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As chief executive officer of Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC), a leading international merchant and processor of agricultural goods, �鶹������ý Lubin School of Business alumnus Michael Gelchie ’90 has a big job. Overseeing some 20,000 employees worldwide, commercial activities in more than 100 countries, and globe-spanning operations that process and transport nearly 100 million tons of products each year, his role is a daily adventure—one that takes him to the far corners of the world, crisscrossing the vast networks and extensive partnerships that make up LDC’s truly global business.

Michael’s 2020 appointment as CEO of LDC was decades in the making—a journey that began in the accounting department on �鶹������ý’s Pleasantville Campus.

As an ambitious college student fascinated by the burgeoning technological revolution sweeping the 1980s, Michael charted his academic course through Pace’s accounting and information systems program. He found it was the perfect marriage of his interests, combining a conventional accounting education with principles of finance and a deep exposure to the technological mechanisms used to retrieve, organize, and analyze financial data.

At the urging of Pace’s Career Services office, Michael also enrolled in several classes outside his degree program, allowing him to qualify for the key certification and licensing exams he needed to successfully launch his career.

“Eileen Murphy in Career Services was quite instrumental in guiding me toward that pragmatic approach,” Michael said. “I ultimately did graduate with an accounting and information systems degree, but because of those extra courses, I was also able to sit for the CPA, CMA, and CIA exams. Those experiences were extremely helpful.”

As he was preparing to receive his degree from Pace, Michael was also diving headfirst into the job search. In the months leading up to graduation, he estimates he sent out seventy-two résumés: “And this was a time when you had to sit down and typewrite every individual cover letter,” he said.

The hard work soon paid off. Just weeks before graduating, Michael landed a job through a connection he’d made at Arnold Foods, where he’d held summer internships over the two previous years. That first job was a junior internal audit position at LDC—the very same company he would be appointed to lead as CEO thirty years later.

“I graduated in May of 1990, and I started at LDC that same June,” he said. “It was an intriguing position—not necessarily what I thought a young person in accounting would be doing. But it was extraordinary to see how many bright, intelligent people were in that environment. Coming into the field of agricultural commodities trading, learning that language, learning auditing at the same time—there was a lot of information to process, but it was an amazing learning experience.”

Michael held a range of positions at the company over the next twenty years, from trading and merchandising to managing LDC’s sugar, rice, and cocoa businesses. In 2008, he helped spearhead the development of the Louis Dreyfus Investment Group as a senior portfolio manager. After a stint away from the company, he returned to LDC in 2019 as global head of coffee and was soon thereafter appointed chief operating officer.

“Establishing our endowed scholarship was an important way for us to extend the same opportunities we received at Pace to current and future students,” Michael said.

He assumed the role of CEO at LDC in July 2020, the culmination of a three-decade agri-commodities career that began just days after he received his Pace diploma. It was a full-circle moment, but there was precious little time for reflection—he was stepping into a role of staggering responsibility in the middle of a global pandemic, as compounding crises were forcing industries across the globe to reckon with a strange and uncertain new reality.

It was among the most complex and challenging periods of his career, he said—a time defined by difficult and potentially existential decisions with vanishingly slim margins for error. But as a leader tasked with navigating the turmoil of the pandemic and engineering a strategy for forward progress, Michael was determined to manage the uncertainty and translate challenges into opportunities.

“When I was appointed CEO, everything was happening through screens,” he said. “I had the chance to learn the role and the business in an incredible way, because it was all being delivered through video. In a normal environment, I might have had to travel around the world for three years to absorb the amount of information and material that I was able to take in virtually at that specific point in time.”

For Michael, the key to successfully leading LDC through challenges like the pandemic—and further elevating the company as one of the world’s foremost agricultural commodities trading firms—is simple: it’s always about the people. It’s about cultivating a sense of connectivity across his leadership team and throughout the organization’s 20,000 employees—a sense of collective purpose and achievement, a shared culture where everyone understands the mission and everyone’s contributions are valued.

In short, Michael believes that investing in people generates extraordinary outcomes. It’s why he has worked to strengthen the culture of mentorship and community at LDC, and it’s why he has provided life-changing philanthropic support to the next generation of leaders—particularly those pursuing their education at his alma mater.

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In 2022, Michael and his wife, Pace alumna Linda Gelchie ’94, established the Gelchie Family Scholarship at �鶹������ý, a permanent endowed fund designed to provide sustained, transformative aid to Pace students, with a specific focus on students who may experience learning challenges.

“Establishing our endowed scholarship was an important way for us to extend the same opportunities we received at Pace to current and future students,” Michael said. “Linda and I have seen in our own lives the doors that can be opened through a strong education, and it means a great deal to us to be able to create those possibilities for others.”

In addition to his scholarship support, Michael is also committed to building meaningful personal relationships with students who—inspired by success stories like his—see a Pace education as their pathway to building careers of purpose.

In the spring of 2025, Michael returned to the Lubin School—the place his journey began—to share his experiences with a group of hard-working finance majors. Motivated by the same spirit of mentorship that animates his guidance of younger colleagues at LDC, Michael spoke to the students about his role, his story, the opportunities available in the agri-commodities industry, and the principles that inform his own theory of effective leadership: building a team you can rely on, developing strong communication skills, walking the talk, and—perhaps most importantly—committing to a lifetime of learning.

It's that untiring dedication to learning that keeps that best leaders sharp, Michael said. And it’s a precept he keeps at the center of his own life: He has recently committed to completing an MBA program at Pace, with plans to earn his second Lubin School degree by the end of 2026.

“For people who want to be leaders, what I’d say is that you have to embrace the notion of continuous learning,” he said. “There’s always something new out there to learn, and great leaders always keep their minds open to the ways our businesses and our world continue to evolve.”