James C. Rhee

James Rhee is a globally acclaimed leader, creator, investor, and entrepreneur who designs and funds systems that center human agency and goodwill. His transformative leadership and ideology are the subjects of a newly published Harvard Business School case authored by Rebecca Henderson, a viral TED Talk, a globally bestselling book named Red Helicopter: A Parable for Our Times, and a musical that recently made its workshop debut at Yale University’s School of Music. He has applied his operating principles across a myriad of industries, peoples, and generations, most notably as the celebrated chairman and CEO of the shocking reinvention of Ashley Stewart.

A former high school teacher and longtime private equity investor, James current shares the tenets of his multimodal philosophy as trustee of the National Humanities Center, Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, and the inaugural Artist in Residence at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Innovation. In recognition of both his commercial and civic achievements, James held an unprecedented appointment as Howard University’s Johnson Chair of Entrepreneurship and Professor of Entrepreneurship for five years. He has managed billions of dollars of growth and distressed-oriented private equity capital and has played a leadership role in some of the most successful growth investments in the consumer-retail industry, including the reinvention of Ashley Stewart, the carve out of Meow Mix from Ralston Purina, and the growth investment in Mattress Firm. As an operator, James was awarded the highest recognition for CEO excellence given by the National Retail Federation, an organization for which he also served as a Director.

Red Helicopter, his media-investment-education platform of the same name, is both an operating system and a community that creates, measures, and amplifies success in a structurally and behaviorally consonant manner. It is grounded in the truths of cognitive science, finance, and history, and tailored for the imperfect realities of technology, private equity, and organizational design. Red Helicopter gives us permission to be human while also centering accountability and agency, and in doing so, it augments real intelligence.

The operating framework of Red Helicopter is inspiring forward-leaning leaders, creators, and companies to implement systems change in preparation for the new global intelligence economy and world order. He has given private and public lectures and counsel to the leadership of companies spanning McKinsey & Company, Hyundai Motors, McDonalds, Principal Financial Group, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. His system was adopted and implanted in wholesale fashion at the sixth largest senior living business in America and the eighth largest hospitality business in the world. From a future of education and intelligence standpoint, Red Helicopter’s operating principles helped inspire the newly founded Institute for Free Enterprise at Virginia Commonwealth University. James will be serving as the keynote for the New York Association of Colleges for Teacher Education annual meeting as they begin to seek practical protocols for their revolutionary, statewide Portrait of a Graduate educational reform initiative. 

 James is a bridge and an inspiration for many seemingly disparate and orthogonal communities.  He currently serves as a director of Xponance, a $29+ billion asset management firm and is a former honoree of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year program. Significantly, prominent civics and non-profit organizations have recognized the prescience and impact of his commercial endeavors. He is a Frederick Douglass honoree of the New York Urban League, the recipient of both the Council of Korean Americans and the Korean American Story Trailblazer Awards, an honoree of Girls Write Now, and an honoree of One To World’s Fulbright Award. Ashoka, the pioneer in social entrepreneurship, elected him as a charter member of its Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network. He was a charter member of JP Morgan Chase’s Advancing Black Pathways and a former director of Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater. 

James is a Harvard College and Harvard Law School graduate, where he was an editor of Harvard Law Review. He lives with his family outside Boston, Massachusetts.