RCIM was founded by Thiemo Rehländer, an experienced, hands-on executive with a proven track record of building, growing, and leading to success organizations and programs of critical importance.

Thiemo got his start into a consulting and management carreer through his business studies at Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany, and through his MBA from the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, USA.  For the latter, he received two consecutive Fulbright scholarships.

Upon finishing his studies, he started at Arthur D. Little in Germany, the world's first consulting company. Originally focusing on matters of strategy and organization, he helped develop the Ambition Driven Strategy approach, which was to become the methodological standard for the firm. He also helped develop a Knowledge Management methodology, at a time when that topic just began to surface. Living in Germany, the US, and Switzerland, Thiemo spent over 14 years at Arthur D. Little, having been promoted to Partner at age 35, and eventually leading the Financial Service activities globally.

At Arthur D. Little, Thiemo worked for insurance, reinsurance, banking, automotive, construction materials, agricultural equipment, engineering, chemicals, oil & gas, and public sector organizations. Topics included strategy development and implementation, organizational change, innovation, aggressive growth, international expansion, knowledge management, hostile takeover response, efficiency improvements, central service optimization, and many more.  Thiemo has worked all over Europe, the US and Canada, in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Brazil.

Thiemo then joined boutique firm a-connect, where he developed clients and oversaw project work in the financial services and pharmaceutical sectors. It was here where he began to appreciate the value of focused, senior independent consultants vs. large consulting firms.

When the opportunity arose, Thiemo joined Zurich Insurance Group as a member of Executive Staff.  He successfully headed two major global programs: The Zurich Way (TZW), and - unrelated despite the similarity in name - The Zurich Way of Working (ZWOW). TZW has been a long-standing program to achieve global technical excellence and standards in all main functions of the business.  Thiemo successfully re-energized the program and expanded its reach from one business segment and two functions to two business segments and over twenty functions, incl. support services.

ZWOW, set up under the direct sponsorship of the Group Chief Operations and Technology Officer at the time, has been the pinnacle in terms of reach and impact.  It is one of the largest and most ambitious single transformation programs ever launched at Zurich, aiming at benefits of USD 400-500 million. Thiemo oversaw the build-up of that program from scratch and managed to exceed results expectations against a very aggressive ramp-up plan. More importantly, despite its aggressive cost reduction targets, ZWOW achieved increased customer satisfaction scores and higher employee engagement wherever it touched the organization. Additionally, the ZWOW team was one of the highest-scoring units within all of Zurich in terms of leadership, job satisfaction, team morale, accountability, etc. in the 2015 Global Employee Engagement Survey.  We even outscored the High-Performance Industry Benchmark. That's the power of "&" - the squaring of the circle.

RCIM aims to deliver this kind of comprehensive transformation to other companies, who may have been struggling to truly extract long-term benefits from their change initiatives.