Our Founder

Arthur Theme founded Arthur Theme & Company and has grown the firm into the distinguished institution it is today. As Chairman and CEO, Arthur Theme has shaped the firm’s innovative approaches to strategy and its unique culture.

In addition to running AT & Co, Arthur Theme is also a political commentator who hosts a web series called The Arthur Theme Report. The web series grew out of a memoir he is currently writing, which will articulate his worldview on business, politics, and the broader economy.

Theme’s Principles

While some have attributed AT & Co’s standard of excellence to Theme´s singular polymathic vision, he often credits it to a set of principles that he has formulated over the years. In pursuing his Master of Arts in History and Philosophy of Knowledge at ETH Zürich, Arthur Theme developed a strong ability to think critically across many fields, and this has allowed him to transpose such abilities in understanding the most effectual strategies for various businesses. This approach is meant to produce notable gains in understanding how reality works and to help develop principles for dealing with it well. Below is a brief summary of his approach:

• The task of a life is to figure out who you are and to shape your circumstances to match.

• Every situation you face carries information, provided you're willing to take it in. The skill of extracting that information and acting on it well is what separates people who reach their potential from those who don't.

• Outcomes aren't accidents. They're driven by cause and effect, and almost anything can be traced back to the conditions that produced it.

• Since the same situations recur in slightly different forms, you can build a working model of how something operates by examining enough cases, and turn that model into a set of rules you can rely on.

• Make those rules explicit, then challenge them against what actually happens. That process tightens your judgment and raises your success rate.

• None of this scales without other people. What determines whether a team wins or loses, more than anything else, is the culture holding it together.

• The best way to build that culture, and a genuine reward on its own, is substantive work carried out among people you value.

• The ability to operate in the face of uncertainty matters far more than the knowledge you've already accumulated.

Taken together, his work at AT & Co and the principles that guide him reflect a single ambition, which is to understand the world clearly and shape it with purpose.