Bill O’Rourke spent the majority of his career at Alcoa, Inc., a global aluminum manufacturing company. After Bill retired from Alcoa, he continued to serve on the Board of the Alcoa Foundation and teach “values” at Alcoa’s Executive Leadership Program. He joined Alcoa as a Patent Attorney in 1975 and held a number of leadership positions including Corporate Patent Counsel, Vice President of Global Business Services (Financial Services, HR Services, Aircraft Operations, etc.), Chief Information Officer, Vice President of Procurement, Corporate Auditor, and Assistant General Counsel. From 2005 to 2008, Bill was the President of Alcoa-Russia. He was the Vice President, Environment, Health & Safety and Sustainability three times under three CEOs at Alcoa. Prior to Alcoa, Bill was an Industrial Engineer for U.S. Steel Corporation and ran the global underground mining parts business for Joy Manufacturing Company.

Bill was a Fellow of the Wheatley Institution in the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, where he served on the Ethics Advisory Board and still teaches ethics to their business students. He is also on the Board of Directors of John Carroll University in Cleveland. He was on the Board of Directors (Past Chairman) of Sustainable Pittsburgh, on the Board of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation on the local (Past Chairman) and international levels, and serves on a number of other civic, charitable and religious organizations. From 2011 to 2014, Bill was the Executive Director of the Beard Institute for Ethics at the School of Business at Duquesne University.

In August 2016, Bill published the book A Field Guide to Business Ethics, with co-authors Dr. Brad Agle and Dr. Aaron Miller. In January of 2019, though not of the faith, Bill was tapped to be the interim Executive Director of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.