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Tom Tierney

Envision Your Legacy, Weave Disparate Strands, See New Ways of Doing Things

It’s still dark outside when Tom Tierney rises in his home outside Boston on a December morning. He dresses quietly, so as not to wake his wife, Karen, and goes to the kichen to brew some coffee. At fifty-nine, Tierney is trim and retains a certain boyishness, helped by the rimless glasses, a full head of hair, and boundless energy. He carries a mug and the fresh pot into his office and closes the door. It’s 5:15 a.m., time to begin the ritual of writing what he calls his “annual review.”

The term reflects Tierney’s lifetime in business: the Harvard MBA, two decades at the consulting firm Bain & Company (including eight years as chief executive), and fourteen years as cofounder and guiding spirit of the nonprofit Bridgespan. But he doesn’t write this personal document with the notion that it should be legible for anybody else. “It’s just for me,” he told me in a long interview a few years ago.¹ “I ask how I spent my time. And I ask how I’m doing. And then I ask, ‘Where am I going with all this? How can I be better? What are my priorities for the next year? Five years? Ten years?’” The annual review is more than a career assessment; it might include personal goals or thoughts about how his two sons are doing. The ritual reflects the qualities that Tierney is known for: discipline, self-reflection, an ability to think big and creatively, and a dedication to personal development, his own and others’.

As he works, he goes back through journal entries that he’s written on cross-country flights and in other spare moments. Tierney, who has been journaling for decades, believes the practice helps him record meaningful data. “I keep track of every single travel day, of every day that I’m home after seven, and of how many nights I’m away and what’s causing that.” But it also helps him think through bigger life questions, track his progess toward long-term goals, and capture ideas and dreams about what might be.

In an entry from 1988, for instance, Tierney—who was then running the San Francisco office of Bain & Company—wrote about what he called a “Make a Difference Company.” The idea percolated in Tierney’s mind and kept surfacing in his journal until 1999, when Bridgespan was born, initially as a start-up incubated within Bain.

The Bridgespan Group is most easily described as a nonprofit version of Bain Consulting—an organization that provides services such as strategic consulting and leadership development to philanthropists, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. Now in its second decade, Bridgespan helps many nonprofit clients and is what Duke University’s Joel Fleishman (a Tierney coauthor) calls “the gold standard in nonprofit consulting.”² That category hardly existed at its founding, but today the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (a Bridgespan client) and hundreds of other ventures in social entrepreneurialism have joined Bridgespan in chipping away at the notion that standard practices from the for-profit world—let alone successful business leaders—have no place in philanthropy and the social sector.

When Tierney left his job as Worldwide Managing Director at Bain & Company in 2000 for Bridgespan it was, he said, “not a natural act.” Yet Tierney has always believed that the notion of a person’s predetermined track is “hogwash.” Instead, he said, “You’re on your own track.”³

Building His Own Track

Tom Tierney was born in San Francisco, the older of two boys. His father had gone to college thanks to the GI Bill and worked at a Colgate-Palmolive factory that manufactured toothpaste. His mother, nominally a stay-at-home mom, volunteered for a long time as president of Sunny Hills Junior Auxiliary, helping troubled high school girls for as many as forty hours a week.⁴ Tierney’s family was solidly working class. “I remember being aware of the fact that we didn’t have a new car and other families did,” Tierney said. When he asked about this, his father told him, “It’s not what you have in life that matters, it’s who you are. And who you are in life is dependent not on what you say, but what you do.”

College didn’t initially appeal to Tierney; he dreamed of joining the Peace Corps. But his parents felt strongly about it, so strongly that the elder Tierney filled out much of his son’s college application forms.⁵ Tom Tierney was accepted at the University of California at Davis, where he arrived as a freshman in the fall of 1972, planning to major in engineering. But some early science classes didn’t bode well. He recalls seeing the results of an exam for a chemistry class, when the long list of grades was posted on a wall, with the best scores at the top. He found his name near the bottom. “I don’t want to be here,” he thought. “I don’t know why I am here. This is hard. I’m not smart enough. I don’t know how to work any harder. Do I drop out?”

Walking home that day along a bike path, he heard someone whistling behind him. When he turned to look, he saw a fellow student in a wheelchair. “If he can whistle,” Tierney thought, “I can whistle.” Tierney stayed in school, although he switched his major to economics, graduating with honors. Unsure of the next step, he kept his job driving a bus, a job he’d had all through college.⁶ It was a great job, he’s told many audiences since. But he itched to travel. He had crossed the California border only twice: bound once for Reno, Nevada, and once for Tijuana. So after bumping into a friend whose father worked for Bechtel, he applied for a job at the global engineering firm.

“When the guy gave me the job,” Tierney recalled decades later, “he said, ‘We’re going to send you to Algeria.’ And I must have had this funny look, because he said, ‘You don’t know where that is, do you?’ I said, ‘Sir, I don’t, but I’m sure it’s not in California.’”⁷ Less than two weeks later, Tierney landed in the northern African country as the newest field engineer at the construction site of one of the world’s largest natural gas plants.⁸ The assignment allowed him to acquire project-management skills, and his two years there, he says, gave him “ten years of experience.” During vacations, he traveled throughout North, West, and East Africa, as well as to Europe and the Mediterranean. The period, as he put it to the authors of a Harvard Business School case, taught him “a lot about people and a lot about life.”⁹

But when Bechtel offered Tierney a three-year contact to build facilities at a new natural gas site in the Sahara, he was ready for a change. He applied to business school, earning a spot at Harvard. “I was the only Algerian application that year,” he told my Wharton class, explaining how he got in. “And I aced the TOEFL exam.”¹⁰

Tierney, who had wanted to go to Stanford Business School but didn’t get in, felt hesitant about going to an Ivy League institution. But his mother, who had never been to college or to New England, told him, “If you can get into Harvard, you should go to Harvard.” So he did. Harvard Business School felt more foreign to Tierney than Algeria. “I understood construction, I understood blue collar stuff, I was very, very comfortable swearing,” he recalled in a 2012 business school talk. “And [I] end up in Cambridge, which was different. Quite a bit different. I had to wear a coat, and some people called me Mister Tierney. It was bizarre.”¹¹

Growing Up at Bain

Tierney says that he initially “struggled through business school,” although he did well enough to land a job at Bain after graduating with distinction in 1980, in the top 10 percent of his class. But the feeling of being a social misfit followed him to Bain. People who worked closely with the budding executive admired his integrity and discipline. They recognized his value to the firm. But in the eyes of some partners, Tierney didn’t look like an executive, nor did he act like one. At his first review, he was told that of the twenty-five associates hired in his year, the partners had ranked him twenty-fifth. He told me that the partner reviewing him said, “I know you’re rough. I just don’t know if there is a diamond in there.”

But Tierney took heart. There had been no criticism of his work, only of superficial things like his appearance, his lack of polish, his behavior. Tierney, who has since described Bain as his “finishing school,” knew that he could learn to be an executive. And with dedicated effort and coaching, he did, becoming a partner in three years—a record.

Although Tierney was thrilled to make partner, the transition was no easier than his initial entry into the firm or into HBS. “You would expect a partner to be a paragon of wisdom and experience; I was twenty-nine years old. You would expect a partner to be polished and smooth like a Wall Street lawyer or investment banker; I was anything but,” he said in the HBS case. It was a job he had to grow into. He began taking sales training classes and hired a clothing consultant. He was told in no uncertain terms to get rid of his white socks. Not a natural rainmaker, he left the client schmoozing to other partners and gravitated toward work that played to his strengths, becoming what he describes as the “unofficial chief operating officer” of the San Francisco office. He began managing professional development and helped institute a new performance-review system.

As a manager, Tierney encouraged employees not to work all the time or let their vacation days languish. “You want to have people there for years and years and years,” he said to me, reflecting on his philosophy. “You want them to be productive. You want them not to burn out. You don’t want people to turn into little piles of dust. They have to be fulfilled on multiple dimensions.”¹²

This was a period of personal growth for Tierney as well. He had fallen in love with Karen McGee, a television executive, and, in 1984, the couple married. In 1987—the same year their first son, Colin, was born—Tierney, then thirty-three, was promoted to head of the one-hundred-person San Francisco office. Although he prided himself on his project-management skills, not all of his colleagues appreciated them, and one day a young partner came to his office, uninvited, to give him feedback. “You’re a steamroller,” she told Tierney. “You’re rolling over people. You’re being too controlling.”¹³ That young partner was Meg Whitman, current CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

She was right, Tierney realized after thinking about her comments for a couple of days. He loosened his management style, focusing not on what the members of his team were doing but on what he could do to help them succeed. John Donahoe, current CEO of eBay, also worked in the San Francisco office at the time; like most consultants, he spent most of his week on the road visiting clients. Donahoe reached a critical juncture at Bain, he told me recently, when his wife earned a prestigious year-long clerkship that would have made it impossible for her to take the couple’s children to school. He went to Tierney to explain that he could no longer travel and would have to resign. “You’re an idiot. You don’t need to quit,” Tierney said to him. “We’ll get you a local client.”¹⁴ There weren’t any local clients, Donahoe pointed out, but Tierney promised to find one—and within two weeks, he had. Donahoe stayed at Bain, working part-time that year, and went on to succeed Tierney as head of the San Francisco office.

If the first few months as head of the office had tested Tierney’s leadership skills, they also tested his ability to live the kind of life he valued: being with his wife and sons, giving back to the community, and carving out quiet moments for himself. Time, Tierney says, is a scarce resource. “The job will not say, ‘You are doing too much work, you need to cut back,’” he said. “A three-year-old will not tell you, ‘I need a bigger share of your time.’”¹⁵

To ensure that he was spending his days wisely, Tierney created what he calls “magnets”: commitments that he took as seriously as a partner meeting. One magnet was exercise; Tierney set out time exclusively for himself every morning for a workout. His wife and sons represented a second magnet, and, to protect his time with them, Tierney decided that he would not go into the office on weekends. “Over the course of my career, I maybe went into the office on a weekend ten to fifteen times,” he told me. That doesn’t mean he never did any work on weekends. He might read something or answer e-mails, but any work had to fit around his family’s weekend activities, from Little League and soccer games to Boy Scout camping trips.

Tierney also began exploring avenues for community service. He started volunteering for the United Way of the Bay Area, an effort that led to Bain’s first pro bono client. Tierney eventually joined the nonprofit’s board, the first of several on which he would serve.

The Struggle to Rebuild

In his thirties, everything appeared to be falling into place for Tierney. He was happily married. He loved fatherhood, once telling me (while struggling to hold back tears) that raising a family “opens up what’s important.”¹⁶ He had succeeded at Bain far beyond the partners’ early expectations, and Bain itself was expanding rapidly. By the early 1980s, Bain had about forty vice presidents as well as offices in Boston, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, and Munich. But not everything was as it seemed. In the mid-1980s, Bain’s seven directors—who together owned the firm—had created an employee stock plan that would distribute shares, giving a greater number of employees an ownership stake. The directors sold 30 percent of the company’s shares to the newly created stock trust, which bought the shares through bank loans that would be paid with cash from Bain’s revenues. But Bain’s growth slumped along with the rest of the economy in the late 1980s, and the company didn’t react quickly enough. Accustomed to fast growth, Bain, in Tierney’s words, “had an accelerator but no brake.”¹⁷ Soon the company’s liabilities—including rent, salaries, and debt related to the stock plan—threatened the firm’s future. Only the small group of directors knew exactly how bad things were.

In 1990, Tierney learned the truth. “It was devastating,” he recalled. “My first thoughts were, ‘I’m wiped out. I have a mortgage to pay on my house. I have a three-year-old child. My wife has quit her job to be a full-time mom. I head an office of one hundred professionals whose future is now in jeopardy.’”¹⁸

For several weeks, Tierney grappled with whether to stay or go. “Sometime during the weeks of indecision, the issue stopped being about money or my job; seeing this through became an issue of values, integrity, and reputation,” he recalled. “I decided that no matter what, I would do my part to help Bain succeed.”¹⁹ He vowed to stay with the company until it was on stronger footing and then leave.

Mitt Romney, then head of Bain’s sister company, Bain Capital, stepped in as interim CEO to help get the consulting firm back on its feet. By the fall of 1991, the financial restructuring was essentially complete and Romney was itching to return to Bain Capital. But first the consulting firm needed a new leader. Romney, among others, wanted that leader to be Tierney. This posed yet another moment of soul-searching for Tierney. “Faced with a choice like that, what do you do? Me, I pray. And I talk to my wife. We talked and talked and talked.”²⁰ Eventually he agreed to become president and chief operating officer of the company for a trial year.

During that year, Tierney officially lived in San Francisco, but he spent 220 nights on the road, tending to Bain’s offices around the world. “I killed myself traveling. At some points I felt like I was running for office,” he said. “At other points, I felt like I was just bailing out a leaky boat as fast as I could just to keep it afloat.”²¹ One day that June, Tierney arrived home from a two-week business trip, to be greeted by his wife Karen and an ultimatum: “You’re gone all the time. We’ve got a five year-old son. This isn’t going to work. Something’s got to change.”²² The partners in Boston wanted a change, too. They needed the head of the firm back in Boston. So, for professional and personal reasons, the Tierneys moved east.

The company was still in decline, and, in contrast to his role in the San Francisco office, where he knew everyone well, Tierney was now running a global organization and herding partners, most of whom didn’t know him personally and some of whom hadn’t voted for him to take the helm. Tierney had to learn how to “exert influence as opposed to control” and how to manage “by remote control,” as he told me.²³ It was a challenging time.

But the firm was on sounder financial footing, and, as the economy picked up, so did Bain’s fortunes. The firm grew at 30 percent a year from 1992 through 1998, a year in which Bain raked in more than $500 million in revenues.²⁴ Tierney oversaw a global expansion, adding fourteen offices around the world, and instituted an internal training program to ensure that “Bainees” at every level were continuing to learn.

Still, that business success took a toll on Tierney’s family, which now included a second son, Braden. “I don’t know anybody who, later in their career, says, ‘I wish I’d spent five percent more time at work and five percent less time with my family,” said Tierney in 2008. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that sentence. Kids make that trade-off starker. There’s a cost to it. If I’m not there, I’m just not there. I can’t say, ‘I’ll make it up to you when you’re forty.’”²⁵ Tierney tried to be as present as possible for his family. “He’s taken more red-eyes than your average person,” Karen, his wife, told me. And when he had to leave, “we could always count on a little love note left on the kitchen counter.”²⁶

Looking back at that period, Tierney described it as “extremely stressful and not always healthy” and admits he doesn’t know how much longer he could have sustained it.²⁷ “My moment came in the mid-nineties,” Tierney told John Kobara, when “a very, very thoughtful person asked me, ‘What if you had ten years to live? Would you keep doing what you’re doing?’” That person was John Gardner, who, as secretary of health in the Johnson administration, helped create Medicare and later went on to found Common Cause. Gardner’s question stuck with Tierney, who kept asking himself, “What is my life about? What’s my legacy?” “He’s on my short list of heroes,” said Tierney of Gardner, adding that Gardner’s questions “gave me courage to follow my path.”²⁸

Crossing the Bridge

In October 1999, Tierney sat down to record a voice mail to Bain’s two hundred partners around the world. He told them that he would not seek a third term as CEO and, moreover, that he was going half-time to give more of himself to Bridgespan. He had co-written the business plan for the nonprofit while at Bain. In fact, the company had supported his effort, bringing his Bridgespan cofounder, Jeff Bradach, on to the payroll in the early months and giving the fledgling team office space.

Soon after Tierney sent the voice mail, two partners came into his Boston office, closed the door, and asked him if he was OK. “They honestly thought I’d received bad news from the doctor,” he told me recently. “To leave this company that was growing thirty-five percent per year, with twenty-two hundred people in twenty-plus countries? It was going well—I had all these perks.” To join a start-up charity with three other people for no pay struck the partners as irrational.

Next, he received a call from a headhunter in Silicon Valley, who told him, “I can get you a job. I guarantee you two hundred million dollars in two years.”²⁹ Tierney was, by his own admission, “really messed up.”³⁰ He asked his wife whether he was being stupid. Her response was direct, even if extreme, to make the point: “Listen, if we need to live in a trailer, we’ll live in a trailer. We’ve got to do what’s right.”³¹

“It was messy,” Tierney said to me in retrospect. “I struggled. But eventually you come back to who you are as a human being, and you come back to that question: How do you define success?”³²

For Tierney the idea that service was important had been planted early by his parents. His father had served in World War II. His mother had volunteered. “I am sure that one of the reasons that I was attracted to consulting is that it is a helping profession,” he said to me, reflecting on the impact of his parents. “And one of the reasons that I was attracted to general management was that it felt to me that my mission as an executive was to create an environment where other people could succeed.”³³ For Tierney, Bridgespan offered an opportunity to use his specific skills to serve a broader community.

The organization was formally launched in September 2000. Within nine months of its founding, Bridgespan raised $7 million in financing, hired twenty-seven employees, and expanded to a West Coast office.³⁴ Jeff Bradach served as Bridgespan’s CEO, overseeing day-to-day operations while Tierney served as its chairman. “It was clear to me that for Jeff to succeed as CEO, I could not be in his neighborhood,” Tierney told me, explaining why he continued to work for two-plus years from his Bain office, two blocks away, while supporting Bridgespan’s launch. “I could help with strategy, I could do fund-raising, and I could work with clients.”³⁵

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation was Bridgespan’s first client. For decades, the foundation had worked to improve the lives of people in low-income communities through grants to organizations that fought poverty, improved schools, and strengthened communities in the United States and the developing world. To ensure that its funding was making an impact, Bridgespan helped the foundation narrow the scope of its work and develop tools to measure the results of its grantees. Today, Bridgespan’s clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Salvation Army, the YMCA, and hundreds more. To help nonprofits that can’t afford to pay for its services, Bridgespan also makes case studies of its work freely available. Indeed, a central tenet of its social mission is to generate and distribute useful knowledge throughout the social sector—through articles, books, an award-winning Web site, speeches, and conferences.

Bringing It All Together

On a late January day in 2012, Tierney took the stage at the Georgia Tech School of Management as part of the school’s Impact Speaker Series.³⁶ “Hi everybody,” he greeted the audience, as he dropped his printed speech onto the lecturn—pages he wouldn’t touch until ten minutes into his talk. “My name’s Tom, and I want to be useful to you,” he said as he removed his jacket and hung it on a chair.

Tierney’s talk began with a subject that the student audience might not necessarily have been thinking about, as he admitted to them. “‘Philanthropy?’ you might say,” he said, scratching his head. “‘I don’t have any money. I have debts.’” Then, without stopping, he launched into his stump speech about service and the role it’s played in his life, drawing the throughline from his childhood values to the choice he made to walk away from a million-dollar paycheck to work for free for a nonprofit.

Tierney’s story—and the lesson he wanted his listeners to take away—was that a fulfilling life does not consist of three separate serial phases in which you learn, then you earn, and then you serve. “The fact is,” he said in a 2008 interview, “you ought to be learning continuously. You earn, but you earn in different ways and different amounts.” He then added a rhetorical question: “Why does serving wait until you’re sixty-five or seventy?”³⁷

Tierney is especially troubled by the idea of service as an afterthought—something you do after you retire. “That serving bit was just as important to me, and I wasn’t going to just leave it for the dessert at dinner. I wanted it as part of the main course,” he said.³⁸

But he doesn’t merely want people to give their money away earlier; he wants them to give their money in a way that is smarter, that has more impact, and that, to use a term from the business world, gives donors a higher ROI (return on investment). Some philanthropists see giving as an end in itself, and they don’t focus on the results of their gifts, he said. But the nonprofit world also lacks what Tierney calls market feedback. “If you own a restaurant and put something on the menu, you’re going to know in short order whether your customers like it or not,” he said.³⁹ Philanthropy lacks such immediate, tangible feedback. As a result, Tierney says, it tends to underperform.

Tierney has been talking about these issues a lot lately, alongside Joel Fleishman, professor of law at Duke University, whom Tierney affectionately describes as his “Jewish godfather.” Fleishman helped fund Bridgespan when he was at Atlantic Philanthropies, and, more recently, the two coauthored a book called Give Smart. “We believe that all philanthropy is deeply personal,” they wrote. “By asking the right questions … you will be far more likely to achieve the change you want to bring about in the world.”⁴⁰

Fleishman says Tierney has “an unbelievable knack” for conveying these lessons in simple language and commonsense analogies.⁴¹ The notion that nonprofits should have as little overhead as possible still dominates the philanthropic world. In one of their joint speeches, Fleishman recalls, Tierney said, “It’s like deciding to fly on the airline with the least maintenance.” This made the concept easy to grasp.

In all of his talks, Tierney questions this conventional wisdom, arguing that there is bad overhead (say, paying for swank office space) and good overhead (such as investing in technology to track results). Tierney counsels philanthropists not to place restrictions on how their donation can be spent (Sheryl Sandberg, for one, heeded this sage advice). Tierney urges them to focus instead on results, asking grantees to agree to certain performance milestones.

“I hope that every philanthropist asks him- or herself, on a regular basis, ‘How can I double my impact with the time, money, and influence at my disposal?’’’ he once told a reporter. “If every philanthropist does that … and as a result, we boost the results achieved by philanthropy by ten percent, can you imagine?” He continued, “That’s like adding hundreds of billions of dollars of new philanthropy—smarter philanthropy—that achieves better results for our communities and our country. That would be a legacy to be proud of.”⁴²

The Skills Tom Tierney Exemplifies

Examining his life philosophy in his journal, Tierney once wrote, “Those that succeed build lives first and résumés second. When they stare in the mirror, they don’t see just a professional; they see a parent, a spouse, a friend, and a member of the community.”⁴³ Tierney knows that a leader plays many roles in life, and he seems to revel in the complex task of finding creative ways to make them work well together. He has traveled a winding path from inconsistent student to California bus driver, engineer in the Algerian desert to Harvard MBA, consultant to high-flying CEO, author to full-time charitable volunteer. He’s been a perpetual traveler, a devoted father, and a significant mentor to people who are great leaders in their own right.

All along his remarkable journey, Tierney’s deep-seated values, on which he regularly and critically reflects, guide him like a lodestar. The disciplined creativity he applies to his commitments large and small enables him to learn as he joyfully serves others, with stellar results. He has faced obstacles and made mistakes, fallen down and gotten up again. At every juncture, he has adopted the same approach, asking others and himself, “Am I getting better?”⁴⁴ Then he has taken the steps necessary to answer positively. He contributes his boundless energy and keen intellect to the people and things that matter to him by envisioning his legacy, weaving the domains of his life together coherently, and seeing new ways of doing things. Although Tierney is an exemplar of numerous other skills, let’s dig further into these three. Then, in Part II, I give you concrete suggestions for ways you can make them part of your repertoire.

Be Real: Envision Your Legacy

Tom Tierney has a vision for where he is headed, what kind of legacy he wants to leave, and how to pursue what is most important in life. Tierney knows not only where he’s been but also where he’s going. He can paint a vivid picture of the life he wants to lead, visualizing himself in five, ten, and even twenty years. Not only does he have a compelling image of an achievable future, but also he has a sense of how to achieve that vision. Although he may not have all the details figured out, he understands the values that will guide him on the path to realizing his dreams.

A leader living the life he wants needs to form an optimistic and yet realistic picture of the world he wants to create. Tierney’s dedication to journaling—and the practical knowledge that emerges from his rigorous self-examination—demonstrates how he goes about envisioning a future that makes sense to him, a future that is congruent with the person he wants to be and how he wants to be remembered.

Tierney’s focus on his own evolution is displayed in the decisions he’s made. For example, in 1990, during the crisis at Bain, he resolved to stay because he knew that his departure would be a devastating signal of indifference to the long-term interests of the firm. Some years later, after Bain found its footing and then some, at the peak of Tierney’s powers as CEO, he chose to leave in the prime of his career and launch a small nonprofit start-up—not a standard move in the eyes of many in the elite world of top-tier consulting firms.

Why did he do it? The new venture allowed him to apply his mastery to help causes closer to his core values. And as Bridgespan spread its wings—as he multiplied his impact by enabling others to help those in need—Tierney saw yet greater opportunity to use his energy, talent, and networks. He dreamed of doing even greater good by reimagining the world of philanthropy. Today, by teaching wealthy people who want to help others the lessons he’s learned from his own experience about how to focus on and create a future that matters, his impact as a leader of positive social change ripples outward.

Be Whole: Weave Disparate Strands

Tom Tierney weaves together the pieces of his life so that it has coherence. He views all the aspects of his life as interconnected and mutually enriching. He understands how different roles complement each other. He has a sense that all aspects of his life are integral parts of the person he is, and integral to his efforts.

Tierney’s life illustrates ways to harness the different domains of life into a coherent whole. One example is his ongoing pursuit of opportunities to seek work that gives credence to his core value of producing social good. Another is the way he ensures that the most precious people in his life—his wife and children—are lodged deeply in his consciousness and receive his attention. And a third is the way he invests in developing the capacity of others to fit together the domains of their lives.

From volunteering for the United Way early in his career to serving on numerous nonprofit boards and founding Bridgespan, Tierney has sought the chance to serve society through his work. Throughout his professional life he has moved ever closer to achieving simultaneous four-way wins: actions that benefit work, home, community, and self, all at once. As a guest at the one-year anniversary celebration of the publication of Give Smart, I saw this play out as family, friends, colleagues, philanthropists, beneficiaries of charity, and others were all together in the same place to advance a common cause.

Interpersonal presence comes in two forms: physical and psychological. It’s possible to be physically present with others while being psychologically absent. Of course, both forms of presence matter when it comes to demonstrating love and to making one’s family a real and ongoing part of one’s life. Tierney realized early, through hard lessons, that he had to be vigilant about protecting the time for his family, so he commited to being physically absent from his office on weekends. With few exceptions, he found ways to ensure that he was home and that, after hours, work matters were secondary to his family’s activities, from sports to Boy Scouts. Indeed, he shepherded both of his sons to Eagle Scout, the highest rank. And even when yet another red-eye flight wouldn’t get him home, or when he determined that he just had to travel, he stayed in touch and maintained a psychological presence through messages that let Karen, Colin, and Braden know that he was thinking of them.

And Tierney hasn’t just taken up the task of weaving his own domains together; he’s helped others do the same. He knows, from a business perspective, that it’s not a good idea to burn people out. Finding John Donahoe a local client so that he wouldn’t have to travel is a good example of a creative solution Tierney found to a dilemma faced by one of his key people. He also devotes time to teaching MBA students the lessons of his own experience, guiding them to integrate the pieces in ways that work for them. Recently, he’s been honored to serve in the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point, where he teaches seminars on life and leadership. For leaders living the lives they want, it’s all of piece.

Be Innovative: See New Ways of Doing Things

Tom Tierney is willing to question old habits and to innovate in managing life’s demands. He does not allow long-standing routines to dictate how he lives his life. He is willing to explore opportunities for greater performance in, and cohesiveness between, the different aspects of his life. He is willing to question his behaviors and to experiment with solutions for managing day-to-day as well as long-term needs.

Tierney shows how to try new things to get closer to your aspirations. He says that predetermined tracks are bunk and that you’ve got to chop through the weeds to make your own path. Tierney is an avid learner and a true student of his own life. He continually feeds his curiosity by observing people and the world around him.

This openness, coupled with a fearless quest for knowledge about himself, was certainly there when he landed in northern Africa on a quickly conceived adventure and then entered an even stranger country at Harvard Business School. Tierney’s openness to change blossomed later, when he learned how to look the part of a business professional, then how to be a partner, and then how to be a very effective executive. He learned from negative feedback. After Meg Whitman told him he was a steamroller, he drew a picture of a steamroller on his calendar every day and, at the end of each day, crossed off the picture if he had not steamrolled anyone that day.⁴⁵

And now, in the world of philanthopy, he continues to scour the world for best practices and has created a video interview series that shares them.⁴⁶ He rejected the traditional assumption of trade-offs implied by the “learn-earn-serve” model of personal development and has shown how it’s good for you to always be learning, earning, and serving, even if in different measures along the way. By persistently rejecting traditional ways of doing things, Tierney has demonstrated what being innovative truly means.

 

When I asked people who know Tom Tierney well to describe him, the word I heard most often was disciplined. He has dedicated serious attention to asking himself, “How do I define real success in my life?” After he answers this question, he acts on what he says. Perhaps this is why in the world of philanthropy he finds himself, once again, to be the beating heart of an enterprise devoted to using available resources to make things better for others.

With his penchant for tracking almost everything he cares about, Tierney knows exactly where he stands in pursuit of his most critical goals. He reflects on his failures and his successes and then looks at the day ahead, and the next day, and the next week, and the next month, and the next year, to see whether he’s on target. Then he adjusts accordingly, even if it means walking away from positions with great power and income.

Tierney, whose father taught him to believe in the little guy, preaches the ideology that employees are people first, with lives that matter. And he applies that to his own life, putting his family first. This commitment to his life beyond work didn’t detract from his career success; to the contrary, it fortified his capacity as a business executive and inspired others, animating his achievements at work and in society. The four domains of his life all win.

I refer to Tierney as a visionary consultant. But a more apt appellation might be something like great student, because his avid thirst for useful knowledge has made it possible for him to evolve, to continually become the person he wants to become, while never forgetting his purpose: to serve, something all of us are capable of doing better.