John Grossenbacher is an accomplished and experienced leader and manager. He has managed and led organizations as large as 25,000 with budgets in the tens of billions of dollars.  Operations, science and technology development as well as significant experience with governments at the local, state and federal levels are all part of his background.

Formally educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University, John served as a nuclear submariner in the U.S Navy for 33 years holding positions of leadership at every level of operational command from the Captain of a nuclear submarine to his final military assignment as a Vice Admiral and Commander of the U.S. Submarine Forces.  Extensive experience in Washington DC and overseas were import aspects of his naval career.

John joined the Battelle Memorial Institute after the Navy and was selected by Battelle to be Director of the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL) for a decade.  In this role, he directed the sprawling 850 square mile complex with a staff of 4,000 in science and engineering research and development.  Their work was focused on nuclear energy, renewables, fossil fuels, and other energy resources as well as their environmental impacts.  Extensive critical infrastructure protection, industrial cyber security, national and homeland security research were also significant elements of the INL’s portfolio.  University, industry and international partnerships were critical to the lab’s success.

In 2023 John co-founded the Cornerstone Collaboration for Societal Change, a non-profit committed to humanizing our large, interconnected, complex societal systems.  This commitment to humanization is intended to help address our society’s existential challenges of spiritual poverty, climate change, and the impacts of ignorance and misinformation on knowledge and our shared reality.

As a researcher and writer, John has focused for a decade on “Saving the Idea that Is America” and the associated societal issues across our values, health and well-being, politics, economics, education, and technology.  He is a proponent of systems thinking and its application to large societal system change.  Some of his works have been published in the Washington DC based publication, The Hill.