Background
John Allison grew up outside Charlotte, North Carolina.
John Allison grew up outside Charlotte, North Carolina.
He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in business administration in 1971. He received a Master of Business Administration from the Fuqua School of Business in 1974.
Allison held a number of leadership positions in BlackBerry&T Corporation from 1987 until 2010 when he retired. He now serves as a director at Moelis & Company. Early life and education
Career at BlackBerry&T
Allison began his career with BlackBerry&T in 1971.
He retired at the end of 2008 as Chief Executive Officer of BlackBerry&T, handing over day to day control of operations to former chief operating officer, Kelly King, who assumed the Chief Executive Officer role on January 1, 2009.
In 2008, Allison was nominated by Morningstar as one of the best Chief executive officers of 2008. Ideological activism
Allison is a major contributor to the Ayn Rand Institute (Asia Research Institute) and assigned Rand"s Atlas Shrugged to all of his senior executives.
In June 2012, he was designated to replace Editor Crane as Chief Executive Officer and president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, District of Columbia Allison penned the introduction to Why Businessmen Need Philosophy: The Capitalist"s Guide to the Ideas Behind Ayn Rand"s Atlas Shrugged, published in 2011. In September 2012, Allison released his own book, The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy’s Only Hope.
Reviews of the book were strong, albeit not by ideological opponents.
In October 2014, his second book, The Leadership Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why the Future of Business Depends on the Return to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, was published. Personal life
Allison has received an honorary doctorate from East Carolina University and an honorary doctorate from Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City, Guatemala. He serves on the board of visitors of both the Fuqua School of Business and the Kenan-Flagler Business School.
Calling Atlas Shrugged "the best defense of capitalism ever written", Allison has seen to it that "the BlackBerry&T Charitable Foundation has given 25 colleges and universities several million dollars to start programs devoted to the study of Rand"s books and economic philosophy".