Meet Todd Glickson, 1991 Alum

Todd Glickson’s path after graduating from the Patterson School would prove to be one that was all his own, but he started out with dreams that would be familiar. “I didn’t want to be in just any US government agency,” he said. “I wanted to be in the State Department or the CIA. I interviewed to be in black market arms. That was the kind of stuff I wanted to do."

“If I wasn’t going to be doing those things, I wanted to be Michael Douglas, you know, Wall Street. Suspenders on, hair slicked back, doing deals. Once I got there, I enjoyed it and loved being in the middle of it, but didn’t want all the fast-paced stuff you see in the movie, because the movie is just a movie.” He nearly got his shot with the CIA after going through several interviews after graduating, but ultimately took the other path. He joined Bear Stearns after graduating and has spent most of his career working in international business.

The Patterson School’s emphasis on international commerce would come into play often for Glickson. He spent several years working for Federated Investors, then Hartford Investment Management to help develop marketing strategies and build product development processes. He eventually arrived at Principal Global Investors in 2007, where he worked as Global Head of Product Development. Glickson worked to help Principal Global Investors as it acquired small and medium asset managers, then scaled their business and reached new customers.

“You’re taking a product or something we’ve done well and you’re customizing it to a new local market,” he said. “It could even be taking those products to developing markets, say India or China or Malaysia, where we worked to do things like take our products and make them Sharia-compliant for the Muslim world. So it was a lot of fun.” That was just the kind of work that a degree from the Patterson School helped prepare him for. After leaving PGI, he spent six years as Global Head of Marketing, Product & Strategy at Cohen & Steers, a mid-sized real assets investment boutique focused on real estate, infrastructure, and commodities.

An interest in international business might have led some students to pursue an MBA, but the professional nature, academic rigor, and diversity of thought he found at the Patterson School was enticing. “Going to the Patterson School, I really liked the professional degree and the flexibility that it provided,” Glickson said. “I liked international business but wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into the public or private sector. MBAs, maybe now they’re more specialized but back in the day it was kind of a straight-down-the-middle-of-the-fairway kind of an MBA. Patterson School was very unique in that you could get that exposure to international diplomats and statecraft, history, as well as international business and have the balance.”

He remains in contact with UK and the Patterson School. Glickson is a member of the Finance Advisory Board for UK’s Gatton College of Business and Economics, and travels to Lexington a few times a year from his home in New Jersey.

“I was really impressed with the diversity and quality of folks that I went to UK with,” he said. “Couldn’t have enjoyed it more.”