At Harvard Business School, Jim is an Entrepreneur in Residence concentrating in the area of turnarounds, entrepreneurship and running small businesses. He has taught entrepreneurship, turnarounds, launching new ventures and running small and medium size enterprises.

Jim sold his company, Extrusion Technology, to a private equity firm in December 2008. He had purchased the aluminum extrusion fabricator in 1987 after an 11 month self-funded search and grew it from $4 million to $32 million, developing a value-added products niche in the Datacomm/Telecom electronics markets and a supplemental factory in Xiamen, China. After taking on substantial debt, Jim transformed the second generation, family-owned business.

Jim has a BS degree from Babson College and after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1976, joined General Electric and moved on to Product General Manager positions within the GE materials businesses. After 5 years, he left GE to run 3 turn-around situations which prepared him to strike off on his own in 1987.