emg_principal_rettig.htm

Sage Venture Development | Sage Strategic Leadership

Clyde E. Rettig
Director
Boston, US

“The list of the three biggest strategic challenges for large corporations hasn’t changed during my career: how to strategically differentiate from major competitors; how to identify and succeed in the businesses of the future; and how to extract the excess resources generated by mature businesses to feed the future ones. Likewise, entrepreneurial ventures still face the same historical set of problems: how to finance the business; how to develop an organization at a pace that matches the market opportunity; and how to survive and prosper against both large incumbent and other new venture competition. Having spent the last 38 years creating competitive strategies, developing new businesses, and helping entrepreneurial new ventures to succeed, I have occupied the intersection of these issues with both large and small clients, particularly in the manufacturing, industrial, and high-technology industries.

That’s why I am excited about joining Sage Partners. In my experience, developing the skills to tackle these persistent issues takes a lot of “learning by doing.” There are no textbooks or self-help courses that can prepare someone to successfully address all three. It takes a lot of years to develop the scar tissue and numerous hands-on case studies to become equipped to attack these difficult concerns in yet another technology, marketplace, or industry. The breadth and depth of my Sage Partners associates’ knowledge of both business strategy and new venturing is unmatched in any of the consultative organizations with which I am familiar. I am confident that, as a team, we can provide the absolute best possible advice to both our large and small clients. That’s my goal and the Sage Partners’ goal as well.”

Clyde E. Rettig actually began working for consulting firms when still an undergraduate. So, it wasn’t surprising that his first job after graduate school was with Technology Management Incorporated, a management science/operations research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then he ran into a business school chum who was one of the founders of Bain & Company and quickly became employee number thirteen. Clyde was at Bain through its formative years as it grew to more than 100 professionals and helped develop the extensive intellectual property Bain created on top of its BCG strategy foundations. He was a lead on most of the high-technology client relationships during that period.

From Bain & Company, Clyde went on to sequentially become a new ventures and new business development executive for three large corporations: American Can, Bendix, and Raytheon. In these roles, he learned the ropes of identifying high-potential new business opportunities, building the organizations to develop them, working with the institutional investor community to obtain financing, and creating corporate partnership relationships to support and reinforce their chances for success. In these roles and subsequently, Clyde has helped finance and develop 25 high-technology companies of which 8 are now public or part of public companies, and created more than 50 working partnerships between large and small enterprises.

After going back into the strategy consulting business as an independent, Clyde linked up with old school friend Bill Ebeling and joined the Braxton team at Deloitte with Tom Doorley and Rich Schneider. During these Deloitte years, he expanded his career list of major corporate strategy development clients to include Air Products, Ashland, AT&T, Black & Decker, Cardinal Health, Caterpillar, Chemical Bank, Citigroup, DuPont, Exxon Mobil Chemical, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Kerr-McGee, Monsanto Chemical, Morton Chemical, Morton Salt, National Steel, Northrop Grumman, Pechiney, Pepsico, Pfizer, Polaroid, Rohm & Haas, Shell Chemical, Siemens, Southwestern Bell, Texas Instruments, TOTAL, Transworld Entertainment, Union Carbide, Verbatim, Verizon, and Vivendi.

Clyde received his S.B. in Management Science and S.B. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a member of the J.W. Forrester Undergraduate Systems Program, a graduate teaching assistant at the Sloan School of Management, and the Vice President of the student body. He received his MBA with Distinction from the Harvard Business School where he was a J.E. Jonsson Fellow.