Marc Stern ’65

Top executive wields his clout with kindness

February 12, 2010

Marc Stern ’65 juggles his time between leading a global firm with $110 billion in assets and overseeing some of the nation’s top arts organizations.

As vice chairman and chief executive officer of the TCW Group Inc. and chairman of Société Généralé’s Global Investment Management and Services North America unit, Marc Stern ’65 oversees the French company’s North American strategic initiatives, including its asset management, private banking, global security services, and brokerage and transfer agent businesses.

“If anyone told me 40 years ago that I’d be asked to have strategic responsibility for the North American operations of a French bank, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he says. “My career has had many twists and turns and, at the core, the liberal-arts education I received at Dickinson has allowed me to shift gears many times.”

An advocate for the arts, Stern is chairman and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Opera and serves on the boards of the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

As a result, the former political-science and history major has been named by the Los Angeles Times as among the “100 most powerful individuals in Southern California,” one of 30 “notables who wield their clout with kindness.”

For Stern, who also graduated magna cum laude from the Columbia University School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review, “the flexibility that a Dickinson education provides allows one to process information in a way that is ‘useful’ to whatever endeavor is undertaken.”