Tim Youmans

Tim Youmans is Director, Regional Lead North America at Hermes Investment Management, responsible for enhancing the activities of Hermes EOS, the firm’s stewardship and engagement team, in North America. Prior to his role at Hermes, Tim was the Research Director of the Strategic Investor Initiative at CECP.

Tim is a research scholar at Harvard Business School since July of 2013, and is an instructor at MIT Sloan School of Management’s Family Office Visionary Investing Program. At both Harvard and MIT he works closely as a research collaborator and co-author with Harvard Business School Professor Robert Eccles, beginning when Tim was in a doctoral seminar taught by Prof. Eccles called “The Role of the Corporation in Society.” Tim is a global expert in the fields of fiduciary duty and materiality in corporate governance, in capital markets, and in the sustainability of the corporation and of the global financial system. Tim’s research has been featured in MIT Sloan Management Review, Forbes,The Economist, The Financial Times, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge and by the The American Bar Association’s Sustainable Development Task Force.

Tim received his Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School (2013), is a Harvard Kennedy School Lucius N. Littauer Fellow, was a Kennedy School economics teaching assistant, and has been an advisor to student-run start-up firms in the Harvard Innovation Lab. In addition to Tim’s research areas of fiduciary duty, corporate governance, materiality, and the role of the corporation in society, he also has expertise in workforce capacity building, sustainable agriculture, and disabled veteran entrepreneurship (he is a disabled veteran entrepreneur).

After a career in the Coast Guard, Tim spent 25 years in business, the last 16 years running his own consulting firms. He interrupted this work twice to work full time for a client: first as EVP of a venture funded internet startup and second to run a large family office. Tim has had both governments and corporations as clients across the globe. He received an MBA from the University of Southern Maine (1992) and a BS in Management from the United States Coast Guard Academy (1981). Tim is an avid fly fisherman and paddleboarder, and has been a volunteer in the Boston-based Veterans Business Owners Initiative.