Pathway to Innovation

Tom Totten credits OSU Ph.D. in Business for Executives program for his startup

by Jeff Joiner

Even though he hadn’t been in the classroom as a student for years, Dr. Tom Totten was nervous in 2012 walking into a room of company executives like himself at Oklahoma State University where he was about to begin Ph.D. coursework. “This was not your typical university classroom full of students,” Totten said.

That experience as part of the first group admitted to the Spears School of Business’s Ph.D. in Business for Executives program had a long-lasting impact on Totten’s career and even led to a successful business startup that began as a concept he refined through the writing of his dissertation at OSU. The startup, a retirement planning consulting firm, has helped thousands of individuals who use his innovative retirement savings products.

The OSU Ph.D. in Business for Executives is an accredited program focused on developing leadership and inspiring innovation guided by business research for working executives. Doctoral degrees have been awarded to 40 alumni to date from such companies as American Airlines, Bank of America, CitiGroup, Dell, Pfizer, Sprint, Walmart and Wells Fargo as well as universities and the U.S. military.

The program was launched in January 2012 with the first cohort of more than a dozen executives, academics and government officials selected to participate. Spears Business Vice Dean and Regents Professor Dr. Ramesh Sharda was the program’s first executive director and recalls the first class of Ph.D. candidates.

“This was something new, and the courses had not been taught in that format before,” Sharda said. “With that first group of outstanding performers, we were fortunate to be able to attract a cohort that set the bar high for the future.”

Today, Totten is a professor and director of the actuarial science program at the University of Notre Dame. He is co-founder of Votaire in Indianapolis, his retirement planning startup, and a board member of the consulting firm Nyhart, which he joined 20 years ago and where he was CEO until he retired in 2018 to join the faculty at Notre Dame. An Indiana native, Totten earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Notre Dame and a master’s in actuarial science from Ball State University.

“Being an actuary means what I do is quantify risk. What we’re known for is quantifying risk associated with life expectancy and helping people protect themselves no matter how long they live,” Totten said. “As an actuarial scientist, I help people think about how long their retirement money needs to last because you don’t know how long you’re going to live.”

For most of his career, Totten has advised people about how to save for retirement to ensure they have money if they live to be 70 or 107. His innovative approach, which has received widespread industry interest and was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal, crystalized at OSU in the Ph.D. in Business for Executives program. “My dissertation was the culmination of my career’s work.”

Totten cites as an example a person with $1 million in retirement savings. Totten’s concept is to take a portion of that money, say $100,000, and purchase a longevity annuity that doesn’t begin paying until the person is 80 or 85 years old. The annuity provides income until death, which means the $900,000 only has to last until the annuity kicks in, a finite period of time.

“It just has to last 15 or 20 years instead of God knows how long,” he said. “They can plan for how long that money needs to last, which removes the fear of running out. It’s a different way to look at retirement savings.”

Being in the first cohort of the Ph.D. in Business for Executives program at Spears Business, Totten said he wasn’t sure what to expect, except his fellow students would be made up of high-achieving executives and academics. Totten said being challenged by his cohort and the Spears faculty had a huge impact on his success in the program.

“I came to Oklahoma State to write my dissertation on this very specific retirement problem but when I got there, I was challenged to look at the problem differently,” Totten said. “I was looking at it from the perspective of a pension plan, but it was suggested I look at it from the individual’s perspective and how it affects them instead of from a company perspective. I did that, and that made me remodel everything I did. That’s where my startup, Votaire, came from. That was a big deal.”

“That’s actually one of our goals along with bringing academia and industry together,” said Sharda. “If you are in industry and you get through the faculty doctoral seminars and research methods in the program, you are learning to apply a different lens to your work where you are not just solving your current problem, but you’re trying to contribute to knowledge by applying a broader lens from the academic perspective.”

Totten said working with gifted Spears Business faculty and developing close, supportive relationships with his cohorts were important reasons why he had such a positive experience at OSU.

“I had a lot of support from people there who really helped me,” he said. “The relationships that were created will last the rest of my life.”