Member Spotlight: Kevin Fallon
Member Spotlight: Kevin Fallon
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Contact: LinkedIn | [email protected] Graduation Year: WG'94, WEMBA East Company: Pivotal Innovation | Denver, CO
What do you do professionally?
I'm the founding President and CEO of Pivotal Innovation — a company dedicated to helping business leaders accelerate value growth with less stress to their organizations and lower costs than any alternative.
Our intention is to disrupt the high-priced consultancy model with a technology-enabled solution for strategic transformation. We've integrated and automated strategy, execution, and innovation in a SaaS platform built for manufacturing and distribution companies. It's an early-stage company — my fifth venture.
My first venture, in Philadelphia, was in factory automation. Through organic and M&A growth, we built it into 14 offices across the US and sold it off NASDAQ in 1999. After that came a venture-backed internet security turnaround sold to McAfee, then a supply chain optimization and lean manufacturing business — we owned the mathematical models behind high-mix, low-to-medium volume manufacturing and distribution optimization. The automation and supply chain work gave me the foundation to now automate value growth for entire businesses.
What are some interesting or exciting things about you?
Perhaps not exciting, but I'm totally unbalanced.
Born in the Bronx, I spent my youth on a farm in rural western Ireland. The farm sits in County Roscommon and actually touches Ogulla Well — a Holy Shrine where, according to tradition, St. Patrick baptized King Loegaire's daughters, Ethna and Fidelm. We grew up drinking spring water from a Holy Well. Not bad as origin stories go.
If I wanted to attend high school, I couldn't — there were none nearby. My parents sent us to boarding school taught by priests, 44 miles away, where I morphed from an innocent kid with aspirations of becoming the Pope to having a healthy disdain for authority. To this day, I view government through a "We the People" lens. (Read The Politics Industry by Kathleen Gehl and Michael Porter — it explains a lot.)
In 1992, I joined Young Presidents Organization (YPO), a global community of 33,000 CEOs. I founded and chaired the Manufacturing Excellence Network (now 4,450 members) and was one of four founders of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Network (11,600 members currently). Both earned Best-of-the-Best Business Network recognition. I was also founder and Chair of the inaugural YPO Innovation Week in 2016 — 50 events in 30 countries in one week, opening in Sydney and closing by ringing the Nasdaq bell, attended by 3,500 CEOs.
How has your Wharton degree benefited you?
My two years at Wharton were two of the best years of my life. As WEMBA students, we attended every other weekend — and during that same period, I was a divorced dad with my kids every other weekend, president of my first venture, and somehow also founded two new companies, got married, and had another daughter. So yes — I learned my limitations.
Prior to Wharton I had a BSEE from Drexel. The MBA taught me solid business principles through a systems lens. In the first term, our statistics professor said he could take us to the sixth dimension — position, velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, crackle, and pop — but that he might not be able to get us back. That was the most profound statement I've ever pondered. It's about dynamic rate of change, and it enabled me to understand business systemically in a way I couldn't before.
I'm still in touch with several classmates who've provided invaluable advice over the years — one is an investor in our current venture. Once we integrate our platform with Dynamics 365 and add our proprietary AI accelerator, I hope to bring several from the Wharton investment community along for the final growth push.
What advice would you offer those alumni who recently completed Wharton?
For the most part, established companies will hire you into functions to support current-state work. But if you think carefully, every business actually has two distinct systems — the operating system and the value growth system — and they're inextricably connected.
We've been using principles developed at the beginning of the last century while the need to increase the rate of change has only accelerated. Business schools don't fully teach this. My advice: skip deep specialization in functions and focus on strategic transformation. Learn to translate strategy through the function layer, prioritize, plan, and execute initiatives faster than anyone else. It's a learned discipline that few have mastered.
Is there any support you'd be open to providing to a local Wharton alum?
Yes — in general, I enjoy meeting fellow alumni. It depends on their needs, but if I can help, I will.
Are there any ways local Wharton alumni could help you or your company?
Yes. We're still early-stage with lighthouse customers. We could hugely benefit from an additional customer in manufacturing — process or discrete, including food and beverage. Introductions to VC or PE would be very helpful and much appreciated.
What are your favorite hobbies?
When we're young, we think in terms of warm or cold hobbies. When we're older, we're fortunate to have a third option: a technical experience.
In 2009, I had my aortic valve replaced by Dr. Joe Bavaria — a world-renowned aortic valve surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania — through open-heart surgery. It wore out again in 2024, and I had it replaced in Denver. I'm living proof that technology keeps humans vibrant.
Over the years my hobbies have included tennis, racquetball, running, cycling, golf, skiing, and chess. I skied through the '22–'23 season before my valve collapsed. I intend to get back to the slopes this winter.
What I enjoy most is reading business books — never fiction. I've read hundreds. Early in my career I discovered I didn't think of work as work, even as a machine operator: I thought of it as a complex game to be mastered. That's still true today. I'm still learning, still improving. And isn't that all that matters?