Former Lotus Chief Takes On Another Venture

Manzi dropped off the Boston high tech radar screen after some forays working with startups.

Manzi succeeds Richard Syron, who left Thermo's board to become chairman and chief executive officer of Freddie Mac. "Jim is one of the technology industry's most respected and successful executives, with a proven record of growing businesses and creating value for shareholders," Marijn Dekkers, Thermo's president and CEO, said in a statement.

In the mid-1980s Manzi took over the reins at Lotus as the hand-picked successor to the firm's founder Mitch Kapor. He drove the company forward and he left with stock worth $78 million. Business Week put him on the cover one year as the country's highest paid executive.

Lotus and Manzi were acquired by IBM in 1995 and soon he was toe-to-toe with IBM's chief Louis Gerstner, who like Manzi had once been a consultant at McKinsey & Co. The relationship lasted exactly 99 days and Manzi was gone. His first stop was a high-profile web company called Industry.Net. Manzi and Industry.Net gradually faded away, lost in the maw of proliferating Web companies.

From there he tinkered with some start-ups including online firms Interwise.Inc. and Flooz.com. He made a splash in 1999 as a fundraiser for Presidential candidate Bill Bradley.

He couldn't find peace and quiet even in peaceful and bucolic rural Vermont. Controversy always seemed to follow Manzi and when he went to the small rural town of Bridgewater in Vermont, he built a very un-Vermont stone house of more than 12,000 square feet set in 460 acres of lush countryside. The assessors said it was worth $6 million, Manzi said $2 million and the inevitable litigation ensued.

At Thermo, Manzi is the chairman of the company's compensation committee. He has been a director since 2000.

This story courtesy of TechWeb