lthough James Dixon Robinson III was born into one of Atlanta's
most prominent banking families, the 1957
graduate of Georgia Tech's School of Industrial
Management has not been one to wait for
success and prominence to come to him. While
many of his peers might have been content to
accept family wealth and an American Express
Gold Card, Jim Robinson went to New York
and got American Express--the whole company.
At age 41, Robinson was named chairman and
chief executive officer of American Express Co.
Casual observers may have viewed Robinson's
rise as an easy ride on rails greased by family
connections. But by the time he left American
Express earlier this year following a gruesomely
public bloodbath inside the company's board of
directors, it was clear that Robinson was a man
who had out-worked and out-thought some of
the country's best business executives to attain his
position . . . and a man not afraid of a fight to
maintain it.
ou have to give Jimmy Credit, "says Willis
Everett, an executive with an Atlanta money-management firm and a boyhood friend of
Robinson's. "A lot of the guys in his peer
group stayed around Atlanta waiting for a fat
and happy job. But somewhere along the line
Jimmy decided he wanted to make it on his
own. He sure did it, too. I don't know, but that
might have had something to do with his
father."James Robinson Jr., known as "Big Jim," had been president of First National Bank of Atlanta (now Wachovia Bank). Before that, his grandfather and great grandfather also had been prominent Atlanta bankers.
But where "Big Jim" was an imposing 6 foot,
4-inches and 200 pounds, his son was a slender
5-foot, 8-inch, 125-pound splinter. During his
Tech career, Robinson began an all-out
weight-lifting regime that by graduation transformed
the bantamweight into a chiseled 205-pound
match for any linebacker.
That program--both the physical-fitness routine and the intense competitiveness--became a way of life he has kept up, and even intensified, to this day. "My father was a very tough-minded fellow," Robinson told one interviewer. "However hard I was working, he'd say, 'Work a little harder.'"
It was a philosophy that didn't immediately take root, Robinson admits. Maximum effort was not a part of his modus operandi at Georgia Tech. "Well, I can tell you about Tech, but I'm not sure it's an answer you're going to like," Robinson says. "I had been at prep school in Virginia. I'd been away for four years and I decided to go to Tech, in part, because I wanted to get back to Atlanta.
"I imagined that I would go into banking or financial services rather than engineering, so that's how I picked the industrial management school. I have to say Georgia Tech was easy for me. I was on the dean's list most of the time. In hindsight, I might have done better to go into electrical engineering or one of the tougher schools down there. But I enjoyed myself and graduated early."
"I think he did reasonably well with a minimum of effort," says Wade Mitchell, executive vice president of Trust Company Bank and a Tech classmate of Robinson's.
"Probably the bulk of his time and attention was spent socializing, having a good time and going to school to get four years older."
Robinson went on to the Navy, became a supply officer, and reconnected with his boyhood pal, Everett, when both were stationed in Hawaii. "I have to say the impression I recall of Jimmy from Pearl Harbor was of someone you'd call an officer and a gentleman," Everett says. "My wife and I would see him and his wife for dinner and cocktails. I'm not sure I was aware at that point that he was a really driven person. It was clear he had a very quick mind. He did have a sense of humor, but it was not visible all the time."
Things changed when Robinson got to
Harvard and began work on his MBA. "I had
taken some correspondence courses while I
was in the Navy and I had some experience at
Trust Company of Georgia," Robinson recalls.
"When I got to Harvard, I felt that I had a leg
up on everybody because I had done those
things. It didn't take me long to realize that my
associates who had come from other
backgrounds, who had learned in
undergraduate school to think in the scientific,
reasoning fashion, were going to outdistance
me. I had the trade tools, but I didn't have the
perspective," Robinson says. Compared to his
Tech career, the Harvard MBA program was a
struggle, he concedes.
Robinson says he's always been consumed by a desire to succeed, even though it may not always have been obvious to his associates. "When I found something that interested me, I pursued it aggressively. But I think I got a little more focused when I went into the Navy. Whatever water I drank, it made me a little more competitive than some others."
y the time he completed his
MBA, Robinson already was a
man marked for stardom.
"Everybody in town wanted to
hire him when he came out of
Harvard," Howard Clark Sr. told
Business Week in 1988. It was
nice that "everybody" was
interested in Robinson, but the
fact that Howard Clark Sr. wanted
to hire Robinson became
significant because Clark had
decided he would retire early as
chairman of American Express.
After watching Robinson zoom up
the corporate ladder, first at Morgan Guaranty
Trust Co. and later at White, Weld & Co., Clark
indirectly offered Robinson the opportunity to
join a dozen or so other men in the sweepstakes
to succeed him at the AmEx helm. In that class
of heavyweight contenders, it was James D.
Robinson III who emerged as champion.Seven years after he joined AmEx, Robinson was named chairman and chief executive officer, beginning a 16-year tenure at the head of one of the nation's most prestigious financial institutions.
Robinson and his second wife, Republican Party activist and public-relations executive Linda Gosden, were decidedly on New York society's "A" list. They counted among their friends--and Robinson's and those of AmEx board of directors colleagues--Henry Kissinger, opera star Beverly Sills, Urban League director Vernon Jordan and former President Gerald Ford. Jim Robinson was hardly out of place in such rarefied company. His voice carries a reserved, patrician air. He speaks in the confident, but measured cadence of diplomats and successful executives. The Robinsons were trendy, attractive, successful-- everything coveted in New York's penthouses and board rooms.
But there was more than flash in Robinson's approach to his job at AmEx, according to accounts of his associates. He had an immense appetite for work, and consumed information with the voraciousness of a mainframe computer.
Every moment counted: Flights were work sessions; upon landing, Robinson would trade finished papers for a briefcase of new work needing his attention. Each year, prior to American Express annual meetings, Robinson required key executives to prepare exhaustive summaries of any questions likely to be asked by shareholders, along with the appropriate answers. Daily, Robinson was awake before dawn, throwing off the coils of sleep with an Olympian exercise routine, and on the way to AmEx's midtown office building before the garbage trucks had cleared the streets.
And though his family tradition may have been in the old school of conservative corporate management, Robinson was assuredly a man of his times--joining in the corporate acquisition binge of the 1980s with gusto. In 1981, Robinson led AmEx to a buyout of Shearson Loeb Rhoades. In quick succession, American Express acquired Investors Diversified Services, Trade Development Bank, Lehman Brothers and E.F. Hutton Group.
Business Week said Robinson's acquisition strategy was "widely considered the most successful financial-services diversification drive of the 1980s." And an Industry Week poll of corporate head hunters in 1986 named Robinson among "America's Most-Admired CEOs." It is ironic, perhaps, that the Industry Week Class of 1986 included John Akers of IBM, and Roger Smith of General Motors. By late last year, all three of those blue-chip companies were reporting huge losses, and all three men were out of their jobs.
Though press accounts of the hour-by-hour maneuvering at American Express paint a picture of Robinson as a man grimly determined to hang onto corporate power, whatever the cost, Robinson himself clearly is philosophical about his departure.
"I think there is a limited useful life for a CEO--10 to 12 years at the outside, seven or eight years probably is better. I stayed longer at American Express than I intended to.
"In the 1950s and 1960s, management turned over every five years because people aged. That was too fast for chief executives to set a direction and implement their strategies. But a CEO shouldn't go more than eight to 12 years, 15 at the outside if you own a good part of the company.
"The reason for burnout is both the freshness of capacity to look at what's going on and the ability to keep up. As you go along, there are always hotshots who are as good or better than you are. It's tremendously difficult to maintain momentum. The other aspect is that the world in that league is so competitive and aggressive, you've got to make it clear that there is room at the top for new blood or you're going to lose your young talent."
On the other hand, Robinson deplores a recent trend of almost management du jour, a switch in chief executives to fit every shift in business strategy. "There are times when the CEO's talents, because of the business situation, must be more focused on cutting or on investing and acquisitions, or what have you. What you've got, hopefully, is the capacity to play on all those courts and the ability to know how to manage through adversity.
"Boards of directors probably are feeling their responsibility more. Some of them try to prove that they are tough. But sometimes change for the sake of change is okay, too," Robinson says with a bit of a laugh.
he change in his own
life since leaving
American Express in
January has been
good for him,
Robinson says. He's
begun a New York
company that will
make venture capital
investments in new
technologies.
"We're looking
chiefly at information
technologies,
interactive kind of
stuff that's a marriage
between
telecommunications,
distributed computer
database and media,"
Robinson says.As to his penchant for physical fitness, it's only increased. "Absolutely," he says with emphasis. "I've stepped that up. I will put more discipline into getting to the gym."
Though he still carries a heavy workload Robinson's grimly competitive zeal may have been tempered slightly by his American Express experiences. With a hint of autumn in his voice, he says, "I haven't felt this free in 22 years."