Donald Layton: Balancing Life And Career

Donald Layton is not your average banker. He is the CEO of Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored enterprise and a publicly traded company and one of the largest sources of mortgage financing in the U.S.  It was established in 1970 by Congress to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the nation’s residential mortgage market. Just how large is Freddie Mac (or Federal Loan Mortgage Corporation)? In 2012 it had total assets of over a trillion dollars.

 It was one of the companies that got into serious trouble during the financial crisis and had to go under conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in 2008. This action has been described as one of the most sweeping government intervention in the private financial market in decades.  Partially due to its uniqueness the institution is making money again when it was thought that it would be one of the few government-bailed out institutions that would give a net loss to taxpayers.

To head this significant institution means you’ve already made a name for yourself in the banking and finance scene. Layton was appointed to this position in May 2012. Prior to his appointment he had a long career in the financial services. He worked for almost 30 years at JPMorgan and its predecessors.

Layton began as a trainee and eventually became vice chairman and a member of the three-person Office of the Chairman, retiring in 2004. In his more recent role he was the chairman and CEO of E*TRADE Financial which he guided through the recent financial crisis. Layton was a senior advisor to an industry association and has been a member of the boards of several financial services firms.

Layton also has outstanding academic credentials simultaneously earning Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in economics from MIT and an MBA from Harvard University.

The rise to the top involved a lot of hard work. In fact Layton and his wife had been married for 16 years before they had their first child in 1990 and another one in 1994. Since having his children he has led a more balance life instead of just living a career-centric existence. He came to realize what really was important in his life.

Dr. Oh-Hyun Kwon: Samsung’s Top Guy

Not well-known globally, Dr. Oh-Hyun Kwon has been playing a pivotal role in Samsung’s rise as an electronics giant and now leads the company in what looks to be very promising times.

Kwon is the CEO and Vice Chairman of Samsung Electronics. To head an electronics consumers firm like Samsung requires a lot of skills including knowing what the market wants. With the success Samsung has had with the Galaxy phone series you can sure bet Kwon and his team know how to go about marketing.

Kwon also has very impressive credentials on the technical side. He has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Seoul National University and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAISST). If that’s not enough Kwon also has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

He began his career at Samsung in 1985 at the Semiconductor Business. Kwon has played an instrumental role in the rapid rise of Samsung Electronics in the semiconductor industry. It was he who led the successful development of the 64Mb DRAM in 1992; this was an industry first.

Promotions followed over the years along with growing responsibilities. Kwon became Vice Chairman in December 2011. He was eventually promoted as CEO on June 8, 2012. Now Samsung is building a campus at the heart of American technology - Silicon Valley. He’s on familiar grounds being a Stanford graduate but this time he comes as head of an electronics giant.

Annapolis Success Story

While a graduate of a government military school Daniel Akerson has shown his successful leadership in the private sector.

We usually associate Annapolis (Maryland) with the U.S. Naval Academy. This government institution has been graduating future leaders of the U.S. Navy for over a hundred years.  Daniel Akerson who was born in California and grew up in Mankato, Minnesota graduated from this prestigious institution in 1970 with a B.S. in engineering degree. He then went on to serve as a naval destroyer officer from 1970-1975. His successful career though has not been in the U.S. military but in the private sector.

His success was initially in the telecommunications and technology industries where he was the president or CEO of several companies. Among the companies he headed include MCI, Nextel Communications, XO Communications and General Instrument.  At Nextel where he was hired as CEO in 1996, company revenue grew from $171.7 million before he arrived to over $3.3 billion in 1998.

In 2003, Akerson joined the Carlyle Group in Washington, D.C. He was a managing director and head of global buyout. His responsibilities included managing over $50 billion in assets and more than 200 portfolio companies having combined employees in the hundreds of thousands worldwide. Akerson was a key figure in Carlyle’s achieving 30 percent gross internal rates of return in the firm’s corporate private equity business.

Akerson was set up for a big challenge on July 2009 when he was elected to the board of directors of General Motors as representative of the U.S. Treasury. GM at that time was already 61 percent owned by the government which was trying to rescue the floundering auto giant. He became the CEO of GM on September 2010 and Chairman of the Board on January 2011.

With Akerson at the helm, GM launched one of the largest IPOs ever totaling $23 billion. The company has also gained market share and has been more consistent in terms of profit.  In 2011, GM was able to achieve $7.6 billion in record profits from sales of $150.3 billion.

This Annapolis graduate has time and again shown his great leadership skills in the private sector.

 

Still Coming Out As CEO

David Dillon was born on March 30, 1951 in Hutchinson, Kansas. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Business at the University of Kansas and a law degree at Southern Methodist University. 

David came from an entrepreneurial family.  His great-grandfather, a pastor, opened a self-service grocery store in Sterling, Kansas. The next generations took over running and expanding the family business. The father of David, Paul with two cousins, steered the company in the next generation when Dillon Stores was transformed into a public company.

As for David he joined Dillon Company in 1976 and held a number of managerial positions starting with its King Soopers division in Denver. He also served various leadership roles with Fry’s Food Stores.  Kroger bought Dillon Company in 1982. David was appointed president of Dillon Companies in 1986.

The ownership change did not exactly slow down David’s career. He became executive vice president of Kroger in 1990. David was appointed president and chief operation officer in 1995. He became CEO of Kroger in 2003 and was elected Chairman of the Board of Directors in 2004.

Kroger which is based in Cincinnati, Ohio has more than 3,600 supermarkets, convenience and jewelry stores operating under two dozen names. It also operates 40 U.S. food processing plants and employs 338,000 people.

The family business may have been bought out but David continued to rise to eventually head the buying entity.

Castulo de la Rocha’s Community-focused Health Care Leadership Activities

With a career in health care and law spanning nearly three decades, Castulo de la Rocha leads AltaMed Health Services Corporation as President and CEO. He is committed to providing an urban Latino population with accessible and affordable medical and human services. A dynamic community presence, AltaMed has expanded from two employees in the early 1970s to more than 1,600 employees today, spanning 44 senior care service and health care clinics. More than 500,000 patients visit facilities of the fully-accredited Federally Qualified Health Center on an annual basis.

A longtime proponent of social justice, Mr. de la Rocha is fundamentally committed to the notion that proper health care is a right, not a privilege. Reflecting legal advocacy experience on behalf of immigrant populations, he has overseen AltaMed’s expansion into accessible storefronts and community housing development locations over the years. The full range of services offered at AltaMed clinics includes dentistry, ophthalmology care, women’s and children’s health, and HIV treatment and prevention.

Selected as one of Hispanic Business Magazine’s top 100 Latino influentials of 2008, Castulo de la Rocha maintains a strong leadership presence within his professional community. A Senior Fellow of the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Public Affairs, he has held board responsibilities with Blue Shield of California, and the Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital Foundation. Mr. de la Rocha has also guided the development of premier fundraising events such as East LA Meets Napa. This one-of-a-kind event pairs wine produced by Latino Napa vintners with high-caliber Mexican restaurants throughout East Los Angeles.

Challenging Times For Olaf Koch

Olaf Koch is CEO and Chairman of the Management Board of METRO AG. This company is considered to be the fifth-largest retailer in the world by revenue; it’s behind Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Tesco and Kroger. It is one of the big boys in the retail and wholesale business. The group is based in Düsseldorf, Germany and has the largest market share in that country. METRO AG is of the most internationalized wholesale and retail corporations.

Koch is thus heading a very large publicly traded company and interestingly his early career path had nothing to do with store retailing. Born on June 1, 1970 in Bad Soden am Taunus, he is a graduate of business management from the University of Cooperative Education Stuttgart. 

Koch’s career had basically been in the auto industry.  Starting in 1994 he was Manager for Finance Processing and Systems at Daimler Benz AG. In January 1996 he founded and was the CEO of IT-Networks GmbH until July 1998. Then it was back with DaimlerChrysler AG where he was Senior Manager at the Corporate War Room from July 1998 to November 1999. Koch went on to hold other higher positions including Vice President, Corporate e-Business and Member of the Board of Management Mercedes Car Group responsible for Finance, Controlling and Strategy.

He left DaimlerChrysler AG in August 2007 and then joined private equity group Permira Beteiligungsberatung GmbH as Managing Director of Operations from October 2007 to September 2009. Then the auto industry executive with strengths in IT and finance joined retail giant METRO AG in September 2009 as Member of the Management Board and CFO.

Since becoming CEO Koch has vowed to change the top-down corporate culture at METRO. He wants more open, bold and controversial discussions taking place. This hasn’t been easy given the recent performance of the company which showed profits dropping. Heads of top ranking executive have rolled with five having been asked to leave.

Experts say Koch’ senior team now does not have long experience on retail. He is continuing to stream line and centralize operations to cut cost and grow the company.  These are challenging times for Koch. Given that he came from a different background perhaps the company’s board did really want change. As for Koch he knows very well that he wasn’t given the top post just so he could enjoy smelling the flowers.

Paul Bulcke: Nestlé’s Top Gun

Paul Bulcke was born in 1954 and is a Belgian national. After college he worked as a financial analyst for Scott Graphics International for two years. Then he joined food giant Nestle in 1979 as a marketing trainee at their head office in Vevey, Switzerland.

Paul has never worked for any other company since then. His job at Nestle has taken him to live in seven countries and learn six languages. He has lived in Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile and has headed operations in Europe rising in various positions along the way. A big promoting came in 2004 when he was appointed executive vice-president of the Americas.  He was in charge of not just the US. but also Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean.  

He performed exceptionally well and was appointed CEO on September 2007 and officially started in his new role in 2008. Paul became CEO at the time when there was a global financial crisis and has led with a steady hand managing to increase the company’s year on year profit. 

His main preoccupation is the large role Nestlé can play in people’s nutrition. He is dead serious on this and it’s not some sort of marketing gimmick. With its global presence and strong R&D he believes Nestlé  can contribute significantly to people in different groups from senior citizens to children in providing them with the right nutrition.

Shamsul Azhar Abbas: Reforms At Petronas

Petronas is the national oil company of Malaysia. It was incorporated on August 17, 1974 and vested with the entire ownership and control of the petroleum resource of Malaysia. Given the resource available at hand along with managerial talent it has become a fully integrated oil and gas corporation and is one of the largest companies in the whole planet being part of the Fortune Global 500.

Having a monopoly on the country’s petroleum and gas resource gives it a huge advantage but it comes at a price. Since it’s government owned it cannot at all times be run like a commercial company. Part of its revenues must also go to the government.

Tan Sri Shamsul Azhar Abbas is the president and CEO of Petronas. Not only does he have to deal with global market forces but also with the country’s various political interests. Like his predecessor he has pushed for reforms in the company he has worked for since 1975.

It involves a lot of negotiating since the chief executive of Petronas and its board serves at the pleasure of the prime minister. It has been noted that over the years the government has let the oil firm fund its dream projects and bail out its mistakes.  Abbas has forged on to improve the company’s commercial performance while at the same time negotiating for a cut in the annual subsidy it pays the government. The company funds 40 percent of the national budget.  

Abbas does acknowledge the support of the current Prime Minister, Datuk Seir Najib Razak allowing him to make necessary reforms. Abbas has spent over 35 years with Petronas starting out as an executive trainee in 1975. He rose through the ranks serving in various positions and capacities and became the president and CEO in February 2010.

Abbas has a degree in Political Science from the Science University of Malaysia, MS in Energy Management from the University of Pennsylvania, USA and a Technical Diploma in Petroleum Economics from Institute Francaise de Petrole (IFP), France.

Kazuhiro Tsuga: Taking On A Tough Challenge

Heading one of the largest companies in the world is a dream come true for any executive. It has its big responsibilities and challenges. Few executives though have as tough a challenge now being faced by Kazuhiro Tsuga, President of Panasonic Corporation. He became president of the company in June 2012 and is also its Principal Executive Officer.

Tsuga replaced the previous president amid the staggering $14.1 billion the company has lost since April 2011. The losses are not unique to Panasonic as other large Japanese electronics companies have also experienced tremendous losses due to a host of factors like the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Innovative and efficient competitors from Korea and China have also eaten into their market.  Even the American company Apple has come roaring back with new products that have taken market share.

Panasonic through its more than 95 years of existence has become a sprawling electronics juggernaut producing a wide range of products from TV sets right down to eyelash curlers. The business model is no longer working.

Some of the products along with jobs will have to be cut out. Tsuga has been chosen to lead the company through this very tough and painful period.  With his more than 30 years of company experience he knows a lot about Panasonic which will be put into good use as he tries to stem the continuing losses while coming out with products that will bring the company to a profitable future.