About Tom
ThoughtCore’s Founder and Chief Thought Officer
Welcome to ThoughtCore!
As founder and chief thought officer, I’d like to thank you for spending time learning about ThoughtCore’s strategic thinking, strategic planning, and strategy/planning functional design services. I look forward to discussing how you and/or others in your organization would benefit from our offerings.
How did I arrive here?
Early in my career, I certainly could not have predicted I would one day found and lead a business focused on helping organizations be more intentional and thoughtful about strategy, planning, and decision-making. But my path to this role was transformative in ways that now make the arrival perhaps inevitable.
I started my career in academia, then switched to the corporate world mid-career, driven by curiosity and no small degree of restlessness for a new challenge. As a tenured university professor in a liberal arts field, I was regularly asked to lead programs and people. Those programs were typically in need of significant revamping, if not outright design and launch from scratch. I soon discovered that my knack (okay, let’s just say gift) for critical thinking and for architecting and leading programs, teams, and functions was portable. So I took it to the corporate arena.
Fast forward a few years – years in which I gained additional transformative experiences and repeated “tapped on the shoulder to lead it” roles as a chief editor, as a client business developer, as a marketer/industry thought leader, and as a seller (yes, I “carried a bag” for a time). I was once again tapped on the shoulder, this time to design, launch and direct an enterprise software company’s first-ever corporate-level strategy and planning function. I did that long enough and through enough iterations and permutations to last several career lifespans. Along the way, the restlessness for a new set of needs and scenarios to tackle kicked back in.
Why did I create ThoughtCore?
I decided to take the show on the road, so to speak. I listened to my continued convictions about the criticality of thinking in strategic planning and decision-making. I acknowledged my own natural ability to always be thinking strategically — rigorously so — and to model it for others. I recalled all the scenarios across my career in which I have been relied on, too, for my skills in designing, directing, and advancing programs or functions. Finally, I admitted to myself, “Others could benefit from joining me in thinking and planning strategically. It’s time for them to have a way to find and leverage me and for me to help wherever I can.” ThoughtCore is the place to dig in..
A note of attribution
You may have discovered on the home page this quote from me: “At the core of strategy is thought. At the core of thought are questions. I ask the questions you may not be thinking of.”
Not only is that quote an accurate take on the core mission of ThoughtCore, but it also echoes the validation I have regularly received over the years regarding the value of grounding strategy in questioning.
In appreciation of that validation, I confess that the last line of the quote didn’t originate with me. In a strategy ideation session a few years ago, I dropped in on a cross-functional planning group with whom I hadn’t directly connected in several months.
As I silently listened to the discussion for a few minutes, I was unwittingly frustrating the industry sales VP. Soon, he turned to me and impatiently demanded, “Hey, aren’t you going to say anything? You’re not playing your role.” Intrigued, I responded, “Oh, interesting. How would you characterize my role?” Without hesitation, he boldly articulated what has since become a personal tagline of sorts: “You’re the guy who asks the questions we’re not thinking of.”