The Wall Street Journal had a great piece that is one of my favorites of the newspaper, a human interest story targeting a specific individual that tells a bigger story about the company he/she works for. This particular story is about a subject that I follow closely – that of AIG, now rebranded Chartis. Mr. Eastwood seems to be doing a good job but is still “deep in the woods”. Follow the link at the end of the piece to find the original wsj.com page.

In January, Peter Eastwood, the leader of one of the largest insurers in the U.S., walked into a broker’s office with a plea. “We want our partners to stick with us,” he said.

Mr. Eastwood had just been promoted to run Lexington Insurance Co., one of American International Group Inc.’s most profitable units, and he wanted to prevent jittery clients from bolting after last September’s government bailout.

“It’s been a humbling process,” says Mr. Eastwood, 42 years old. Although he had nothing to do with causing the mess that forced the government to swoop in, paying back the roughly $80 billion that AIG owes the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Treasury Department hinges largely on executives such as Mr. Eastwood who run the company’s many insurance units.

Those businesses need to thrive so the company can sell them or steer profits to the government — and still have something left over.

Before AIG nearly collapsed under the weight of its credit-default swaps, the insurer was widely seen as an indomitable force. The swagger is largely gone, with executives and employees now having to reassure clients about the New York company’s financial strength, fend off poaching and scramble for new business.

On Monday, the Government Accountability Office said in a report that AIG’s operations “have begun to show signs of stabilizing” but that the “ultimate success of AIG’s restructuring and repayment efforts remains uncertain.”

AIG has tried to hold and attract desired commercial-insurance customers. But business has suffered, with premiums declining at a double-digit percentage rate in the second quarter from a year earlier in the massive property-and-casualty division that includes Lexington. Income has tumbled in the division by more than 40% to $1 billion, after factoring out capital gains and losses.

New AIG chief Robert Benmosche is weighing whether he wants to keep the global property-and-casualty business, which has been rebranded Chartis, or sell a stake in the unit to investors.

Mr. Eastwood and other executives who toil mostly outside the glare directed at the outspoken Mr. Benmosche and his predecessors face the relentless challenge of essentially trying to run their businesses amid the turmoil. Some customers say the distractions have been obvious.

Last month, Stanford University Medical Center decided to drop two AIG policies, including one from Lexington for medical-malpractice claims. AIG was “really concentrated on their problems, rather than our problems,” says Jeff Driver, the medical center’s chief risk officer, who dealt with different AIG executives, not Mr. Eastwood. “It seemed to be more about them than about us.”
[lexington and churchhill downs] Getty Images

Lexington Insurance, a major AIG subsidiary, sells coverage to many high-profile clients, including Churchill Downs, where the Kentucky Derby is run.

A Chartis spokeswoman says many insurance clients “have appreciated our open and customer-focused approach” during the past year, adding that it “has become an even greater advantage for us in the marketplace.”

On its own, Lexington would be one of the nation’s largest insurers. It has logged tidy profits, including $1.5 billion in 2007, or 27% of the total for AIG’s commercial-insurance operations. Lexington takes on big and unusual risks shunned by many rivals, from onshore oil rigs to sports facilities. Lexington customers include some of the largest U.S. companies, such as General Electric Co., and the insurer is willing to commit millions of dollars on a single policy.

At the time of the AIG bailout, Mr. Eastwood handled health-care accounts at Lexington as a deputy to Kevin Kelley, who had turned the unit into a crown jewel for its parent. Last December, Mr. Eastwood was showering at a Houston hotel when an AIG executive called with word that Mr. Kelley was leaving with his top aide to join a rival. Mr. Eastwood was asked to take over.

Mr. Eastwood caught a flight back to Boston, where Lexington is based, alert to the danger that Mr. Kelley’s departure might spark an exodus. “By the time I get back to 100 Summer St., will I be the only one left in the building?” he recalls thinking.

The Rhode Island native launched a campaign to persuade people to stay. One pivotal moment came in an employee Webcast, where Mr. Eastwood spoke and then asked other top Lexington executives to talk, too. “To me, it was about securing the top and working my way down,” he says.

After the bailout, AIG established retention programs that called for giving thousands of employees bonuses ranging from $92,500 to $4 million. AIG hasn’t disclosed how much specific individuals at Lexington or elsewhere in the company were promised. “They went up to Boston with a bag of money,” says one person familiar with the matter. Mr. Eastwood says compensation hasn’t been “a central theme of the conversations.” The bonuses were distinct from the controversial payments that went to employees of the financial-products unit whose problems largely sparked the bailout.

There were tense moments. Shortly after taking over, Mr. Eastwood called Geof McKernan, the head of NSM Insurance Group, an agency in Conshohocken, Pa. “Are you calling to tell me everything is OK?” Mr. McKernan asked, according to both men. “What are you going to do when the top 10 people in your organization walk out in one week?”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Mr. Eastwood replied.

Mr. Eastwood got credit for keeping the top Lexington staff largely intact, though the threat isn’t gone. According to people familiar with the matter, a rival insurer tried last month to hire a Lexington executive who had been Mr. Eastwood’s peer before he got the top job at the unit. AIG responded to the attempted raid by promoting the executive to a position outside Lexington, and he stayed.

Since taking over at Lexington, Mr. Eastwood also has hit the road, traveling to more than 20 cities from San Diego to London to meet with customers and brokers, some of whom already were nervous because of the bailout.

In January, Mr. Eastwood went to Charlotte, N.C., and met with Steve DeCarlo, who heads an insurance brokerage, AmWINS Group Inc., which does more than $150 million of business with Lexington. “He understands the challenge ahead of him,” Mr. DeCarlo says. “He’s nobody’s dummy.”

It helps that AIG still is a huge player in commercial insurance, so finding alternatives at a competitive price can be hard, says Jim Rubel, an executive vice president at Lockton Inc., a Kansas City, Mo., brokerage.

Many customers also are comforted by the billions of dollars that AIG’s insurance units have for paying claims and oversight of AIG’s claims-paying strength by state insurance regulators. In May, Wyndham Worldwide Corp. renewed a policy with Lexington that provides $25 million of coverage for property damage at hundreds of the Parsippany, N.J., company’s hotels.

Mr. Driver, the Stanford risk manager, hasn’t ruled out a return to AIG. “We just want to step back and see how they develop,” he says.

Mr. Eastwood says the situation “feels a lot more stable.” This month, he spoke again to Mr. McKernan and asked the Pennsylvania insurance executive how things were going. “AIG’s not having any negative effect on my business. You’ve been able to keep your team together,” Mr. McKernan said. “So I’m happy.”

You can find the original HERE at wsj.com.

Chase Jarvis is a hero of mine from my avocation of photography. I read his blog from time to time to see what kinds of things he is working on. He is always at full tilt going a million miles an hour. Today, he turned me on to a great piece written by a Court Crandall of the Los Angeles ad agency, Ground Zero, that talks about “making it” or being successful at anything you choose to do in life. Here’s an excerpt:

…[Noah]Clark interviewed to be my assistant a couple weeks before he was scheduled to graduate from the University of Southern California. Unlike the other finalist for the job, an attractive woman the rest of the creative department was imploring me to hire, Noah was more “boy band”: spiked hair, fresh face, jeans that were more fancy than a guy needs to own. But there was something about him that reminded me of myself. And it wasn’t the hair. He was just so damn eager to be in the business. There was no pretense, no attitude or entitlement. All he wanted to do was work hard, learn and help.

So I hired him, spelling out very clearly that the chances of his growing into an art director position with us were similar to the word at the end of our agency name: “Zero.” He nodded along and said he understood. Then he set about completing every task asked of him to the highest standard possible. Between doing all the so-called “grunt” work, Noah grabbed every creative brief he found lying around the office and looked for ways to help out with layouts, taglines, new business presentations, etcetera. He never asked to be promoted. He never bitched about his day-to-day responsibilities or acted like anything was beneath him. Which is why when a junior art director position opened, I decided it was time to do what a guy named Peter Seronick did for me years before: Give him a chance. So I gave the kid who was Ground Zero the opportunity to join our creative department over all the guys and girls who simply wanted to work for Ground Zero. [Click the 'continue reading' link below...]

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In the four years that followed, Noah turned into an award-winning art director who did the kind of work students at VCU and Art Center now point to and say, “Someday.” But that wasn’t what made him special. The longer you do this job, the more you find that doing good work is the price of entry and it’s all the other stuff that separates the folks you really like from the ones you can’t live without (my emphasis, cj).

In 15 years of owning Ground Zero, there haven’t been many folks who regularly beat me to the office in the morning. Noah was one of them. It should also be noted that he was often the last to leave at night, if he left. I don’t say this to glamorize long hours or a sweatshop mentality, but to point out that he typically wasn’t burning the midnight oil or the pre-dawn oil to better his portfolio, but to make a presentation look a little better, work on the agency new business materials or polish an ad that was still a little too rough around the edges for his liking. This kind of dedication earned him the moniker “The Cleaner” from Laura Eastman, our head of account services. Like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, Noah was the guy who fixed things, no matter how screwed up they might have been when someone dumped them in his lap. When another art director left on vacation, Noah picked up the slack. When another team dropped the meat in the dirt, he picked up the pieces…

If you’ve gotten this far, then you either have character, want character, or you are one. As such, I strongly recommend you read the full piece here, and get some insight into becoming–or surrounding yourself–with “Players of Character”. I feel quite fortunate to work with several people that have such character. . .

Thanks Chase, via Adweek.