Dr. Richard J. Scaldini, founder and president of Spearpoint Strategy Advisors, LLC,
has blended successful careers in higher education administration,
investment banking, teaching, scholarship, and management consulting.
He capitalizes on this experience to advise Spearpoint’s clients on the
complex strategic and operational issues that beset many small
businesses, colleges, and not-for-profit organizations today.
Dr. Scaldini’s higher education career includes two college presidencies: Hiram College and Myers University. He has also led two not-for-profit organizations: The Washington Campus and the Center for Leadership in Education. Each organization faced major financial and strategic challenges. He brought to bear his planning, financial, academic and organizational skills to chart new directions and restructure dysfunctional organizations. Dr. Scaldini’s academic field experience encompasses management education, the liberal arts, and public policy, including programs for adults and traditional students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He speaks fluent French as well as basic Italian and German.
In the 1980’s, Dr. Scaldini served as a senior investment banker with two major financial institutions: Chemical Bank (now J.P. Morgan & Company) and the Union Bank of Switzerland’s New York subsidiary. As a managing director at UBS, he helped to bring the bank to a historic position in global corporate financing, including a leading role in the underwriting and derivatives markets. Working with companies such as ExxonMobil, Anheuser-Busch, Xerox, Union Pacific, and AT&T, Dr. Scaldini led the design and execution of major financings around the world. In 1987, Dr. Scaldini led a UBS team in the design and execution for Eastman Kodak of an innovative transaction, combining international debt financing and derivatives, which was named one of the Investment Dealers Digest Deals of the Year.
Dr. Scaldini has earned degrees and certificates from Tufts, Yale, Columbia, the Sorbonne, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris as well as the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has taught as a full-time and adjunct professor at Dartmouth College, Washington University in St. Louis, The George Washington University, Georgetown University and Case Western Reserve University. His scholarly publications include work on the theory of modernism as well as papers on globalization’s impact on leadership development and contemporary postsecondary education. Dr. Scaldini serves as a trustee of Wilberforce University, Ohio, the oldest independent historically black university in the United states. He is also a director of the Connecticut Arts Alliance, an advocacy group for the arts in Connecticut.
In addition to leading Spearpoint, Dr. Scaldini is associated with Collegiate Enterprise Solutions and its affiliate, The Registry of College and University Presidents.
Dr. Scaldini is active in community and professional organizations. He resides in Warren, Connecticut with his wife, Arlene Bergenthal, and their son, Benjamin.
