Alumni Leaderhip Speakers Series

The Alumni Leadership Speaker Series is a collaborative effort between the Mason LEADScholar and the Office of Alumni Affairs. Mason alumni are invited to serve as guest speakers. The Alumni Leadership Speaker Series will enable students to hear stories from successful Mason alumni and learn from their experiences. You must complete a RSVP Form in order to attend the event.

Upcoming Alumni Leadership Speaker Event:
November 17, 2009 from 6:00pm-7:30pm (Student Union Building I, Room C) - Click here to RSVP. Deadline to RSVP for this event is November 11, 2009

Jim Laychak
BS, Accounting/Decision Sciences, 1983
President, Pentagon Memorial Fund

About Jim Laychak:
Jim Laychak recently left Accenture as a Senior Executive (Partner) in Accenture’s Health & Public Service Operating Group. Jim was with Accenture for over 26 years, working for two years in the accounting and audit practice as part of Arthur Andersen & Co. and spending the remaining 24 years in the consulting business.

After Jim’s younger brother, Dave, a civilian working for the Department of the Army, was killed in the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Jim got involved in the process of creating the Pentagon Memorial. Since 2001, Jim has been working with a group of other family members, who worked first with the US Army Corps of Engineers and then with the Pentagon Renovation Program, to provide input to the process that culminated in the creation of the Pentagon Memorial. He was also one of two family members that participated on the Design Competition Jury that evaluated over 1,100 entries and picked the winning design for the Pentagon Memorial.

From the fall of 2003 until September of 2008, Accenture allowed Jim to spend a significant portion of his time to lead the effort to raise money to design and build the Pentagon Memorial. In 2003, he led the effort to create the Pentagon Memorial Fund, Inc., a 501c3 tax-exempt organization that is organized and led by family members to raise the funds necessary to create the Pentagon Memorial which will honor the 184 men, women and children who died when terrorists attacked the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Since 2003, Jim has served as President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Pentagon Memorial Fund, Inc. In this role he led the effort to raise $25 Million to construct the Memorial along with $10 Million to create an endowment to maintain the Memorial forever. The Pentagon Memorial was the first of the three national 9/11 Memorials to be dedicated and open to the public. The dedication ceremony took place on September 11, 2008. Over 16,000 people were in attendance including, family members, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, congressional leadership and Pentagon employees.

With Accenture, Jim worked on large business transformation projects in a variety of industries, including pharmaceutical, hospitality and the US Federal Government. Jim has experience as a program manager and change architect for business transformation programs with some of Accenture’s larger clients. He was the solution architect for an internal change program within Accenture that involved designing and rolling out the “Community” structure to Accenture locations around the world. He also has experience leading teams to implement package software solutions for both financial accounting applications (Oracle & SAP) and customer relationship management applications in a call center environment (Siebel). Jim spent two years as the deputy program manager for a Customer Relationship Management Program at the Department of Education – Federal Student Aid (FSA). As part of their overall modernization program, FSA was looking to completely transform their customer service operations. Jim led the team that developed FSA’s target state customer service environment, moving from an environment that was program centric with 9 different “800” numbers, 13 different customer support systems and 10 different call centers to one that was customer centric with one number, one customer support platform and 4 virtual contact centers. Jim subsequently co-led the team that developed the overall implementation plan and the detailed business case to deliver significant savings as a result of moving to the target customer service environment.

Jim is the oldest son of a career Army officer and grew up on Army Posts around the country and overseas, including two years with his family in Tehran, Iran. Jim and his family moved to Northern Virginia in 1975 and he has lived here since. Jim graduated from George Mason University in 1983 with degrees in Accounting and Decision Sciences. He served as the President of the George Mason University Alumni Association from 2000 – 2002. He is married to Lynn Gumowski, and lives in Alexandria with Lynn, their two children, Ryan and Megan and their two yellow Labrador retrievers, Madison and Murphy.