Greg Rorke—Personal Background
— a great son, sibling, father, grandfather, and friend,
— a Brown University AB and a Harvard MBA
— a very capable business strategist and operator with a long successful track record of 12 CEO turnaround assignments– including Danskin Apparel and Kaplan Test Prep.
— a top rated Professor of Finance and Management at Columbia Business School during a 16 year run (1996- 2012–while he was an active CEO). He was chosen by Professor John Whitney to take over the most popular course at Columbia Business School. “Turnarounds” continued its Top Three bid points rating as Greg led 65 students a semester in twelve 3-hour classes.
— a successful business operator in many industries. In 1999 he took over a struggling start-up software company, Ergotech International. He raised $2MM to add to the previous $2MM, brought in a new senior team to steer the 100 employees, and within one year he initiated and completed the sale of the pre-revenue software company to Webline as it completed its acquisition by Cisco Systems. The Ergo $4MM immediately became $36MM in Cisco shares.
— a generous volunteer (coaching high performing youth soccer teams, fund raising for charities, feeding the homeless, counseling substance abuse addicts, teaching SAT Prep to hundreds of inner-city students at no cost, caring for rescue dogs. He found out in college his donated blood was special and went directly to neonatal units, so he has given well over 100 pints in his life.)
— a very accomplished athlete. He was recruited and played soccer for Brown, a top 4 Division I program in the 70s. He also played basketball for Brown, ran track and then kicked field goals for Brown’s Ivy League Football Championship. He ran 25 marathons (8 Boston Marathons including a 2:40 there.) He was an impressive age group finisher at the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Championship at age 50, passing 300 other competitors during the Marathon to complete the race. And there is much more…
— a good comedian. He won the student talent show at Brown doing stand-up comedy, and he still makes people laugh.
— an informed citizen of the world and is extremely well read in many subjects.