Thomas Gilmore

Founder and Principal

Thomas Gilmore, Principal and one of CFAR’s five founders, consults to significant changes in complex organizations, often in connection with leadership transitions. He has written extensively on issues of leadership, large group engagement processes, reorganizations, downsizing and team building.

Originally trained as an architect, Tom brings a different perspective to the process of analyzing organizational problems and drafting solutions. He is an expert at seeing the links between the whole and the elements of an organization, ranging from the business fundamentals evidenced in the hard data to the psychodynamics among individuals on the executive team faced with tough, far-reaching decisions. His particular specialty is leadership transitions, and he has worked with corporations, universities, liberal arts colleges, foundations, associations and healthcare organizations to help them to seize leadership transitions as a major strategic opportunity to strengthen the organization.

Tom is a prolific writer. It is his natural impulse to extract lessons from the particulars of a client situation and express them in a form that can be shared with other CFAR consultants, clients and the greater world of business thinkers. He is the author of Making a Leadership Change: How Organizations and Leaders Can Handle Leadership Transitions Successfully, cited by Frances Hesselbein—former CEO of the Girl Scouts and Founding President of the Drucker Foundation—as “the best book I know on this subject…I use it today – the most helpful gift I know for a leader in transition.”

Tom is a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School and in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, Population Health Associate at the Jefferson School of Population Health, and is a faculty member in the Consulting and Coaching for Change Program offered by Oxford and HEC. He is one of the founders and a member of ISPSO (International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations), serving on its board for three years.

Tom earned an AB from Harvard University in Roman History and Literature and a M. Arch. from the University of Pennsylvania.