Nearly two years ago, Mark Tercek left his job as a managing director at Goldman Sachs to attend to an ecosystem devoted to another kind of green: the Nature Conservancy. TNC, which watches over 119 million acres of land in more than 30 countries, has a significantly different culture from the one he’d dominated on Wall Street. While conducting his first organization-wide online meeting in 2008, Tercek swigged from a Poland Springs water bottle. The next day, he was greeted by half a dozen welcome gifts from colleagues in the form of reusable water containers. “Not so good to be the brand-new head of the biggest conservation organization and drinking out of a plastic water bottle,” he says.  He once helped make markets, now he works to instill market principles at a nonprofit whose client, he likes to say, is the Earth. The hardest part, other than moving his wife and kids from Irvington, N.Y., to Washington, D.C., was the transition to needing to build consensus—something not so crucial in his past life. “A mission-driven nonprofit is harder to manage than you think,” Tercek says. He used to judge the value of deals and employees by objective financial measures. In his new career, success is more difficult to calculate: “Reasonable people can disagree on what is important and what is not.”  Although Tercek’s life has changed a lot with the new job, he’s enjoying an existence that is a bit more down-to-earth. “The day I joined TNC, my executive assistant said to me, ‘We fly coach and stay in crappy hotels,’” he says. “I’m staying in funky boutique hotels, which are much more fun. I didn’t know that back in my Four Seasons days.”  Those days are still evident in the air of sophistication and ease with which he comports himself (he wears a nice-but-not-too-fancy suit—and he wears it well). Tercek, a former Boy Scout from the Midwest, is tall and lanky and earnest. He married his high-school sweetheart and they have two boys and two girls, ages 12 to 21. He and his wife have sought to impart a love of the environment to their children, taking family trips to places like Tanzania, Patagonia and Costa Rica. Naturalists showed them where economic development had benefited the environment and where it had harmed it. “My kids were really interested in that and we started talking about it more as a family,” he says.  Tercek, 52, graduated from Williams College in 1979, worked in Japan for Bank of America for a few years and then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1984. He joined Goldman Sachs straight out of business school and over the years he headed the investment bank’s global corporate finance, real estate and equity capital markets. By 2005, he was growing restless, so he went to Goldman Sachs chairman Henry M. Paulson, Jr., who would go on to become Treasury Secretary. When Tercek told him that he wanted to move into the public sector to advocate for business- and market-based solutions to climate change, Paulson cautioned him against leaving his career behind and asked him to harness his interest to benefit Goldman Sachs, by leading the company’s environmental business efforts instead. “He was truly a world citizen and I thought he would do very well,” says Paulson, himself a former board chairman of TNC.
A head for business, a green conscience and a former Treasury Secretary inspired Mark Tercek to quit a high-flying career at Goldman Sachs to run the Nature Conservancy