Walpole Chamber Board Of Directors Biography:

Colonel John R. (Dick) Power (US Army – Retired)

Colonel John R. (Dick) Power retired from active duty in the Army in October 1992 after serving almost 30 years.  After graduation from Northeastern in 1963, he served in numerous company-grade assignments in Signal Corps logistics, commanding units in Germany and Vietnam, as well as serving on battalion and brigade staff.  As a field grade officer he was an instructor and branch chief at the Signal School, a contracting officer in both the US and in Saudi Arabia and a signal staff officer in Germany and at Army Materiel Command.  He spent a year in Training With Industry in the private sector, and had several project management assignments.  After being promoted to Colonel, he was Deputy Director of Procurement at Ft. Monmouth, NJ, project manager for Mobile Subscriber Equipment (MSE), one of the largest communications projects in Signal Corps history ($4.3 Billion) and concluded active duty as Inspector General for the Massachusetts National Guard.

After retiring from the Army, Colonel Power was Director of Total Quality for GTE Government Systems, an 8,000 person, $2 Billion a year company.  There he led establishment of ISO 9001 as a corporate standard, organized benchmarking and process reengineering, and customer satisfaction measurement.  Later he was the senior program manager for information security programs at GTE Corporation, a Fortune 50 leader.  He retired from GTE in 2000 with its merger to form Verizon, and now operates his own financial planning practice as a licensed Certified Financial Planner (CFP®).

Colonel Power graduated from Northeastern University and earned an MBA at Babson College.  His military education includes the Signal Officer Advanced Course, the US Army Command and General Staff College, the Defense Systems Management College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.  He has also done post-graduate course work at the University of California, Berkeley, Seton Hall University and the University of Maryland.  Colonel Power holds a Diploma in Financial Planning from Boston University.