Thomas H. Stanton

Thomas H. Stanton is a Past President of the Association for Federal Enterprise Risk Management (AFERM) and a former member of the federal Senior Executive Service. He is a Senior Fellow and former board member of the National Academy of Public Administration, and formerly chaired the Academy’s Standing Panel on Executive Organization and Management. With a career that spans the practical and the academic, Mr. Stanton’s work has led to the creation of new federal offices and approaches to delivering public services more effectively.

Mr. Stanton has written several books including A State of Risk: Will Government Sponsored Enterprises Be the Next Financial Crisis? (HarperCollins, 1991), in which he invented the concept of contingent capital (see p. 182) now being applied to major financial institutions internationally to help mitigate financial risk. He edited Meeting the Challenge of 9/11: Blueprints for Effective Government (M.E. Sharpe Publishers, 2006) and Making Government Manageable (co-edited with Benjamin Ginsberg, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Mr. Stanton’s book, Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail: Governance and Management Lessons from the Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2012), based on his service at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, analyzes differences in leadership, governance, and risk management between firms that successfully navigated the financial crisis and those that failed. Mr. Stanton co-edited with Douglas Webster, Managing Risk and Performance: A Guide for Government Decision Makers, (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014). Mr. Stanton holds degrees from the University of California at Davis, Yale University, and the Harvard Law School.