The Author

Jim O’Donnell serves as Executive-in-Residence and Associate Professor of Business and Economics at Huntington College, in Huntington, Indiana. There, he teaches students to integrate values and ethics into their professional and personal lives.

"I began my career helping others invest for the future. Now I will be investing in the future," says Jim O’Donnell, whose résumé reads like an excerpt from Who’s Who on Wall Street.

Jim brings to Huntington College the savvy earned as a senior executive at some of the nation’s largest mutual fund companies.  From 1981 to 1985, he served as vice president and national sales manager for the Dreyfus Service Corporation. During his final year with Dreyfus, he personally sold $1.5 billion in new investments. From 1985 to 1989, Jim led the sales and marketing efforts of the Portfolio Group, Inc., a subsidiary of Chemical Bank (now J. P. Morgan Chase), increasing assets under the firm’s management from $800 million to $2.5 billion.  Jim then moved to Fidelity Investments, first as senior vice president for Personal Advisory Services, then executive vice president and founding director of the High Net Worth Group, an investment and marketing arm of Fidelity serving the needs of wealthy individuals. 

Though highly-successful, Jim O’Donnell always cut against the grain in the dog-eat-dog world of money.  A man of deep convictions and great thoughtfulness, he strove to inject principles of his Christian faith into an industry characterized by cut-throat competition. 

In a decision to serve God more intentionally by teaching the next generation of business leaders, they moved from the East Coast and the active business world to small-town Indiana, in 1994, where Jim’s wife, Lizzie, was soon stricken with a series of with life-threatening illnesses.  Together, they have struggled with her cancer, heart disease, kidney failure and other chronic problems. During the early months of their suffering and uncertainty, Jim documented the hope, the horrors, and his wrestling with God with searing honesty through a series of letters written to “friends back East.”

A thought-provoking writer, his opinions on ethics and finance have appeared in Barron's, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, America, and other publications.

Letters for Lizzie, Jim O'Donnell's book about his experiences of caring for his wife, and Walking with Arthur, his book about his coming to a faith that could love his wife through a crisis, are both published by Northfield/Moody Publishing, Chicago.

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