Word: ceos
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Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO The Revenue Question: Windows and Office rule. It needs another big revenue generator The Search Strategy: Bing is spending $100 million to get you to try its "decision engine" The Perception Problem: No one ever loved Microsoft. Bing could help soften its tech-demon image...
Lloyd Blankfein, the 54-year-old chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, is powerfully perplexed. In the past six months, his investment-banking and securities-trading firm has roared ahead in profitability by taking risks - that other firms would not - for itself and its clients in an edgy market. It has paid back the billions of dollars, and then some, of taxpayer money the government forced it to take last October; raised billions of dollars in capital from private investors, including $5 billion from Warren Buffett; and urged its cadre of well-paid and high-performing executives to show some...
Friends in High Places Not least of those explanations has to do with Blankfein's appearance in the call logs of Henry Paulson, his predecessor as Goldman CEO, who was Treasury Secretary while the financial crisis started to unfold in early 2007 up until January 2009. For instance, in the week after Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse into bankruptcy last Sept. 15 - and while the Secretary was playing a major role in deciding whether to pump $85 billion into the rescue of insurance behemoth AIG - Paulson and Blankfein spoke 24 times. On one level it makes sense: a Treasury...
Blankfein's deftness under pressure impressed his partners. "He is a totally independent-minded guy," says another senior Goldman official. "Ten years ago, I think most people would have said that it is highly unlikely that Lloyd would be CEO and highly unlikely that he would succeed. But he has done both, and it seems like a dream in this environment ... It's a bit of a miracle. It was unpredicted...
...December 2003 he was named Goldman's chief operating officer and co-president after the departure of John Thain - Blankfein's rival to lead the firm - who left to become CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. By then, Blankfein had impressed Goldman's board of directors and especially Paulson, then the CEO, with his tenacity, ambition and hands-on management style. "Hank became increasingly concerned about whether [John] Thornton or Thain" - the co-presidents of Goldman before Blankfein - "would assume responsibility for the business units and show they could run things," says a former Goldman partner. "Lloyd showed...