Having fallen 300 feet down Mount Taranaki in New Zealand, at the age of 23, Tomas was unable to walk or talk. After hours of uncertainty on whether he would be found, a helicopter flew around the mountain, but was quickly gone. With the sun setting and the possibility of hypothermia, he realized that he might not be found. After a failed effort was made to get down the mountain, he waited. Fortunately, the helicopter returned and a man dropped down with a bungee cord and tarp. Tomas was placed on the tarp and airlifted to the bottom of the mountain. He was placed in an ambulance and driven to the nearest emergency room. He had a skull fracture and had broken his sternum with injuries to most of his body. He was flown to the nearest neurosurgeon, went through 6 hours of brain surgery, hours of surgery on his left elbow and right knee and although he was fortunate enough to live, he was stuck in New Zealand unable to fly until his body was well enough able to board a plane.
As time in New Zealand progressed, he was relearning how to walk and talk and Tomas was faced with a decision on whether to continue building his fledgling insurance business, or whether to focus on his recovery and look to start over. When he chose to return to Detroit to continue with his business, he did not know how he was going to lead. Most of his leadership was attributed to his youth and energy, neither of which was available in his fragile state, and he was still unable to form full sentences. Over the coming months, through considerable professional development and personal transformation, Tomas had several insights on leadership and went on to set records for production and continued to grow the agency in the following years.
Despite the success in insurance, Tomas wanted to contribute to society in ever expanding ways and moved from Detroit to San Francisco and transitioned from insurance to consulting. He continued to work on his own personal and professional development, while also leading transformational programs for both individuals and businesses. Interestingly, Tomas found that the transformation he went through in the years following his accident was highly effective and replicable with a diverse group of individuals and organizations, and, surprisingly, the transformations were sustainable. After considerable success implementing his ideas with both individuals and organizations, Tomas noticed a barrier in his clients’ ability to communicate the transformation to people that hadn’t gone through the transformation. Tomas knew that the transformational methodology was special as he watched it produce inexplicable results for thousands of people. But, Tomas was left with a question, why was it inexplicable?
Tomas began an inquiry, which led him into academia. He audited PhD courses at Stanford and got clear that the paradigm of transformation from which he operated, was absent from the academic literature. He began his journey to have transformation be available to society. He began by studying with some of the most published scholars in Management, at the University of Florida, where he received his MBA. He went on to study under many of the most prolific Management scholars at Texas A&M University, where he received his PhD in Business Management.
Tomas currently develops scholarship that shifts the paradigm for leadership and organizational change research in academia. Tomas works to alter what it means to be an organization and what it means to lead in the face of uncertainty. In an effort to execute on his vision for transformation, he has found and partnered with Legacy Transformational consulting, a global leader in transformative learning. Tomas has worked with Legacy to develop models for organizational transformation, which give access to new ways for scholars and practitioners to understand and interact with people and organizations. Tomas also continues to lead transformational programs to individuals and organizations. And recently, Tomas has joined Legacy to help implement this new paradigm for organizational transformation within governments and companies across the world.