DENVER – The Global Energy Management (GEM) program at the University of Colorado Denver Business School has a new leader. Jim Marchiori, the new Executive Director of GEM, has more than three decades of experience working in the energy industry, and played an active role in the program as a former member of the GEM Advisory Council. He has served as interim executive director for the past three months.
“We are very excited about Jim’s appointment as GEM’s Executive Director,” said CU Denver Business School dean, Sueann Ambron. “His extensive experience in the energy industry will be instrumental to the program’s continued growth and success.”
As Executive Director, Marchiori is focused on the strategic mission of the Global Energy Management Program.
“If we say that the role of the energy industry is to provide the world with economically and environmentally sustainable energy, then I want to see GEM as a key source of leaders and ideas that help the industry fulfill its role,” he said. “Our industry is very diverse: technologically, economically, geographically, culturally, and just about every other kind of “-ly” you can imagine. We’re a business school, not a technology incubator – I see us working across the whole energy portfolio to help develop leaders who will harness all of this diversity into practical business solutions to our energy needs.”
Marchiori wants GEM to be a place where the industry comes to share and explore ideas. While discourse exists in the energy community, one of the biggest challenges the GEM Program addresses is the need for a relevant and lasting platform where industry-driven intellectual exchanges can occur on a productive scale.
“Energy is a completely international industry,” Marchiori said. “All of the demands we have for leadership and management skills in the U.S. exist all around the world, however the capacity to teach and develop those skills may not. With our worldwide reach and our flexible delivery methodology, we can bring leadership and management development resources to places where they have been hard to find before.”
As a GEM Advisory Council member, Marchiori has presented at GEM Speaker Series events and attended annual faculty meetings. Marchiori joined the AC in 2009, while serving as the Director of Organization Capability at DCP Midstream. His former boss, Chris Lewis, was one of GEM’s founding members of the Advisory Council.
“The GEM program gives me a chance to interact on a daily basis with some of the best minds and leaders in the industry, and the university’s status as a nonprofit, state institution gives us credibility that is hard for a for-profit company to achieve,” he said. “This means that we have the capacity to bring people together from across different parts of our industry in ways that maybe they have not come together before. If I can help make one contribution to the Denver energy community, I hope that will be it.”
Marchiori has a long background in learning and developing people. After starting out in training design with a vocational school and the US Army, then consulting with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he entered the energy industry in 1981. He consulted at IHRDC in Doha and Dubai doing job analysis to help the Qatar General Petroleum Company and the Dubai Natural Gas Company set up their succession planning and career development programs. He took on a permanent role with Dubai Natural Gas for the next seven years to build their Training Department, and has been in energy in either a full-time or consulting role ever since. He’s worked all over the world, including North America, Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the former Soviet Union, always building or helping companies to build, develop, and align their strategic talent.
“There is absolutely nothing like the energy industry,” Marchiori said. “Energy is fundamental to everything people do; human society cannot thrive or evolve without it. In human history nothing else other than agriculture has that kind of fundamental importance. Governments can rise and fall based on energy. Couple that with the diversity I mentioned earlier, and the kind of resources that go toward making advancements in energy and you’re combining the best that science, technology, and business have to offer with a basic human need. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
Marchiori plans to use his experience in leadership, strategy and talent management to build a “pipeline” of talented individuals who will make a meaningful impact within the GEM Program and on the global energy landscape.
