Robert McLaughlin was the CEO of two NYSE companies and served on the board of directors of three public companies and two private companies. His memoir begins with his experiences as the leader of a small unit, a battery commander in the Marine Corps, and his first civilian job as a sole proprietor, responsible for a sales territory and continues through the success of his first management position. He then spent ten exhilarating years with Xerox Corporation in its early years of high growth, creating six elite marketing and engineering organizations. He became the CEO of a failing NYSE company at age thirty-nine and returned it to prosperous operation, achieving an extraordinary return for the stockholders. He formed The Sutter Group, a consulting company that provided executive officers to assume responsibility for financially distressed companies and return them to prosperous operations.
McLaughlin published his first book, The Capture of the U-505, in 2019 to reader acclaim. Creative Destruction is the author's contribution to the experiential learning process. He resides in Tiburon, California, with Kathie, his wife of sixty-five years.