Colonel Tom Tyrrell, USMC (Ret.) brings over 30 years of leadership and strategic planning experience in organizations ranging from the military, to government acquisition, to the United Nations, to the not-for-profit sector and the financial services industry.
Since embarking on his post military career, in July of 2002, he has held executive positions in both the not-for-profit and for profit private sectors. First, as the CEO & Executive Director of the Intrepid Sea Air & Space Museum, where he oversaw an ambitious 3 year expansion program resulting in an 80% increase in revenue, a 50% increase in visitor attendance and completion of $40 million in capital improvement projects. Subsequently, he joined the fast paced interdealer broker industry as the Senior Managing Director, Business Services, Cantor Fitzgerald. Based in London, he was tasked with management oversight for several key back office functional areas including Global HR & Marketing, Europe & Asia Facilities and vendor support relations for travel, insurance and benefits programs.
Over the course of his 26 year career in the United States Marine Corps, he gained broad experience in the complex dynamics of successfully implementing change in large diverse organizations.
As one of two special assistants reporting directly to the senior officer in the U.S. military, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or CJCS, he advised the CJCS on a broad range of transformation issues and initiatives requiring interaction at the highest levels of government. Some examples of these tasks were: providing a strategy for the cultural bridge to connect Congress, the military Services and the defense industry with a $60,000,000,000 acquisition plan heavily invested in legacy programs with newly emerging operational requirements; designed and facilitated implementation of a new Joint Staff Management Review process to ensure the 1,300 senior officers assigned to the Joint Staff were aligned with and supporting the CJCS vision; conceived, chartered and led the primary staff division responsible for implanting and marketing the CJCS conceptual template for a post-millennium American military force, the Joint Vision and Transformation Division.
Immediately following his assignment with the Joint Staff, he was posted as the Director of Strategy, Strategic Planning, Policy and Coordination; Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo.
This assignment was a “secondment” from the U.S. Military to the United Nations. His responsibilities included multi-component policy development and strategic planning, intra-organizational coordination of political crisis response and disaster consequence management. Two major projects were: design and implementation of the “Witness Program” to observe Presidential elections in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) – a program enabling UNMIK volunteers to record the number of voters actually entering polling stations on Election Day thereby establishing a “ceiling number” of possible Kosovar voters. And second; leadership of a clandestine three-person delegation assigned to negotiate and coordinate issues relating to ethnic Albanian prisoners held in Serbian facilities and the bilateral Serbian-Kosovar exchange of combatant remains. They successfully established a framework of activities (dubbed, “The Human Rights Matrix”).
Col Tyrrell’s executive management opportunities included Commanding Officer assignments for a broad range of military units. He served multiple tours with executive responsibility for Light Armored Reconnaissance, Selected Marine Corps Reserve and Recruiting Command organizations.
His early operational experiences motivated him to become a student of the combat requirements development process and he carried that perspective and insight into each new position. Beginning with his Naval Postgraduate School thesis on the juxtaposition of the USMC combat development process with the DOD acquisition process and continuing throughout his career he has continuously sought to find creative ways to make the end- to- end capabilities development process work.
Col. Tyrrell served as a designated acquisition professional and held an unlimited government contracting officer’s warrant. In his capacity as the Marine Corps Chief of Contracts for the Far East, he was able to bring his own experiences as a consumer into the development of procurement actions that were directly and efficiently mapped to combatant requirements.
Col Tyrrell has a BBA from Texas A&M (Kingsville TX), a MS (Acquisition & Contract Management) Naval Postgraduate School and a MS (Strategic Resource Planning), National Defense University, Industrial College of the Armed Forces.