John Thompson is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Symantec Corporation, a technology company with over 14,000 employees and a market capitalization of $19.2 billion.

Born John Wendell Thompson in Fort Dix, New Jersey, on 24^th April 1949, his father was a postal worker and his mother a school teacher.

From an early age Thompson knew that he wanted to become a businessman. He attended Lincoln University in Missouri on a scholarship, but when he realised that a condition of his scholarship was that he had to major in music, he eventually transferred his studies to Florida A&M University, where he majored in business administration and achieved his bachelor’s degree in 1971. This was followed some years latter by a master’s degree in Management Science from MIT’s Sloan School of Management (1983).

Whilst studying for his bachelor’s degree Thompson sold stereo components and began to see sales as the best career for himself. Therefore, following his graduation from Florida A&M University he joined the IBM sales team, in 1971.

He originally planned to stay at IBM for a couple of years and then go to law school, but those plans never materialized, and instead Thompson got hooked at IBM, where he earned a reputation as an unflagging salesman.

IBM could see the potential of Thompson and so during his first decade he held several positions including regional sales rep, sales manager, regional practices adviser and regional sales manager. In 1993 he was then appointed as the General Manager of IBM Americas, a division with annual revenues of $37 billion and 30,000 employees.

With this senior appointment some wondered if Thompson might someday replace former IBM CEO Louis Gerstner. However, after working at IBM for nearly 28 years, Thompson decided to leave in April 1999 to take up the top post at Symantec.

At this time Symantec was a $632 million consumer software company. It was founded in 1982 by Dr. Gary Hendrix, was acquired by Gordon Eubanks in 1984 and had merged with Peter Norton Computing Inc., in 1990.

Thompson’s arrival at Symantec immediately attracted attention, since he was the only African American CEO of a major Silicon Valley company. Indeed, on the eve of his arrival the Rev. Jesse Jackson went to Silicon Valley to complain about the dearth of minority leaders in IT.

As chairman and CEO Thompson set about on a very simple, but effective turnaround plan, stating “we’re going to become the leader in Internet Security,” thus it became clear to everyone both in and out of the company what Symantec were trying to achieve.

Thompson decided to make some major changes. Half of the company’s original 2,300 employees were replaced, including almost all of the top managers. In addition, he set about on an acquisition trail. Another 1,900 staff joined Symantec through 10 acquisitions which cost the company $1.38billion. The biggest (in his early years) was a $975 million stock deal with firewall and IDS manufacturer Axent Technologies in 2000.

More recently Thompson has purchased Veritas software for $13.5billion. This purchase is expected to generate some $5 billion in revenue within the next year or so, putting Symantec on the map with other mega sized software powers such as Oracle and Microsoft.

Under Thompson’s leadership Symantec has been successfully transformed from a $632 million consumer software company, into a multinational market leader in enterprise security software with market capitalizations of $19.2billion.

Thompson now married to wife Sandi has 2 adult children, from a previous marriage. He resides in Woodside California with a vacation home in Hawaii.

He is a member of the board of directors at UPS and was appointed by President George W. Bush (in 2002) to the National Infrastructure Advisory Committee (NIAC) to make recommendations regarding the security of the critical infrastructure of the United States.