Word: aig
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...bidding, he was at times a tyrant too. He demanded loyalty and was capable of terrorizing the people who worked for him. "I always prepared myself to the hilt when I was to see him," says Gerard Roche, veteran executive recruiter at Heidrick & Struggles, which has placed executives at AIG. Greenberg liked to keep his meetings short--say, 10 minutes--and quickly lost patience with anyone not prepared. Then would come the famous Greenberg tongue lashing. His former daughter-in-law Nikki Finke, who knew the family throughout the 1970s and was married to eldest son Jeffrey in the early...
...Would he yell at me? Absolutely," says Edward Matthews, a longtime AIG senior executive. "I always told people when we were hiring them, 'If you have thin skin this is the wrong place.' Did he drive people hard? Absolutely. But who did he drive the hardest? Himself...
...demanding personality, combined with an almost regal confidence, that enabled Greenberg to build the AIG empire. In the early days he used to drive through New York telling independent insurance agents that if they had clients no one would insure, he'd write the policy that day. "If he could comprehend it, he'd underwrite it," says Joe Coughlin, a risk consultant at Corporate Risk Solutions. That confidence, which still permeates the culture at AIG, led the firm to embrace businesses that others would turn down, from firearms dealers to makers of football helmets to school-bus companies...
...Today AIG operates in 130 countries, has a stock-market value of $143 billion and nearly $100 billion of annual revenue. It's had a staggering transformation from the obscure firm that Greenberg took command of in 1967 and took public two years later with just $13 million of annual profit--a figure that swelled to $11 billion by last year. While building AIG in the 1970s and '80s, Greenberg often was the only foreigner in sight in politically combustible countries like Romania, Iran, Vietnam and other parts of the Far East, and would draw a curious crowd just crossing...
Nowhere is Greenberg's standing more firm than in China, where the forerunner company to AIG was founded in 1919 in Shanghai by the most important figure in his career, Cornelius Vander Starr, who hired Greenberg in 1960. Even though AIG had to shut down its operations in China in 1950 after the communists took over, Greenberg never lost sight of those roots and was thrilled when his company in 1998 reclaimed one of its original offices on the Bund in Shanghai. Ahead of most, he understood the vast economic potential of China and advocated for better relations to every...