Jerry Jones: Dallas Cowboys

Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys go hand in hand. He is not only the owner of the team but is the president and general manager. This just shows how involved he is with the team and not many owners are as deeply involved as he is.

Jones is a graduate of the University of Arkansas. Before getting involved with the Dallas Cowboys he made his first fortune drilling natural gas wells in the 1970s.  Jones made his big move in 1989 by purchasing the Dallas Cowboys for only $150 million.

Today the Dallas Cowboys is America’s most valuable sports team, currently worth $2.1 billion. It has great staying power even if it at times it doesn’t perform that well on the field. It is a winning team having won three Super Bowls in the 1990s. 

They do it big in Texas and Jones exemplifies this having built a gigantic 111,000-seat stadium for the Cowboys. Aside from the Cowboys Jones is also in the real estate business. He is a big time supporter of the Salvation Army as well. Over the past 15 years he has utilized the well-known Thanksgiving halftime show of the Cowboys to raise $1.6 billion for charity.

Jones lives and breathes Dallas Cowboys.

Jeremy Jacobs Sr.: Taking Over

One does not have to be original to be successful.  To achieve great things in life you simply just have to give the best when an opportunity comes along. There is also the need to be patient and staying the course. Looking for instant results many only mean short-term successes.

Jeremy Jacob, Sr. is the chairman and CEO of Delaware North Companies. He did not found this company. It was founded by his father Luis and his two uncles, Charles and Marvin in 1915. The company first sold concessions in theaters. Next they entered major league ballparks. In the 1950s the health of his two uncles were failing so his father Louis took over the company.

Then it was Jeremy’s turn to take over the company in 1968 upon the death of his father. He was 28 years old at the time. Jeremy was born on January 21, 1940 in Buffalo, New York. He earned his B.A. from the University of Buffalo’s School of Management and completed the Harvard School of Business Advanced Management Program.

Today the company he took over from his father is one of the largest privately held firms in North America. Delaware North Companies is a hospitality and food service enterprise the does business worldwide.  It is based in Buffalo, New York and operates in the lodging, sporting, airport, gaming and entertainment industries.

Delaware North provides food, drinks and entertainment at 200 venues in four countries. Among the venues it operates in includes Boston’s TD Garden (home of the Celtics), Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, and London’s Wembley and Emirates Stadiums.  North Delaware has more than 55,000 employees all over the world and has annual revenue of over $2.5 billion.

While most of his wealth stems from Delaware North, Jeremy is better known in the sporting world as the owner of the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League. He has owned the Bruins since 1975. In 2011 he helped the Bruins win the Stanley Cup after a 39-year drought. It certainly didn’t come overnight and Jeremy made some changes in his management team to help bring it about.  Of late though, he was under fire for his role in the NHL lockout as chairman of the NHL’s Board of Governors.

You can’t please everyone but Jeremy has certainly been achieving in levels not everyone has reached.

 

Marius Kloppers: Nice Retirement

Marius Kloppers is an overachiever in every sense of the word. At 44 years of age he became the CEO of BHP Billiton, the largest resource company in world. This was in 2007.

He was born in Cape Town, South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Pretoria. Marius earned a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds an MBA from INSEAD. Among the companies he worked for before joining Billiton in 1993 was McKinsey & Co.

Marius has been noted for his role in overhauling the global iron ore market to market-based pricing rather than annual contract talks.  He has also led in daring bids to take over rival Rio Tinto, Rio Tinto’s iron ore business, and Potash Corp. These all failed due to concerns from regulators.

Marius won praise for leading BHP through the global financial crisis in much better condition than industry peers. He did not do well with expensive bids for shale gas assets in the U.S. which led to $2.8 billion in writedowns in 2012. A 58 percent drop in profits for the second half of 2012 finally caused him to resign as CEO on May 2013 and retire on October 2013.

His retirement payout could add up to $45.4 million. That’s certainly a nice retirement package. At only 50 years of age we may not have heard the last from Marius Kloppers.

Gregory D. Wasson: Pharmacist At The Helm

Many corporations are run by individuals with business degrees. Some of these individuals come from well-known business schools like Harvard. Gregory D. Wasson runs a huge enterprise but his college degree was not in the field of business. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in 1981.

Greg worked as a pharmacy intern at a drugstore chain in 1980 while he was still a student. After earning his degree he managed several Houston drugstores for the company and was promoted to district manager in 1986. Greg was an excellent manager as evidenced by his promotion to regional vice president of store operations in 1999.

More promotions came along the way. He became vice president and executive vice president of the company’s Health Initiatives unit and pharmacy benefit manager in 2001. Other promotions included becoming company vice president in 2004 and executive vice president in 2005. Greg became company president and chief operating officer in 2007 and then appointed CEO in 2009.

Greg is not the CEO of a just a big company he’s leading the biggest one; the Walgreen Company or simply Walgreens. It is the largest drug retailing chain in the U.S. with around 8,300 stores in all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Guam.  For 2012 the company had revenue of $71.633 billion and 176,000 employees.

He may be a pharmacist by training but Greg is all business in reshaping Walgreens so it remains competitive and dominant in the decades ahead. While he can’t even get himself to gamble away $100 in a casino, Greg is different in the corporate setting spending $1.1 billion to acquire New York-based pharmacy chain Duane Reade, Inc. in 2010.

To augment Walgreen’s online presence Greg paid $429 million to buy Drugstore.com in 2011. He also led the over century old company to venture for the first time outside North America with a $6.7 billion cash-and-stock deal for 45 percent stake in Alliance Boots GmbH, the European pharmacy and health-and-beauty-retailer creating the world’s largest buyer of prescription drugs, with a network of 11,000 stores in 12 countries.

Wasson is reshaping and taking the company to new directions in a very bold manner.

Gerry R. Heminger: Marathon Man

Nope we’re not referring to Gerry R. Heminger as a diehard runner. If there’s anything that he has been diehard about then it has to be Marathon Petroleum Corporation (MPC). He has been with the company for over 38 years and counting.

Heminger earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting from Tiffin University in 1976. He also obtained an MBA in 1982 from the University of Dayton. To further hone his executive skills he graduated from the Executive Management Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Heminger knows MPC inside out having held numerous positions in the company. He spent five years in a number of financial and administrative roles. Heminger spent three years in London as audit supervisor of the Brae Project. He has also held several marketing and commercial roles with the predecessor of Speedway LLC.

A number of his higher executive roles include president of Marathon Petroleum Company LLC in September 2001 and executive vice president – Downstream of Marathon Oil Corporation. In July 2011 he assumed the top positions of President and CEO of Marathon Petroleum Corporation.

MPC has headquarters in Findlay, Ohio and employs around 28,000 individuals and is a member of the Fortune 500. It has around 9.5 percent of the total U.S. refining capacity.  It’s a company well worth working with for more than 38 years.

Vittorio Calao: The Second Time Around

It may be the case that the position you think will go to you goes to someone else. It could be that the position wasn’t meant for you or it simply wasn’t the time yet. The latter was the case with Vittorio Calao.

Calao was born on October 3, 1961 in Brescia, Italy.  He graduated from Bocconi University with a degree in Business. Highly intelligent Calao earned, with Honors, an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He began his career in London working as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. In 1986 he was back in Italy as a Partner in the Milan office of McKinsey & Co. His work covered telecommunications, media and industrial goods. Calao was also responsible for office recruitment.

Around a decade later Calao joined Omnitel Pronto Italia and reached the position of Chief Operating Officer before it was taken over and became Vodafone Italy. When you’re good at what you do even the new owners will notice. Calao didn’t have to worry about his employment status. By 2001 he was the Regional CEO for Southern Europe and the following year even joined the main board of Vodafone Group.

Calao was a rising star at Vodafone and was in line for the top post. As things turned out the CEO position became open but it went to someone else. Calao resigned from Vodafone and joined RSC MediaGroup, an Italian publishing company, where he was appointed CEO in July 2004.

Things did not go very well at RCS MediaGroup. There was criticism from shareholders concerning the group’s governance and strategy.  Calao resigned from the company and rejoined Vodafone in 2006 as CEO, Europe and Deputy Chief Executive. 

He finally got the CEO post in July 2008 succeeding the man who got the job instead of him. His resignation at RCS MediaGroup was actually a blessing in disguise as it gave him another crack at the top post at Vodafone. A winner never quits.  

Anshu Jain: Challenges

Anshu Jain was born in Jaipur, India, the son of a civil servant. He earned an economics degree at Sri Ram College of Commerce at Delhi University and obtained an MBA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985.  He is now the co-CEO of Deutsche Bank the biggest lender in Germany and the largest continental bank in Europe in terms of total assets.

What is interesting about Anshu is he is an Indian national holding a British passport and speaks very little German. Given his hectic schedule there’s very little time for him to learn the language but he has been trying his best and even gave a two page introductory speech during the 2013 annual stockholder’s meeting in German.  

The world has become more international but having a non- Germany speaking co-head has made some people uneasy, especially when banking is all about trust. He got to this position by helping Deutsche Bank become one of the largest investment banks in the world when he joined the company in 1995.

 Yet it is also this side of the bank which as caused many problems including criminal investigations and charges against employees. Jain himself has not been accused of any wrongdoings. He has worked out of London, does not speak much German and has sold products like sophisticated derivatives that few people totally understand and view with suspicion.

Despite these challenges Jain along with co-CEO Juergen Fitschen who is a native German are working to shore up the bank’s capital and cut costs including laying off thousands of workers. Jain understands his job and challenges simply have to be overcome.