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1925 – 2019

Who was Tom Paterson?

A planner, an originator of process, and the inventor named on a 1966 British patent application for a machine that dispenses cash against a card and a private number.

Tom was born on 12 March 1925 in Kearny, New Jersey, and died on 3 September 2019 in Fort Collins, Colorado, aged 94. He worked as a corporate planner and then as an independent consultant. Tom's legacy lives on in Paterson, the strategic principles he founded and taught extensively and the processes we now follow: StratOp® and LifePlan®.

He described himself as a planner and an originator of process. Two early patents from the mid-1960s show what that meant in practice.

The patents

Before he built planning processes, Paterson put his name to a design we all recognise at once. On 20 April 1966, RCA filed a UK patent application naming him as inventor: GB 1,183,336, “Dispensing Apparatus”. It describes a card reader, a keypad for a private identification number, a central memory holding the corresponding number, and a comparison between the two. Cash is dispensed only on a match. Patent offices classify it under G07F19/20, automatic teller machines. Corresponding applications followed in Sweden and Germany in April 1967.

RCA filed that application twelve days before the 2 May 1966 priority date of GB 1,197,183, the patent generally credited with introducing the PIN, for which James Goodfellow holds an OBE. That does not make Paterson the inventor of the PIN, and the two systems differ: Goodfellow's checks the number against encrypted information on the card, RCA's against a central memory. A US filing was made by Tom the following year.

Goodfellow's ATM was built and deployed as the Chubb MD2 and licensed by NCR and IBM, while RCA clearly were not able to get traction despite the earlier patent. It does though show how insightful and timely Tom's ideas were. He would spend the rest of his career perfecting the relationship between insight, innovation and action.

The career

In telling of Tom's career, many of the Paterson team knew Tom and spent time with him as they learned and perfected their craft of his tools. For this reason there is a rich oral history within the team of Tom's wisdom and insights. There are also a number of interviews in the public record: an appearance on the Better Life Television programme Journeys 'n Journals around 2008–09, and a Veterans History Project interview recorded at his home on 26 January 2016 by Brad Hoopes, who has donated Colorado veterans' interviews to the Library of Congress for two decades.

You can see them for yourself but here are some of the key milestones.

He enlisted in the US Marine Corps at 17, after Pearl Harbor. The Marines sent him to Cornell to study engineering, then to Camp Pendleton, where he made maps from reconnaissance photographs for bomber crews, work connected with Iwo Jima. After a medical discharge he went to Boston University on the GI Bill, graduating with honours in business management.

His corporate career ran from W. T. Grant to Douglas Aircraft, where he was associated with planning for the DC-8, then to Northrop as head of planning in its new electronics division, then IBM, then RCA. The US patent places him at RCA's Valley Forge site in 1967, the home of its space-systems operations, which tallies with his account of work connected with the Apollo programme. Tom proposed RCA's involvement in Walt Disney World - at the time the largest building project in the world - and with backing from Roy Disney, worked on Space Mountain, eventually taking it to multiple continents.

He later became an independent consultant working across as many as 100 countries, with repeated engagements in Japan. He also had a deep friendship with Peter Drucker and his wife Doris and credits Peter with inspiring the trajectory his career took.

Across both interviews he describes himself in the same terms: as a planner, and an originator of process.

In practice

Among the clients Paterson named were Eastman Kodak, General Motors, Printronix and JLG Industries, which grew from $90 million to around $3 billion.

Curt Richardson, the founder of OtterBox, has publicly described, in his own words, using the StratOp process. He characterises it as an iterative cycle: gaining perspective, setting priorities, assigning task forces and reassessing.

Tom's writings

Tom was not as prolific a writer as his friend Peter Drucker but wrote two books. Living the Life You Were Meant to Live was published by Thomas Nelson in 1998, with a 2003 paperback carrying a foreword by Rick Warren. Deeper, Richer, Fuller: Discover the Spiritual Life You Long For was published by Howard Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in 2010.

Further reading

Our legacy