Brian Doubles has an engineering degree, years of experience as a chief financial officer, and a small weakness for the idea that cold water can improve a company’s prospects. He has publicly described himself as superstitious. One of his customs is a New Year’s polar plunge for good luck. What began as a personal ritual eventually acquired colleagues, charitable donations, and a name that sounds suspiciously like a sporting event: the Doubles Dive.
There are tidier ways for an executive to express solidarity with employees. A note would do. Perhaps a speech beside a modest buffet. Doubles’s tradition involves getting wet. It offers an unusually literal glimpse of a leadership preference that appears throughout his career: take part, accept some discomfort, and give other people a reason to join you.
Today he is president and chief executive officer of Synchrony, the Stamford-based consumer finance company. His working life has included industrial training, the financial crisis, a public listing, and the task of succeeding a chief executive with whom he had built a company. The recurring question is how much security a person should surrender in order to do something worthwhile.
A career that was supposed to stay put
Doubles graduated from Michigan State University in 1997 with an engineering degree and joined General Electric’s leadership development program. He imagined staying with GE for his entire career. It was a reasonable ambition inside a company large enough to offer several careers without requiring anyone to change the name on a business card.
His early development included living and working in Asia in GE’s aviation business. One lesson arrived late at night in Singapore. Working with colleagues at about ten or eleven, he took off his shoes and put his feet on a table. A teammate explained that displaying the soles of his feet was disrespectful in the local culture. Doubles recalled being embarrassed.
He has connected that episode with his subsequent attention to the different backgrounds of people in a room. An engineering course might teach you how to solve the problem on the table. This particular class concerned what you had put on it. The correction came from someone beside him, and depended on his willingness to hear it.
By January 2009, he was CFO of GE’s retail finance business. The timing placed him in financial leadership during the financial crisis. Years later, he named Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail as his favorite business book. Its account of finance, government, and ordinary economic life overlapped with a period he had experienced at work.
Learning to leave the parent company
The career he had pictured began changing in 2013, as the retail finance business explored becoming independent. Doubles and Margaret Keane initially evaluated the possibility with a very small circle. He had become accustomed to assembling experts for complicated questions. Here, confidentiality meant doing more of the early financial modeling himself, with help from outside advisers.
His first concerns included how his team would feel about leaving GE. The practical questions followed: how the business would fund itself, what investors would pay for it, and whether retail partners would remain comfortable. Independence has a glamorous vocabulary. Its working documents are less glamorous, and rather more useful.
Synchrony went public on July 31, 2014. Doubles later remembered a two-week investor roadshow, little sleep, and an early start on listing day. Before trading began, the wider market was falling. His hopes for the shares became more modest as the morning developed. He would have welcomed a flat opening.
A bell-ringing photograph compresses a complicated transaction into a pleasant instant. The job behind it included regulatory approval and building the infrastructure required of a separate public company. Doubles was part of that work as CFO. Synchrony completed its separation from GE in November 2015. The familiar employer had given way to a business whose future the team now had to construct for itself.
The promotion came with three promises
In May 2019, Synchrony appointed Doubles president. The role widened his responsibilities into strategy, venture investing, acquisitions, analytics, marketing, and customer experience. It moved him closer to decisions about what the company would become, alongside the financial discipline required to get there.
He became CEO on April 1, 2021, succeeding Keane. His public message on that first day set out three commitments: listening, encouraging innovation and new thinking, and preserving the company’s culture. He recalled advice from an early mentor to listen more than he talked. He also credited Keane and the employees with what they had already built.
That combination matters in a succession. A new chief executive has to make decisions that are recognizably their own while inheriting relationships that cannot simply be redesigned on an organizational chart. Doubles’s opening message treated the existing culture as something worth keeping. Change would have to earn its place alongside continuity.
He nevertheless reorganized the company after taking over, aligning business units around industries and creating growth and product organizations. His explanation was practical: Synchrony was a regulated institution competing with faster-moving financial technology businesses. The structure needed to help people make decisions and bring products to market more quickly.
“Decide and deliver.”
Brian Doubles, on his guiding principle
The office clock loses an argument
For someone whose professional preparation included years of financial measurement, Doubles has an especially pointed objection to one familiar workplace metric: hours spent in the office. In a 2022 conversation about leadership, he argued that managers needed to assess what employees delivered. Watching attendance was a poor substitute for understanding performance.
“The new leadership model has to be about measuring outcomes,” he said. He also reported that Synchrony had removed college degree requirements for about 90 percent of its roles. He described backing employees who lacked degrees but had other qualities needed to succeed. His own degree had opened a door; he did not want it to become the only acceptable key.
The argument gives employees a greater say in where they work, while leaving their responsibilities in place. It also changes the conversation a manager needs to have. What is due? What help is needed? When should colleagues come together? Those questions are more useful when people can give specific answers.
There is a demanding side to his position. Measuring outcomes requires a manager to know what good work looks like and to discuss it clearly. An occupied chair answers an easy question. A useful contribution requires judgment. Flexibility makes that judgment more visible, including when the person being assessed is the manager.
Two ranking snapshots, five years apart. Lower rank numbers indicate a higher position.
In April 2026, Synchrony reached number one on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, up from number 37 in 2021. The company reported that 94 percent of employees called it a great place to work. The ranking gives a public measure of employee sentiment. It also raises the standard against which future decisions will be judged.
A tradition with a very short dress code
The Doubles Dive offers another way to see that culture at work. In February 2024, more than 120 employees took the plunge at Compo Beach in Westport, Connecticut. Doubles joined them. The air temperature was 34 degrees Fahrenheit. The company said that year’s Connecticut event raised and matched more than $113,000 for SeriousFun Children’s Network.
His charitable custom has also traveled beyond Connecticut. Employees elsewhere have participated through plunges, ice-bucket challenges, and donations. In Alpharetta, the local version included a dunk tank and silent auction; the office raised more than $9,000 for North Fulton Community Charities in April 2024. The premise could survive a change of scenery and a little local invention.
There is room for mild contradiction elsewhere in his life, too. The Michigan State graduate has admitted to also supporting Michigan, having grown up fond of the Fab Five basketball team. When the rivals meet, he sides with the Spartans. Evidently, choosing a university need not require discarding every childhood allegiance. Sports fans may wish to consult their own regulations.
The next checkout may do the shopping
His current business agenda extends into how people will buy things as artificial intelligence becomes part of shopping. In August 2026, Synchrony announced an enterprise collaboration with OpenAI aimed at bringing financing, rewards, and loyalty into AI-based shopping and checkout experiences. The announcement described plans, including a forthcoming shopping plugin, rather than a completed transformation.
The strategic question is recognizable from his earlier work: if the setting changes, how does the company remain useful? Separating from GE required an independent financial foundation. Flexible working required different management habits. Shopping assisted by software agents creates another setting in which existing relationships and products have to prove their value.
Results still provide an uncompromising appointment with reality. On October 20, 2026, Synchrony reported third-quarter net earnings of $892 million, compared with $1.1 billion a year earlier. Purchase volume rose 8 percent to $49.7 billion. More spending and lower earnings can coexist. A profile of a financial executive should leave room for both numbers.
Doubles’s advice to new graduates has been to accept roles that stretch them, even when the work makes them nervous. His own career supplies several versions of that choice: leaving an expected lifetime at GE, becoming a public-company CFO, then taking responsibility for the whole business. Some decisions require financial models. Others require listening carefully when a colleague tells you to take your feet off the table.