Class of 2014

Gareth Gaston

As an undergraduate at the University of West Scotland, Gareth was a second lieutenant in the Army Officer Training Corps. In the years since, he’s held several senior executive positions at large corporations – he is currently executive vice president overseeing the Omnichannel banking division at U.S. Bank. Yet, he says the TRIUM program had a lot to teach him about taking command:

TRIUM’s leadership program – and TRIUM in general – helped me deconstruct my style, figure out what I stood for as a leader and ultimately solidify what sort of leader I wanted to be.

The team projects that are a hallmark of the TRIUM experience led Gareth to develop a style he considers particularly apt for the modern executive, he says. “I have long thought about and wrestled with the differences and similarities in military and business leadership. And I also think leadership styles in the West certainly have evolved a lot in the last 10 to 20 years. What I see in today’s world is less the CEO making the decision and more the management team aligning and making recommendations to the CEO. Therefore you have the same dynamics of equally smart senior people all trying to get to an outcome they can agree on while not compromising quality and speed to market.”

When he made the decision to go back to school for the first time since graduating from university in 1996, Gareth was executive vice president in charge of the global billion e-commerce business of the Wyndham Hotel Group. “I didn’t feel I had fully applied myself ever from an education perspective, so I really was curious to see what I was really made of academically,” he said. “More than that, I had and have ambitions to push further in my career and felt that an EMBA would give me another boost to the next level.”

Another reason for undertaking TRIUM, he continues, was to decide what to do with the rest of his career. “I was open to almost anything, but still hadn’t really considered anything in financial services.” Shortly before completing his TRIUM degree, Gareth was hired by U.S. Bank for his proven e-commerce skills and newly acquired finance savvy.

Ultimately what TRIUM gave me was the confidence and self-belief that I could make such a drastic switch and then the knowledge to follow through.

While in the TRIUM program Gareth was elected class representative, and he remains very much in touch with his cohort and program administrators.

“It certainly seems like class rep is a job for life,” he laughs. “Seriously, TRIUM has been a magical and very special time of my life, and I will always do what I can to help and nurture this amazing community.”

In my current position I use what I learned in the program every single day because I am in unfamiliar territory. Both the academic frameworks from TRIUM as well as the case studies are invaluable, but most importantly TRIUM taught me how to think differently. So I didn’t learn a tick box framework for strategy – I learned how to truly think strategically. And I didn’t just learn how to calculate net present value – I learned about the true sources of economic value.