Thomas J. Tierney

Thomas J. Tierney (born 5 March 1954) is an American business executive and corporate writer, who is the co-founder of the nonprofit Bridgespan Group that provides management consulting to nonprofits and philanthropists. He was chairman of eBay from July 2015 to June 2020.

Tierney is cited by the book Management Consultancy in the 21st Century as a specialist in customer service and marketing.

Early life Tierney was born in San Francisco, California in 1954. Tierney earned a BA in economics from the University of California, Davis in 1976, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1980.

In 1998, Tierney co-founded The Bridgespan Group, described by Bloomberg as an "independent, nonprofit affiliate of Bain & Company designed to provide general management consulting services to foundations and nonprofit organizations". He launched the organization in 1999, and was appointed its chairman. In March 2003, Tierney was appointed an Independent Director at eBay, and he has been its Lead Independent Director since April 2012. He occasionally lectures at the school and has contributed numerous articles to The Harvard Business Review and books, including Forbes's Learning From The Chief Executive Officer and Aligning the Stars (2002), the latter co-authored with Jay W. Lorsch, which documents business strategy and organization. In 2011, he co-authored Give Smart: Philanthropy That Gets Results with Joel L. Fleishman. Tierney said of Give Smart: Philanthropy That Gets Results: "The basic premise behind the book is that there must be ideas relevant to philanthropy that have been proven over time, ideas that were as useful to Andrew Carnegie as they are to Bill Gates. One of the reasons [co-author] Joel [Fleishman] and I teamed up was that he has done extensive research on twentieth-century philanthropy, a lot of which he used in The Foundation".