Richard Panico

Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer IPM (Integrated Project Management Company, Inc.)

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

C. Richard Panico is the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Integrated Project Management Company, an Illinois firm that does not advise on project management so much as execute projects on behalf of clients – placing its own project leaders inside life sciences, food, consumer products and industrial organizations to run complex, cross-functional programmes to completion. He founded it in 1988 after fifteen years at Johnson & Johnson, on the conviction that large organizations consistently lacked disciplined project execution and would pay for people who could supply it. He has run the company ever since, a tenure now past thirty-five years. The clearest external validation of what he built is the 2018 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, conferred by the US Department of Commerce and administered by NIST: IPM was the first small business in Illinois ever to win it, and one of only five Illinois organizations of any size to do so since the programme began. Alongside the operating record he has accumulated an unusual concentration of ethics awards – the Pollard Award in 2010, and DePaul University’s first-ever corporate ethics award in 2013.

Career Highlights

• Founded IPM in 1988 and has been its chief executive without interruption since.
• Led the company to the 2018 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for small business, the first Illinois small business to receive it.
• Spent fifteen years at Johnson & Johnson’s Chicago operations from 1973, advancing through manufacturing, engineering and senior management roles.
• Received the William C. Pollard Award for Business Ethics from the Oak Brook Executives Breakfast Club in 2010.
• Inducted into the University of Illinois Chicago Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame in 2011.
• Named the inaugural recipient of DePaul University’s Institute for Business and Professional Ethics annual international award for corporate ethics and excellence in 2013.
• Built a firm recognized as one of Forbes’ 25 Best Small Companies in America and a repeat Great Place to Work honoree.
• Contributed to three books on entrepreneurship, integrity and leadership, and speaks regularly on ethics and organizational culture.
• Has held board appointments at Micron Industries and Midtronics, Inc.

Professional Journey

Panico grew up in an immigrant family in Chicago’s Little Italy and was educated in Catholic schools there – an upbringing he has consistently named as the source of the values he later built the company’s culture around. He took a BS in Aviation Technology Maintenance and Management at Lewis University, an unusual academic route into what became a career in project execution, though one grounded in the same discipline of maintaining complex systems to specification.

He began his professional career in 1973 at Johnson & Johnson’s Chicago operations and stayed fifteen years, moving up through manufacturing, engineering and senior management roles. That period gave him a close view of how large, capable organizations handle major cross-functional projects, and his conclusion was that they generally handled them badly – not for want of technical skill but for want of disciplined execution owned by someone accountable end to end.

In 1988 he left to found Integrated Project Management Company on exactly that thesis: that there was an industry-wide need for what he called top-drawer project execution, and that it could be sold as a service. The model was distinctive in that IPM’s people lead client projects rather than producing recommendations, which makes the firm’s reputation directly dependent on delivered outcomes rather than on the quality of its advice.

The culture Panico built around this became as much a part of the company’s identity as the service itself, and it drew outside recognition first in the ethics domain – the Pollard Award for Business Ethics in 2010, induction into UIC’s Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame in 2011, and in 2013 selection as the first-ever recipient of DePaul University’s international award for corporate ethics and excellence. He has described leadership in his own terms as dreaming, caring, committing and achieving, and speaks and writes on the subject, having contributed to three books on entrepreneurship, integrity and leadership.

The company’s most significant recognition came in November 2018, when IPM received the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the small business category. The Baldrige is a performance-excellence award administered by NIST on behalf of the US Department of Commerce and is unusually demanding, requiring a multi-year examination of leadership, strategy, customers, workforce, operations and results. Panico has spoken publicly about the process as a long and difficult one, and NIST published a separate leadership profile of him as a recipient chief executive. IPM was the first small business in Illinois to win it.

Outside IPM, Panico is a member of Heartland Angels, where he mentors entrepreneurs, and has held board appointments at Micron Industries and Midtronics, Inc.

Education

Lewis University

BS, Aviation Technology Maintenance and Management