies seeking to manage CEO and board succession. In this role, he has recruited over 200 CEOs and more than 300 board members. The criteria for each client varies based on its needs, but there is a single, transcendent quality that Thompson identified as the most important.

“I have a hypothesis that the biggest contributor to success in leaders is pattern recognition,” Thompson said. “From all my experience, that is the key, driving factor. Leaders need to make decisions very quickly today. They have to be able to pull the trigger on big decisions, sometimes massive financial commitments, with very little information. That would have been scary to people 20 or 30 years ago, but people today have to make decisions very quickly. I prefer working with executives who are good at pattern recognition and can see things coming. Overall, leaders do make an enormous difference in any organization.”

Processing information rapidly to determine a course of action is something that Thompson, too, has done throughout his career, starting with that elevator full of Hokie hijinks back in the early ’70s.

—Mason Adams