As the 2018 recipient of Fisher’s Alumni Award for Professional Achievement, Eric L. Lenard, CMA, CFM (BSBA '97, MBA '97) has demonstrated outstanding achievement in business, civic involvement and service to the college. He shares a little bit about his time at Fisher and why it is so special.

What are you doing now?

I am now a senior director of corporate treasury for Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest health care company and one of the two remaining AAA-rated non-financial firms. In my role, I am responsible for leading a best-in-class team supporting enterprise capital structure, corporate forecasting and financing, North America cash management and enterprise financial risk management. I have been with Johnson & Johnson since 2004 holding several financial leadership roles in J&J’s Vision Care, General Surgery, and Orthopedics businesses before assuming my current role in 2016. Prior to joining J&J, I worked at P&G serving in several roles with increasing responsibilities.

I am also a Certified Management Accountant and Certified Finance Manager. I am happily married and live in New Jersey.

What is your favorite memory as a student?

I've got a lot of them — from walking around campus Saturday mornings singing our fight songs with my other Men's Glee Club brothers, to standing in the middle of Ohio Stadium announcing the Homecoming Court, to the day I was linked into Sphinx, to the evening I went to my first Pace Setters ceremony to celebrate one of my MBA friends' award and was surprised to receive the Robert E. Georges honor.

But probably my favorite memory was giving campus tours as an Honors Ambassador to skeptical parents worried about how their child would acclimate to a large school like Ohio State. I would tell them "I'm a poor college student, so all I've got is this quarter, but I'll bet you that while we're on this tour around the Oval, I'll see someone I actually know and will talk to them." And I never had to give up my quarter after hundreds of tours. That's what makes this place so special!

What do you like about present-day Fisher?

For me, it's all about the students. During my years as the head finance and accounting recruiter for P&G, and now as the founder and lead of Johnson & Johnson's finance recruiting team at Fisher, I've had the honor of recruiting and hiring hundreds of our students and seeing them thrive as professionals and business leaders. There's something undeniably great about Fisher's students. Their thoughtfulness, their humble confidence, their balance between analytics and business acumen, and their unbridled passion are all things that make Fisher Alumni stand out in companies around the world, and those extraordinary traits are developed and polished right here.