Proposed themes

• The cultural aspects of change management
• Building businesses across Europe
• How to hold on to the A team - Making cross-border M&As work
• The realities and complexities of multinational life

James L Prouty

Educated at Brigham Young University and Columbia University Graduate School of Business, Jim Prouty has spent the last 20 years of his career in Europe working in the financial services industry. He has lived in Belgium, England, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Spain. During 15 of these years he worked for Bank of America, where he rose to the position of Senior Vice President and Head of Continental Europe.

In 1997 he joined Heller Financial, the largest independent commercial finance company in the United States until it was acquired by GE Capital. At Heller, he rose to President of the company’s international business, which covered 22 countries with $4 billion in assets and nearly 2000 employees.

A common characteristic of each of Jim Prouty’s 20 different assignments during his 30 years in business has been that each new job represented turning around a business - from tasks as straightforward as introducing a new strategic vision to building a new management team and introducing new products and markets, while using state-of-the-art operational platforms and technology. Building businesses across Europe has given Prouty extremely valuable insights into the hard realities and human complexities of successfully running and adapting domestic and multinational businesses across the divergent cultures of Europe.

In 2002 after GE Capital’s acquisition of Heller Financial, Jim with four other partners created JLP Solutions and Eclosion based in London and Vail, Colorado. These rapidly expanding businesses are involved in change management with a particular emphasis on the cultural aspects of change. The primary target market is companies involved in cross-border M&A activity that have a need to integrate very different business and national cultures.