[1] Tierney is cited by the book Management Consultancy in the 21st Century as a specialist in customer service and marketing.

[3] Tierney earned a BA in Economics from the University of California, Davis in 1976, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1980.

[4] Aside from his Bridgespan and eBay position, Tierney has been the Director of The Nature Conservancy, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and has held numerous other posts on non-profit boards, including the Hoover Institution, The United Way of the Bay Area, the Committee for Economic Development and the WGBH Educational Foundation.

[5] He occasionally lectures at the school and has contributed numerous articles to The Harvard Business Review and books, including Forbes's Learning From The Chief Executive Officer and Aligning the Stars (2002), the latter co-authored with Jay W. Lorsch, which documents business strategy and organization.

One of the reasons [co-author] Joel [Fleishman] and I teamed up was that he has done extensive research on twentieth-century philanthropy, a lot of which he used in The Foundation".