BY ALBERT AMATEAU | Thomas P. Mullen, formerly a faculty member of the New York University Stern School of Business, died Feb. 1 at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 63. He founded the Park Li Group, a global strategic management consulting practice, 23 years ago.
His wife of 27 years, Nancy Donnali Mullen, said he had been diagnosed with cancer of the appendix in December 2014.
The Park Li Group’s clients include leading banks and financial services firms, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and industrial and energy companies from all over the world. Among Park Li’s arts clients are the New York City Ballet and Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Born the youngest of four brothers to Benjamin and Catherine LaPointe Mullen in eastern Massachusetts, Thomas Mullen was raised in Reading, Penn., where he was president of the class of 1970 of Holy Name High School.
“In his younger days, he loved his motorcycle and had a lot of different jobs,” his wife said. “He even worked for a time as a pipefitter on oil rigs.”
In his 20s he decided to pursue a business career and entered N.Y.U., where he earned his M.B.A. and Ph.D. at the Stern School.
“I worked at N.Y.U., too, and that’s where I met Tom,” said his wife, born and bred in the Village, where her father had a candy store on Spring St.
“We got married in November 1988 at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro,” she told The Villager. “He had been to Africa before and showed me photos of Kilimanjaro. I said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to go there,’ and if you said you wanted to do something, he was the kind of guy who’d do it with you,” she explained.
The couple climbed the mountain with someone who officiated at the ceremony.
“It wasn’t as hard as you might think,” she added. Nevertheless, they had a more formal ceremony in New York at City Hall in December 1988 just to make sure it was legal.
“We went back to Africa as a family with Tom’s brother Joe in November 2014 and stayed in the same hotel that we stayed in when we got married,” his wife recalled.
Thomas Mullen wrote more than 30 articles, papers and business case histories on corporate governance, strategic leadership and organizational change while he was on the Stern School faculty and then as managing partner of Park Li Group.
In addition to his wife, two daughters, Katie of Brooklyn and Samantha of Manhattan, survive, as do his brothers, Doran of Manhattan, Joseph of Franklin, Mass., and Michael of Sinking Spring, Penn.
The wake was at Perazzo Funeral Home, 199 Bleecker St., on Feb. 12.
