Today we’d like to introduce you to Donald Thompson.
Donald, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My grandfather told me I was going to be the first millionaire in our family. I was seven years old, sitting in his living room in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and he meant every word of it. I’ve spent my entire career making sure he wasn’t wrong.
I sold candy in the fifth-grade hallway at 400 percent margins, got elected student body president on a dare, and signed a scholarship to play safety at East Carolina. When football ended, I went into retail at Dollar General, then tech sales at Alphatronix — and if you want to learn how business actually works, sales is exactly where you start.
Every chapter after that demanded something new and more technical, and I refused to treat that as a weakness. I became President and CEO of I-Cubed at 36, earned through performance, not pedigree. I invested in a small marketing agency that became Walk West, one of North Carolina’s fastest-growing agencies, and built The Diversity Movement into a national firm before its acquisition in 2023.
The through-line from Bogalusa to here hasn’t changed: the people everyone underestimates are usually the ones with the grit to outwork everybody who counted them out.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
No — and anyone who tells you their entrepreneurial journey was easy is either lying or hasn’t built anything worth talking about.
The 2008 financial crisis hit I-Cubed hard while I was CEO. We grew through it anyway — staying debt-free and profitable. We also built a talent pipeline through an internship program that deliberately recruited Millennials coming out of the downturn hungry for real responsibility. We gave them something the big firms couldn’t: a culture where promotions were earned on results, not years served.
I-Cubed posted double-digit revenue growth every year through the worst of it. That came down to belief, relentless effort, and refusing to let doubt slow the team down while competitors pulled back. The principle was simple — sacrifice now, win big later. I learned that watching my parents make hard trade-offs throughout my childhood, and it has followed me into every company I’ve built since.
Building The Diversity Movement (TDM) had its own humbling stretches. The idea started in 2019, before the pandemic — I wanted to build a course around something I was already seeing in the market: organizations wanted to reach broader audiences but didn’t have the tools or frameworks to do it well. By the time COVID hit, TDM was already positioned and credentialed to meet that demand at scale. The pandemic didn’t create TDM — it accelerated it.
I also had to recruit, build, and lead an entire team — and build a real culture — without ever being in the same room as most of them. At the same time, people everywhere were responding to something bigger than any one industry — a collective demand for more equity and inclusion in every part of life. Organizations felt that pressure and didn’t know how to respond to it with any credibility. They needed a partner who could actually do the work, not just talk about it. TDM grew into a multimillion-dollar company using the same model I’d refined at I-Cubed: learn everything you can about the client, gather the data, listen, then prescribe a customized solution. That model worked at a tech company and it worked at a consultancy, because the discipline underneath it never changes. The client always knows when you’re guessing versus when you’ve done the work.
TDM is the most personal work of my career — I wanted my own kids judged only on their talent and work ethic, and I’m convinced that genuinely inclusive companies are measurably more profitable, more innovative, and more competitive. That’s not a soft belief. It’s the entire argument.
No, it hasn’t been smooth. But every chapter taught me something I needed for the next one.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
The Center for Organizational Effectiveness at Workplace Options is a global platform supporting over 88 million individuals across 127,000 organizations in more than 200 countries and territories. I help executive teams align strategy, leadership behavior, and talent systems so performance holds up through transformation, AI adoption, and growth. I’m also Founder and Executive Chair of ExecBrand Authority and Executive Board Chair of Walk West and The Victor Group.
What sets me apart is that I’ve lived every stage of the business lifecycle — founding, scaling, acquisition, post-merger integration — which gives me a practitioner’s credibility that advisory or academic voices simply can’t match. I’ve personally led teams of well over a hundred people through mergers and acquisitions, more than once, always keeping clients insulated from disruption — and I’ve built performance systems designed to outlast any single leader. Culture, revenue, and AI adoption aren’t three separate conversations in my work — they’re one integrated leadership challenge, and that full-spectrum view is what most advisors in this space can’t offer.
Recognition has come at every level — these and so many more: EY Entrepreneur of the Year® Southeast Region, Forbes Next 1000, Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas, and three consecutive Inc. 5000 recognitions. I hold each one with gratitude, because each of them were earned.
My book, “Underestimated: A CEO’s Unlikely Path to Success,” won the Independent Press Award in Leadership. It’s built on candor — the spectacular failures sitting right alongside the wins, told the way they actually happened, not the way they’d look in a highlight reel. My podcast, High Octane Leadership, ranks in the top 5% globally and puts me across from leaders who bring perspectives and experiences I’d never get anywhere else — every conversation teaches me something.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I’m an avid reader, and not just of whatever’s in the front display at Barnes & Noble. I live in the business, leadership, and management sections. I still walk through bookstores and study magazines, not browsing but analyzing: how a headline earns attention in three words or loses it in five. That habit has sharpened my marketing instincts more than any course I’ve taken.
“Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill rewards every re-read — I’ve worn out two annotated copies and keep a fresh one in my office. Six decades later, it’s still the most honest map of what it actually takes to win, starting with unwavering courage.
“Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss is also on the list — a masterclass in persistence. The lesson hit me hard enough that I once bought ten copies and handed them out across my entire sales force. In a digital world, it’s still person-to-person energy that sells products, technology, and ideas.
My podcast, High Octane Leadership, is its own learning structure — every conversation is a chance to sit across from a leader I respect and ask the questions I actually want answered. My guests teach me as much as the audience learns.
The other resource I rely on is AI. I use it to brainstorm when everyone else is asleep, and to get an idea into a version that’s tight enough to hand off — no room for my team to read it ten different ways. That eliminates the misalignment that kills momentum before it starts.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.donaldthompson.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DonaldThompsonJrOfficial
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donaldthompsonjr
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DTLeadership
- Other: https://substack.com/@donaldthompsonjr
