John Rose ’82

In December 2001, John Rose ’82 left his decades-long role at McKinsey to join the music publishing and record company EMI Music. He arrived at a time of enormous change for the music industry, with CD sales about to drop precipitously and file-sharing piracy rampant.

As a group executive vice president responsible for creating a viable digital music business, he recalls, he had to both “address piracy and provide a legitimate way for people to do what they wanted to do, which was download and own individual songs instead of being forced to buy albums.”

When Rose left EMI three years later, digital music represented 15 percent of EMI’s profits. During that period, he worked to create the industry-wide definitions of new digital products, like downloads and ringtones; negotiated a deal between Apple and EMI that enabled the launch of the iTunes music store; and helped lead a company restructuring that resulted in the sale of its global CD and DVD manufacturing plants and a significant reduction in force.

Central to his success shepherding the company through a seismic transformation were the problem-solving skills he learned at SOM and applied over the course of his career in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. In nearly 20 years at McKinsey and more than 20 at Boston Consulting Group after EMI, Rose started and led practice groups focused on private equity, media, and the public sector. He has also applied his expertise as a board member of several arts and media organizations, including New York Public Radio, where he recently became chairman of the board.

Long before becoming a consultant or even applying to business school, Rose had cultivated a variety of interests and passions. As an undergraduate at Wesleyan, he majored in math but also studied music theory and physics. He was drawn to the sciences but soon realized that “I was never going to develop the next big paradigm,” he says. To succeed, his professors told him, he would need to specialize, something that didn’t appeal to him. At one point, Rose remembers, the school’s career development office asked him to write an ideal job description as an exercise in discerning his post-college path.

“I wrote something about wanting to solve problems in different environments,” he says. “I didn’t realize I was describing something that didn’t really exist, but that would soon become a profession.”

After Wesleyan, Rose spent a couple of years working in policy and playing music before applying to graduate schools. He was drawn to SOM, then known as the Yale School of Organization and Management, because of its focus on entrepreneurship and developing leaders for the public as well as private sector. He also wanted to dig deeper into “softer” subjects such as organizational behavior, organization design, and management after an undergraduate experience focused on math and science.

“I wanted to lean into what I hadn’t experienced or wasn’t as strong at yet,” he says.

Rose knew he was in the right place when, during a visit to SOM, a group of current students asked him why he wanted to go to business school and he said, “I don’t really want to go to business school.”

“They laughed with me instead of at me,” he remembers.

After graduating from SOM, Rose joined McKinsey, where he remained for almost two decades. His position at the firm allowed him to delve deeply into multiple industries and exercise his entrepreneurial skills, especially by creating the firm’s global media practice. As part of that practice, he helped the media conglomerate Cox Enterprises create the telecommunications subsidiary Cox Communications through the scale acquisition of the Times Mirror Company’s cable business. He also developed what became a life-long passion for journalism by helping restructure NBC News following the company’s acquisition by General Electric.

Rose also worked with Major League Baseball to create its digital streaming business, eventually known as BAM Tech.

“We got all of the owners of the teams to vote their digital rights into a new company,” he says. “That allowed us to create a single platform that the league owned, while the teams got to control their content. The platform was so strong that when CBS Sports wanted to stream March Madness, they had to outsource to Bam Tech. The single-platform approach allowed MLB to take back online ticketing from Ticketmaster. It was a really cool thing.”

In 2004, Rose joined Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he built private equity, global media, and public sector practice groups and consulted with the World Economic Forum on a major project on personal data and privacy. He remains a partner emeritus and senior advisor at the firm.

In one of his major projects at BCG, Rose helped New York State respond to the COVID pandemic. He worked with the state to devise rules on gatherings; create guidelines for opening and closing businesses and public spaces; design and create the state’s stockpile of personal protective equipment; create the digital health care pass known as Excelsior Wallet; and eventually develop the vaccine roll-out program. In addition, he was asked to moderate weekly discussions among seven northeastern states coordinating their COVID respond strategy.

Rose has also brought his skills as a problem-solver to long-term work with several New York City nonprofits. Joining the board of New York Public Radio (formerly WNYC) in 1997, he worked closely with founding president Laura Walker ’87 to facilitate its remarkable growth, from 1 million to over 20 million listeners and from a budget of $1 million to over $70 million. Rose now serves as the board’s chair, and is also a board member of the Metropolitan Opera and of Playwrights Horizons.

At SOM, Rose was especially influenced by coursework in operations with Arthur J. Swersey; organizational behavior and group dynamics with David Berg; and microeconomics with Richard C. Levin, who later became president of Yale University. He also learned “about being a change agent from within organizations” and using his skills “for good.”

Rose credits his time at SOM with preparing for a career spent doing exactly what he aspired to in college: solving complex problems across industries and contexts.

“I have been really fortunate,” he says. “I’ve been able to have a career helping a diverse set of organizations and people think through unique problems in different environments. And I had no idea, when I started, that this path existed. I’ve had a great time and made a real difference.”