Frank Lassman
Senior Partner

Frank Lassman has a distinguished career as a strategic planning and operations executive in the information technology sector specializing in the content management and digital printing/publishing industries.

Lassman began his career as a member of the faculty at New York University’s Stern School of business where he taught marketing at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Lassman subsequently joined IBM where he was a member of the planning team that helped to shape the systems/solutions approach at the office products division. At Xerox Lassman was based in London working for Xerox’ European division with responsibility for product and strategic planning.

Returning to the US Lassman worked as Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning at Merganthaler-Linotype a division of Allied Signal. The company was in a period of transition moving out of the traditional pre-press industry into the nascent desktop publishing arena. Anticipating the tremendous revenue potential of licensing typefaces to this market, Lassman spearheaded the move by licensing typefaces to Adobe Systems and worked with both Apple and Adobe to market the first high resolution controller/typesetter.

Lassman then joined Imagen, Inc. in Santa Clara as Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Imagen was a supplier of hardware and software controllers for the Unix market and transitioned into producing controllers for HP and other laser printer manufacturers. Imagen was acquired by QMS/Minolta and Lassman was named Managing Director for the European, Middle East and Africa markets. After growing
the business from $28 to $83 million dollars, QMS asked Lassman to head up the Pacific Rim operations as President of the region. QMS was a leading supplier of laser and thermal printers to the high end and desktop publishing markets.

Lassman was an independent consultant before joining Portola Strategies. Lassman serves on the Board of Jarlack Investments NV in Amsterdam, and also does pro bono consulting for a number of not-for-profit organizations in the New York City area.

Lassman is viewed by many as a marketing visionary and has a strong view about the need for good strategic communications as an important management tool. He sums up his philosophy regarding strategic planning by his belief that “vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare!”

Lassman earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Business Administration degrees from New York University.