After college, he went to work for Aaron Russo at the Kinetic Playground (aka Electric Theater) in Chicago, a rock-and-roll club and concert venue, and then as Vice President (with Peter DeBlanc) at Tomorrow, Inc., a company that designed and built equipment for major touring bands. During the early 1970s, he worked in the recording and film industry in Los Angeles and San Francisco, as an independent designer of recording studios, studio engineer and record producer, working with musicians as varied as Holly Near, Canned Heat, Joel Scott Hill, Lee Michaels, Eric Burdon, War, Jimmy Witherspoon, Booker T. Jones and others. He also did some writing for television, including a pilot series for Sesame Street with co-writer Gil Baldwin.
In the late 1970s this business evolved into Koch Systems Corporation, a computer systems programming and development company, which produced the world's first major commercial business application using a relational database (Oracle) and English language query. George was President and CEO of this company. This also led to his authoring of the bestselling book Oracle, The Complete Reference, the number-one book in its class for the last 21 years, currently translated into 8 languages, and available in bookstores worldwide (now updated by Kevin Loney). It has sold an estimated 500,000 copies.
In 1990, George accepted the position of Senior Vice President and member of the Management Committee of Oracle Corporation, the second-largest software company in the world. He ran the worldwide Applications Division of Oracle for four years (while attending seminary), and applied Christian moral and ethical principles for team building and mutual respect with employees and customers, thus executing a major turnaround of a business with low morale, a small market share, and significant losses. It grew from 45 million dollars in revenue to a quarter-billion, and became a dominant market force worldwide — in either 1st or 2nd place (with SAP), depending upon the measures used. Some believe this effort positively affected Oracle overall and help redirect it:
"Back in the early 1990s, when Oracle was up against the ropes with users and everyone else, Ellison brought in George Koch to bring a little user focus to the company. It was an enormously important moment, and in my opinion Koch's arrival was an essential part of the turnaround that propelled Oracle forward through the 1990s." - Editorial in Managing Automation Magazine, May, 2002.
In 1994, he left Oracle to become the Pastor of a Midwest church with just 12 members — Church of the Resurrection — a not-very-traditional Anglican (Episcopal) Church in West Chicago, Illinois. This church has now grown into a center of healing and ministry, with vibrant worship, an exciting children's ministry, youth group, missions teams, adult small groups and education. It is a congregation which truly strives to help each person to grow and develop their own gifts for ministry and for life. The congregation is dedicated to authenticity and loving support — not a place for "Sunday faces," but a place of honesty and caring. It is thriving! (It left the Episcopal Church in 2007 and moved to new facilities. Click here to read more.)
George has preached more than 600 sermons (all available on tape, some available online here), taught many classes, appeared numerous on radio and television programs, helped lead a number of conferences on healing prayer, authored numerous magazine and newspaper articles in publications as diverse as Christianity Today and The Wall Street Journal, and also the book The Country Parson's Advice to His Parishioners, published by Monarch in England, and a doctoral dissertation titled "Teaching Healing Prayer for the Victims of Sin."
George is a member of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion, and is one of the founders of the American Anglican Council and serves as recording secretary for the Executive Committee and College of Bishops of the Anglican Church in North America. His interest in physics continues, and he is also a potter, a member of the Potters Council of the American Ceramic Society. He spends his days off working in porcelain and firing to cone 10 (2350° Fahrenheit). His pottery can be seen at his ByronArts Web site.
He married the love of his life, Victoria, in 1979, and they have two sons, George August Koch, a writer and freelance copy editor, and Isaiah James Koch, who loves bowling, The Simpsons, and working at Ultra Foods.
Pastor George also has a personal Web site you may enjoy, at www.GeorgeKoch.com. He can be reached by e-mail at pastor@resurrection.org.
