Walter Wriston
Walter Bigelow Wriston (August 3, 1919 – January 19, 2005) was a banker and former chairman and CEO of Citicorp. As chief executive of Citibank / Citicorp (later Citigroup) from 1967 to 1984, Wriston was widely regarded as the single most influential commercial banker of his time. During his tenure as CEO, the bank introduced, among other innovations, automated teller machines, interstate banking, the negotiable certificate of deposit, and "pursued the credit card business in a way that no other bank was doing at the time." With then New York Governor Hugh Carey and investment banker Felix Rohatyn, Wriston helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the mid-1970s by setting up the Financial Control Board and the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and persuading the city's union pension funds and banks to buy the latter corporation's bonds. 
Wriston was born in Middletown, Connecticut to Ruth Bigelow Wriston, a chemistry teacher, and Henry Wriston, a history professor atWesleyan University who was later president of Lawrence College and Brown University.
Wriston attended grade school and high school in Appleton, Wisconsin. Reared as a traditional Methodist, he was not allowed to listen to the radio or go to the movie theater on Sundays. Wriston was an Eagle Scout and recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.
He attended Wesleyan University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941. While there, he was a member of the Eclectic Society and received the "Parker Prize" (awarded to the Wesleyan sophomore or junior who excels in public speaking). He received a Master's Degree from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1942.
After graduate school, Wriston became a junior Foreign Service officer at the State Department, where he helped negotiate the exchange of Japanese interned in the United States for Americans held prisoner in Japan. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, he served in the U.S. Army for four years, being with the Signal Corps on Cebu in the Philippines during his service.
After graduate school, Wriston became a junior Foreign Service officer at the State Department, where he helped negotiate the exchange of Japanese interned in the United States for Americans held prisoner in Japan. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, he served in the U.S. Army for four years, being with the Signal Corps on Cebu in the Philippines during his service.
In 1942, Walter Wriston married Barbara Brengle, with whom he had one daughter. Two years after her death in 1966, he married lawyer and businesswoman Kathryn Dineen.
Wriston died on January 19, 2005 in Manhattan, New York City, New York, at the age of 85. His papers, including the text of hundreds of speeches and articles spanning his lengthy career, are at Tufts University's Archives. Many have been digitized and are available in the Tufts Digital Library.
From 1982 to 1989, Wriston was chairman of President Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board, and in June 2004 awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil honor, by President George W. Bush. He was twice offered the job of Secretary of the Treasury but turned down the offers. One report is that Wriston declined the offers because these were not made to him personally by the-then President. Wriston also would have had to take a substantial pay cut had he accepted the government position.
In 1987, the Manhattan Institute of Policy Research initiated a lecture series in honor of Mr. Wriston, and in 2004 the Idea Channel organized a seven-part series of interviews with him as well.
John Sculley
John Sculley (born April 6, 1939) is an American businessman. Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of PepsiCo (1977–1983), until he became CEO of Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993. Sculley is currently a partner in Sculley Brothers, a private investment firm formed in 1995. He is best known for his marketing skills, particularly in his introduction of 'the Pepsi Challenge' at PepsiCo, which allowed the company to gain market share from its primary rival, Coca Cola. Sculley used similar marketing strategies at Apple throughout the 1980s and 1990s to mass market Macintosh personal computers. During his tenure, Apple's sales increased from $800 million to $8 billion. However, his stint at Apple remains controversial due to his departure from founder Steve Jobs's sales structure, particularly regarding Sculley's decision to compete with IBM in selling computers to the same types of customers. He was ultimately forced out of Apple in 1993 as the company's margins eroded, sales diminished and stock declined. In May 1987, Sculley was named Silicon Valley's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$2.2M.
Sculley was born in the United States, but within a week of his birth, he and his family were relocated to Bermuda, and subsequently to Brazil and Europe.
Sculley attended high school at St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts. He ultimately received a bachelor's degree in architectural design from Brown University and an MBAfrom the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania
Sculley joined the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo in 1967 as a trainee, where he participated in a six-month training program at a bottling plant in Pittsburgh. In 1970, at the age of 30, Sculley became the company's youngest marketing vice-president.
As vice-president of marketing at Pepsi, Sculley initiated one of the company's first consumer-research studies, an extended in-home product test in which 350 families participated. As a result of the research, Pepsi decided to launch new, larger and more varied packages of their soft drinks. In 1970, Pepsi set out to dethrone Coca Cola as the market leader of the industry, in what would eventually become known as the Cola Wars.
Pepsi began spending more on marketing and advertising, typically paying between US$200,000 and $300,000 for each television spot, while most companies spent between $15,000 and $75,000. With the Pepsi Generation campaign, Pepsi aimed to overturn Coca Cola's classic marketing.
At Pepsi, Sculley also took the position of managing PepsiCo's International Food Operations division, shortly after he visited a failing potato-chip factory in Paris. PepsiCo's Food division was their only money-losing division, with revenues of US$83 million and losses of $16 million. To make the food division profitable, Sculley hired new managers from Frito-Lay and improved product quality, as well as improving accounts and establishing financial controls. Within three years, the food division was making US$300 million in revenues and $40 million in profit.
Sculley is best known at Pepsi for the Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign he started in 1975 to compete against Coca Cola to gain market share, using heavily-advertised taste tests. It claimed based on Sculley's own research that Pepsi-Cola tasted better than Coca-Cola. The Pepsi Challenge included a series of television advertisements that first aired in the early 1970s, featuring lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers participating in blind taste tests. Pepsi's soft drink was always chosen as the preferred product by the participant; however, these tests have been criticized as being biased. The Pepsi Challenge was mostly targeted at the Texas market, because Pepsi had a significantly low market share there at the time. The campaign was successful, significantly increasing Pepsi's market share in that state. At the time the Pepsi Challenge was started, Sculley was senior vice-president of United States sales and marketing operations at Pepsi. Sculley himself took the taste test and pic
Jack Welch
John Francis "Jack" Welch, Jr. (born November 19, 1935) is an American chemical engineer, business executive, and author. He wasChairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. In 2006 Welch's net worth was estimated at $720 million.
Jack Welch was born in Salem, Massachusetts to John, a Boston & Maine Railroad conductor, and Grace, a homemaker.
Welch attended Salem High School and later the University of Massachusetts Amherst, graduating in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering. While at UMass he was a member of the Alpha chapter of the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity.
Welch went on to receive his M.S. and Ph.D at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1960.
Welch joined General Electric in 1960. He worked as a junior chemical engineer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, at a salary of $10,500 annually. While at GE, he blew off the roof of the factory, and was almost fired for doing so. Welch was displeased with the $1,000 raise he was offered after his first year, as well as the strict bureaucracy within GE. He planned to leave the company to work with International Minerals & Chemicals in Skokie, Illinois.
Reuben Gutoff, a young executive two levels higher than Welch, decided that the man was too valuable a resource for the company to lose. He took Welch and his first wife Carolyn out to dinner at the Yellow Aster in Pittsfield, and spent four hours trying to convince Welch to stay. Gutoff vowed to work to change the bureaucracy to create a small-company environment.
"Trust me," Gutoff remembers pleading. "As long as I am here, you are going to get a shot to operate with the best of the big company and the worst part of it pushed aside." "Well, you are on trial," retorted Welch. "I'm glad to be on trial," Gutoff said. "To try to keep you here is important." At daybreak, Welch gave him his answer. "It was one of my better marketing jobs in life," recalls Gutoff. "But then he said to me--and this is vintage Jack--'I'm still going to have the party because I like parties, and besides, I think they have some little presents for me.'" Some 12 years later, Welch would audaciously write in his annual performance review that his long-term goal was to become CEO.
Welch was named a vice president of GE in 1972. He moved up the ranks to become senior vice president in 1977 and vice chairman in 1979. Welch became GE's youngest chairman and CEO in 1981, succeeding Reginald H. Jones. By 1982, Welch had disassembled much of the earlier management put together by Jones.
Through the 1980s, Welch worked to streamline GE. In 1981 he made a speech in New York City called "Growing fast in a slow-growth economy". This is often acknowledged as the "dawn" of the obsession with shareholder value. Later, in an interview with the Financial Times on the Global financial crisis of 2008–2009, Welch said, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy... your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.” Interestingly, Welch did not make such a comment while still the CEO of GE. He also pushed the managers of the businesses he kept to become more productive. Welch worked to eradicate perceived inefficiency by trimming inventories and dismantling the bureaucracy that had almost led him to leave GE in the past. He shut down factories, reduced payrolls and cut lackluster old-line units. Welch's public philosophy was that a company should be either #1 or #2 in a particular industry, or else leave it completely. Welch's strategy was later adopted by other CEOs across corporate America.
Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers. He earned a reputation for brutal candor in his meetings with executives. He would push his managers to perform, but he would reward those in the top 20% with bonuses and stock options. He also expanded the broadness of the stock options program at GE from just top executives to nearly one third of all employees. Welch is also known for destroying the nine-layer management hierarchy and bringing a sense of informality to the company.
During the early 1980s he was dubbed "Neutron Jack" (in reference to the neutron bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact. In Jack: Straight From The Gut, Welch states that GE had 411,000 employees at the end of 1980, and 299,000 at the end of 1985. Of the 112,000 who left the payroll, 37,000 were in sold businesses, and 81,000 were reduced in continuing businesses. In return, GE had increased its market capital tremendously. However, Welch eliminated basic research, closed or sold off businesses that were allegedly under-performing. These and other moves placed basic research at the bottom of the list with respect to funding and attention.
In 1986, GE acquired RCA, RCA's corporate headquarters was located in Rockefeller Center; Welch subsequently took up an office in the now GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The RCA acquisition resulted in GE selling off RCA properties to other companies and ultimately keeping NBC as part of the GE portfolio of businesses. During the 1990s, Welch shifted GE business from manufacturing to financial services through numerous acquisitions.
Welch adopted Motorola's Six Sigma quality program in late 1995. In 1980, the year before Welch became CEO, GE recorded revenues of roughly $26.8 billion. In 2000, the year before he left, the revenues increased to nearly $130 billion. When Jack Welch left GE, the company had gone from a market value of $14 billion to one of more than $410 billion at the end of 2004, making it the most valuable and largest company in the world.
At the time of his retirement, Welch received a salary of $4 million a year, followed by his controversial retirement plan of $8 million a year, which included GE's $80,000 per month luxury apartment in Trump Tower (New York City), free food and wine, access to a $300,000 per month B737 corporate jet, VIP tickets to the Metropolitan Opera, the Knicks, Wimbledon, theUS Open (tennis) and the Red Sox, an office and a secretary in the GE building and a limousine with driver. In 1999 he was named "Manager of the Century" by Fortune magazine.
There was a lengthy and well-publicized succession planning saga prior to his retirement between James McNerney, Robert Nardelli, and Jeffrey Immelt, with Immelt eventually selected to succeed him as Chairman and CEO. Nardelli became the CEO of Home Depot until his resignation in early 2007, and until recently, was the CEO of Chrysler, while McNerney became CEO of 3M until he left that post to serve in the same capacity at Boeing
Michael A. Sheehan
Sheehan graduated from Christian Brothers Academy in New Jersey in 1973 and the United States Military Academy (West Point) in 1977. Sheehan has a Master of Science in Foreign Service from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service as well as one from theUnited States Army Command and General Staff College.
He served as an officer in the infantry and Special Forces. He had several overseas assignments, as a commander of a "counter-terrorism" unit in Panama, a counterinsurgency advisor in El Salvador, an infantry company commander in Korea, and on peacekeeping duty in Somaliaand Haiti. Also while on active duty, he served in the White House on the National Security Council staff for Presidents George H. W. Bushand Bill Clinton.
In 1998, he was appointed Coordinator for Counterterrorism with the rank and status of Ambassador-at-Large at the United States Department of State and was confirmed by the United States Senate for this position in 1999. Following an assignment as Assistant-Secretary-General at the United Nations in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (2001 to 2003), Sheehan served as Deputy Commissioner of Counter Terrorism for the New York City Police Department until May 2006.
Sheehan is the President and co-founder of Lexington Security Group, an international consulting firm that specializes in providing international law enforcement, internal security, and national defense organizations with strategic guidance, unit training, and individual mentoring to manage emerging security challenges. He is also currently a partner in Torch Hill Investment Partners, a private equity group in New York City that specializes in the defense, intelligence and security sectors. He is also a terrorism analyst for NBC News and a fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security.
Sheehan is the author of the book Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves ISBN 978-0-307-38217-7 After the attempted bombing in Times Square, Mr. Sheehan concluded the terrorist was a 'lone wolf' and wrote so in the New York Times. However, experts in the field have concluded that he was part of a terrorist group based in Pakistan.
