Word: paramount
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...hurry. He leapfrogged to the top of Gulf & Western over two more senior executives after the death of conglomerateur Charles Bluhdorn. It took Davis just six years to transform Gulf & Western from an unwieldy, 1960s-style pastiche of unrelated companies into the more focused media giant that he renamed Paramount Communications the day before he launched his bid for Time Inc. He is fond of exhorting his employees to "lead, follow...
...native of the Bronx, Davis joined Paramount in 1958 as director of sales and marketing. After G&W bought the studio in 1966, Davis quickly rose to become the principal deputy to company founder Bluhdorn. When Davis gained control of the company in 1983, he immediately spun off some 100 subsidiaries, ranging from zinc mines to sugar plantations. Within 2 1/2 years, he reduced the company's size by half...
Some former employees say Davis is an authoritarian manager who sometimes has difficulty keeping talented subordinates. Among the top-level Paramount executives who have gone to rival companies: Barry Diller, now chairman of Fox Inc.; Michael Eisner, chief of Walt Disney; and Dawn Steel, head of Columbia Pictures. Davis told FORTUNE in 1984 that he was "thrilled" to have made the magazine's annual list of toughest bosses. FORTUNE quoted a business associate saying, "He exceeds all of the qualifications for the category of s.o.b...
...with the hard- line faction headed by Li. The losers were a more reformist group led by party chief Zhao Ziyang. Diplomatic sources said that Zhao had been stripped of his power, although perhaps not his title, and put under house arrest for daring to challenge the paramount authority of Deng. As for Deng, he is believed to be in the capital, personally directing troop movements by phone. Last week's power struggle raised questions of whether he might be turning his back on his own creation and whether modernization would outlast...
...idea to make this picture." (Ovitz says he was simply giving Feldman "friendly advice" that "a lot of people we deal with -- clients and nonclients -- really didn't want to see John's memory exploited.") In the summer of 1986, Jim Belushi stormed into Feldman's editing room at Paramount, trashed his desk and told the secretary, "Tell him I was here." (Her reply...