Greg Adams serves as Chief Operating Officer for the State of Tennessee.  He joined the governor’s senior team in July of 2013 after working for IBM for 36 years.

Adams was a member of the company’s senior leadership team, most recently as a managing director in the financial services sector.  Throughout his time at IBM, he held positions in sales, marketing, operations, reengineering & quality, and general management.

Early in his career he spent two years in Knoxville as branch manager of IBM’s East Tennessee operations and then moved to Nashville where he was regional manager of the Mid-South region.  After that he served as managing director of operations and board member for IBM Japan in Tokyo.

In 1994 he moved to New York where he held a variety of senior executive positions related to IBM transformation initiatives.  His 11 years in New York included roles from general manager of process industries for IBM North America to vice president of small and medium businesses for Canada, United States and Latin America.  He moved to Atlanta in 2005.

In the governor’s ongoing effort to make Tennessee the best managed state in the nation, Adam’s role is to work with state departments to ensure they’re operating in the most efficient way possible. 

Adams earned a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree from Princeton University in 1976 and a master’s in science and management from M.I.T. in 1989.  He’s been married to his wife, Jeannine, for 39 years and has three married children and seven grandchildren.