Part IThe Story
The Man Who Left the Laboratory
It was October, at the start of a fundraising drive that Phillips Academy called Campaign Andover, when two emissaries from the school went to see an old boy at his Park Avenue office. Barbara Landis Chase was the head of school. Peter R. Ramsey was the secretary of the academy. They carried a presentation on the science education needs of the place, which in practice meant a presentation about Evans Hall, a 1963 building that sat on the campus in what the architects politely called "contrasting architecture and siting" to everything around it. The man they had come to see was in his seventies, chairman emeritus of Bristol-Myers Squibb, a member of the class of 1941, and by his own account a donor without a plan. He had known he wanted, as he put it, to "do something special." He had not known what. "I didn't know what it would be," he said later, "but I knew I'd know it when I found it."
He found it in a laboratory, which is the first of several small ironies in the life of Richard Lee Gelb.
He had never much cared for laboratories. At Andover he had preferred history and English. At Yale he began in chemical engineering, the major his father's profession might have suggested, and then dropped it. The school's own account of the gift notes, with an almost audible clearing of the throat, that although Gelb "took close interest in the research and development arm of Bristol-Myers Squibb, it was not in the lab, but in the corner office of that company, that he made his fortune." Now the corner office would pay for the lab. In 1999 he gave Andover one of the largest gifts it had ever received. The result was a three-story building of 55,000 gross square feet, built for about $12 million by Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, with twenty-six fume hoods in its chemistry and biology labs, a scientist-in-residence program, systems for handling and disposing of hazardous materials, and an 18-foot-diameter observatory on the roof. It opened in January 2004. Gelb died on April 4 of that year, of cancer, at 79, several months before the building was dedicated.
There was another laboratory with his name on it, a much larger one. In 1995, the year he finally stepped down as chairman, Bristol-Myers renamed its research campus in Wallingford, Connecticut, the Richard L. Gelb Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Development. The facility ran to 982,000 square feet. In June 2015 the company announced it would close it. In 2018 it was demolished.
So: two laboratories bearing the name of a man who walked out of chemistry, one of them standing on a hill in Massachusetts and the other gone. The space between them takes in most of the history of the American corporation in the second half of the twentieth century. A hair dye bought in France during the Depression turned into a household name, the household name was sold to a laxative and toothpaste company, the son of the hair dye's founders came to run the laxative and toothpaste company, and the laxative and toothpaste company, under that son, became the second-largest drug maker in the world. Then his successors took apart, one division after another, nearly everything he had assembled.
Gelb is hard to see. There is no memoir. There is no business book with his face on the jacket and no famous quotation on leadership. The few sentences of his that survive in the public record are a joint press statement, a remark about a gift, and some letters in archives whose contents are not online. His Wikipedia entry, at the time of writing, gives his birth name in the infobox as "Richard Lee Geib," a typo nobody has troubled to fix. For twenty-one years he ran one of the largest health care companies on earth, and the internet barely knows how to spell him.
His family's first great product was sold on exactly that kind of uncertainty: the promise that nobody would be able to tell.
By the Numbers
The Gelb Era at Bristol-Myers
21 yearsAs chief executive of Bristol-Myers (1972–1993)
35 yearsOn the Bristol-Myers board (1960–1995)
$12BValue of the 1989 stock-swap merger with Squibb
$11.4BWorldwide revenues in 1994, the year before he retired as chairman
982,000Square feet in the Wallingford R&D center named for him, demolished in 2018
7% → 40%Share of American women coloring their hair, from the 1950s to the 1970s
10thHis finish in the javelin at the 1948 U.S. Olympic Trials
A Name That Means Yellow
In German, gelb means yellow. The family that carried the word to New York would make its fortune selling blonde, though nobody seems to have remarked on it at the time, and the product never bore the family name.
Lawrence M. Gelb was born on January 15, 1898. The sources call him a chemist and also, less grandly, a chemical broker, and the gap between the two descriptions is worth noticing. He was a New Yorker and, according to the categories into which encyclopedias sort the dead, one of the twentieth century's American Jews. In 1931, with the country three years into the Depression and, as one Andover chronicler put it, "everyone struggling to survive," he traveled to France with his wife and with James Romeo, a business partner and lifelong friend. There they came across a hair-coloring preparation that worked differently from what American salons were using. Instead of coating the hair, it penetrated the shaft, and the color came out softer and more natural-looking. Lawrence bought the rights to market it in the United States.
His wife's role in the decision is recorded only in an aside: he went abroad "with the guidance of his wife." Her name was Joan, and she worked professionally as Joan Clair. The product was named for her. That is how a German-Jewish surname meaning yellow ended up absent from the most famous brand of yellow hair in America, replaced by a stage name with a French ending. Clair-ol. Light, clear, and nobody's ancestry in particular.
From the start, the encyclopedia of popular culture notes, Lawrence promoted the product on the premise "that beautiful hair was every woman's right, and that hair color, then considered risqué, was no different from other cosmetics." That was a large claim in 1931. Dyed hair belonged to actresses and to the kind of woman respectable women talked about. For two decades Clairol sold its tint to beauty salons and to the professionals who applied it behind a curtain, and the company did well enough, in the chronicler's phrase, that "the Gelbs were able to send their sons to Yale and Harvard."
There were two sons. Richard came first, on June 8, 1924. Bruce followed on February 24, 1927. Both went to the New England boarding schools that existed largely to turn boys into a particular kind of American man. Richard went to Andover and graduated in 1941. Bruce went to Andover as well, long enough to meet a boy named George Herbert Walker Bush there in 1941, and later graduated from Choate in 1945. The father had found his opportunity in a French bottle. The sons would be raised inside the institutions that decided who counted as American, and both would go on to run institutions of their own.
You could read the whole Gelb story as a story about a product that let people pass, and about the family that sold it learning to pass too. Nobody in the record says this. The record isn't the kind of document that says things like that. But the pattern is there.
The Javelin Thrower Who Studied Something
At Andover, Richard Gelb threw the javelin on the 1941 varsity spring track team, and threw it well. The school's Athletics Hall of Honor, which inducted him posthumously, keeps the numbers. Seven years after he left Andover, by way of Yale, three years of military service in the Second World War, and a return to Yale, he finished sixth in the NCAA in the javelin and tenth at the 1948 U.S. Olympic Trials. Tenth is not a team. It is close enough to see the team from where you stand.
The javelin is an odd event to excel at for a man whose career would consist of letting go of things. You run, you plant, and at exactly the right instant you release, and everything afterward depends on how cleanly you let the spear leave your hand. Holding on longer doesn't make it go farther.
What he studied at Yale depends on whom you ask. Andover's account of the science center gift has him starting in chemical engineering and switching to economics, "a better fit." The online biographical database NNDB lists a B.S. in economics. The Yale Bulletin, in a 2004 article about the company's partnership with the medical school, describes him as "a 1945 Yale College graduate with a degree in English." That is the class year Yale assigned to the boy who had enrolled before the war, though the Hall of Honor has him actually finishing in 1948. It is a little funny that the record can't agree what one of the country's leading pharmaceutical executives studied in college. All three versions agree on one point: whatever it was, it wasn't chemistry.
Harvard Business School came next, and he took a master's degree there in 1950. The Andover chronicler lists what he learned with the earnestness of a school newsletter: "advertising, manufacturing and finance — all the things that later on proved to be highly essential in Gelb's career." It is a fair summary of the curriculum. It is also a fair summary of the man. He was a generalist trained to run a whole company, someone who could read a production schedule, a balance sheet, and a print ad and see how they bore on one another.
He married Phyllis Nason, called Rusty, born in 1930. They had a son, Lawrence Nason Gelb, in 1952. He became a psychiatrist. Lucy Gates followed in 1954 and Jane Elizabeth in 1957. Then came a twelve-year gap, and James Matthew was born in 1969, the year Larry graduated from Andover. The family lived, as Gelb did nearly all his life, on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
After Harvard he went home. In the language of the school chronicles, he "went back to his roots and joined the family business." That sounds like modesty and was probably also strategy, since the family business was about to become one of the most talked-about companies in American consumer marketing. Richard rose to president of Clairol.
Only Her Hairdresser Knows for Sure
The breakthrough happened before the advertising did, and Bruce Gelb, the younger son, the marketer, the one who would later run American propaganda abroad, is the person who described it best.
In 1949 Clairol introduced Miss Clairol Hair Color Bath. One source dates it to 1950, and the Gelb record contains a lot of disagreements like that. It was the first one-step hair color for salon use. Before it, coloring hair took several stages and a lot of skill, and it carried a certain whiff of chemical risk. When Clairol's sales representatives gave a live demonstration at the International Beauty Show in New York, thousands of hairdressers and beauticians crowded around to watch. They didn't believe what they saw.
— Bruce Gelb, to Malcolm Gladwell in The New YorkerThey were astonished. This was to the world of hair color what computers were to the world of adding machines. The sales guys had to bring buckets of water and do the rinsing off in front of everyone, because the hairdressers in the crowd were convinced we were doing something to the models behind the scenes.
Buckets of water on a convention floor. Proof had to be performed in public, because the product's whole value was that it looked like nothing had been done, and so people assumed something had been done in secret. It is one of the great scenes in American selling, and it contains the problem Clairol would spend the 1950s solving: how to sell a transformation that customers wanted no one to notice.
In 1956 the company brought the formula home. Miss Clairol became the first at-home permanent hair color, sold in salons and in stores, and Clairol hired Foote, Cone & Belding to advertise it. The agency gave the account to a junior copywriter named Shirley Polykoff, the only woman writing copy at the firm. Polykoff colored her own hair and didn't say so, which was the custom. Years earlier, during the Depression, she had been introduced to her future mother-in-law, who afterward took her son aside and asked him about his girlfriend's real hair color. The question Polykoff imagined the older woman asking, Does she color her hair, or doesn't she?, became one of the most famous lines in advertising history. Does she... or doesn't she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.
The line worked because it never answered itself. The early print ads, some shot by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, showed wholesome young mothers next to children whose hair matched theirs. They were not glamour girls. They were the girl next door with a kid on her hip. The matching child was the alibi, since a woman whose daughter has the same hair can't have dyed it. Malcolm Gladwell, writing about Clairol in The New Yorker in 1999, described hair color for women of that decade this way:
— Malcolm Gladwell, “True Colors,” The New Yorker, March 22, 1999A useful fiction — a way of bridging the contradiction between the kind of woman you were and the woman you were supposed to be.
The numbers followed. Clairol's sales reportedly quadrupled within six years. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the share of American women who colored their hair went from 7 percent to 40 percent, by the encyclopedia's count. By 1959 Clairol was considered the leading company in the American hair-coloring industry. Polykoff was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1967. The slogans kept coming, most of them mild provocations a reader of today can only look at with a kind of anthropological wonder. Is it true blondes have more fun? If I've only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde. For the gray-covering formula Loving Care: What would your husband do if suddenly you looked ten years younger?
Bruce had arrived by a more conventional route. After the Navy, Yale in 1950, and Harvard Business School in 1953, he spent four years at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, first as assistant brand manager and then as brand manager, learning packaged-goods marketing at the company that more or less invented the discipline. He joined Clairol in 1957 as advertising manager, became marketing vice president in 1958 and executive vice president in 1961, and was president from 1965 to 1976. Under him Clairol launched Nice 'n Easy, the first shampoo-in color, with the line The closer he gets, the better you look. In 1966 the company sponsored That Girl on ABC, a half hour of Marlo Thomas's very healthy-looking hair.
Somewhere in this period, and the record doesn't say exactly when, Richard Gelb's name went onto a slim book called Your Future in Beauty Culture. The title suggests a vocational guide, the sort of volume given to a teenager weighing a trade. It is the only book he is credited with. The future chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's board, of Memorial Sloan Kettering's overseers, of a company that would win the National Medal of Technology, is on the record as an author about beauty school.
Sold, and Then Not Sold
Even the year of the sale is disputed. Several sources say the Gelbs sold Clairol to Bristol-Myers in 1957. Others, including the Bristol-Myers corporate chronology, Wella's company history, and the encyclopedia of popular culture, say 1959. One encyclopedia manages to give both dates in a single article. The weight of the evidence points to 1959, and the confusion fits a family whose foundational sales pitch was that you couldn't quite be sure.
The buyer was an old company with a modest history. In 1887 two Hamilton College graduates and former fraternity brothers, William McLaren Bristol and John Ripley Myers, put $5,000 each into the Clinton Pharmaceutical Company, a failing drug maker in Clinton, New York. For years they lost money. They lacked capital and, by one account, didn't really understand how drugs were made, and they sold their preparations to local doctors and dentists out of a horse and buggy. Bristol had been born in Clinton on July 28, 1860. He was a small-town man who bought a small-town business and refused to let it die. Myers died in 1899, and the hyphenated name outlived him by more than a century. The company found its footing with Sal Hepatica, a laxative mineral salt, and then, in 1901, with Ipana toothpaste. Over time it gathered household brands: Bufferin, Excedrin, Ban deodorant, Vitalis hair tonic, and through Drackett, Windex and Drano. In 1943 it bought a plant in East Syracuse that had made acidophilus milk and converted it to producing penicillin for the Allied forces.
In 1959, according to Bristol-Myers's own history, the company's president and chief executive, Frederic N. Schwartz, and its treasurer, Gavin K. MacBain, who would later succeed Schwartz, decided that Bristol-Myers should acquire "well-managed smaller companies." The phrase deserves attention. They weren't buying products or patents. They were buying management. That meant buying the people who ran the company, and in the case of Clairol, the people who ran it were Gelbs.
Richard stayed on as president of Clairol. In 1960 he joined the Bristol-Myers board. In 1967 he became president of the parent company, the same year it acquired Mead Johnson, the infant-formula maker. In 1972 he succeeded MacBain as chief executive. In 1976 he added the title of chairman.
So a family business is sold to a larger company, and thirteen years later the founder's eldest son is running the larger company. In the language of deals, the target ended up running the acquirer. Bruce came along behind him. He became executive vice president of Bristol-Myers in 1977, president of its consumer products group in 1981, executive vice president over both the consumer products and health care groups in 1984, and vice chairman from 1985 to 1988. By the mid-1980s two of the most senior people at Bristol-Myers were the sons of the couple whose hair dye it had bought. The Gelbs had sold Clairol and, in a sense, ended up with all of Bristol-Myers.
This is the hinge of the story, and because it is a quiet hinge it gets less attention than it deserves. Richard Gelb didn't found anything. He didn't take over a company through a raid or a proxy fight. He let his family's company be absorbed and then rose up through the bigger company that had absorbed it. Most second-generation heirs who sell the family firm take the money and leave. He stayed, and he climbed.
The Corner Office and the Laboratory
The company Gelb took over in 1972 was a conglomerate of everyday products. It made deodorant, toothpaste, drain cleaner, glass cleaner, headache pills, hair dye, baby formula, and, almost as an afterthought for someone looking at the ad budget, prescription drugs. When the Los Angeles Times covered his biggest deal in 1989, it still described Bristol-Myers as the maker of "such products as Ban, Excedrin and Drano." The newspaper's shorthand was a fair picture of how the public saw the company, and Gelb set out to change that picture without anyone noticing he was doing it.
In his first year as chief executive he started something no one required of him. In 1972 Bristol-Myers made its first major grant to the Yale School of Medicine. It went to Dr. Leon E. Rosenberg, who chaired Yale's new Department of Human Genetics and later became dean of the medical school. Rosenberg's field was barely a discipline yet, and his career followed the field as it grew. The partnership with Yale lasted more than thirty years. Bristol grants paid for research in cancer, genetics, neuroscience, and virology. In 1996 they helped create Yale's Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, which let graduate students rotate through laboratories in as many as twelve departments. Robert J. Alpern, dean of the medical school in 2004, said: "I can't overstate how important this program has been for Yale."
One piece of that partnership came back to the company as a product. In Yale's pharmacology labs, William H. Prusoff and his colleague Tai-Shun Lin found antiviral properties in a compound that Bristol-Myers Squibb developed and sold as Zerit. It became a staple of the AIDS drug cocktail. In 2001, after a request from Doctors Without Borders, the company and Yale rewrote their patent agreement to make the drug available across Africa at a thirty-fold discount. Prusoff and Lin were bench scientists in a university lab whose work ended up in the pill bottles of millions of people they never met. That is roughly the reverse of the Gelb path, from shop floor to boardroom, and the two paths crossed at Yale because the man in the corner office had decided in 1972 that crossings like this were worth paying for.
In September 2004, a few months after Gelb's death, Yale and the company dedicated a plaque to him in the Sterling Hall of Medicine. Peter R. Dolan, then chairman and chief executive of Bristol-Myers Squibb, spoke.
— Peter R. Dolan, chairman and CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb, at Yale, September 2004He believed strongly that scientific collaborations across institutional and disciplinary lines were absolutely essential if we wanted to make any progress against some of the stubborn scourges like cancer, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, etc. Most importantly, he followed up and took specific actions.
He followed up. For a corporate eulogy that is unusually specific praise, and it is consistent with what the archives contain. In the James D. Watson Collection at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory there is a file labeled "Bristol-Myers Company (1983–2000)." It holds a letter from Richard L. Gelb to Watson dated February 15, 1983, and another dated February 14, 1990. It also holds a letter from Watson to Gelb that the archivists tagged with the subjects "Awards and Prizes" and the name of the scientist Leo Sachs, born, like Gelb, in 1924. The letters themselves aren't online. What survives is their existence: a consumer products executive writing over the better part of a decade to the man who co-discovered the structure of DNA, about prizes and about science.
Other traces of him show the CEO of a multinational doing the ordinary work of the job. There is a letter to Senator Vance Hartke about the Foreign Trade and Investment Act of 1972. The abstract available records the fact of the letter but not what it argued. There are forewords he wrote in 1984 and 1986, an article on health care reform in 1995, and a memo in Senator Bob Dole's papers about the Business Roundtable's policy committee. He wrote things down when he wanted something done, and he didn't, so far as anyone can find, write about himself.
The investments kept coming. In 1983 Bristol-Myers introduced tamper-resistant packaging for its capsule products, part of a broader industry reckoning with how a pill gets from the factory to the medicine cabinet. In 1984 it built a research facility in Wallingford worth many millions of dollars, the campus that would eventually carry his name. Year by year a company known for drain cleaner was turning into a company known for drugs, and doing it quietly. It looked as though nothing had changed. Like a good dye job.
Two Richards in July
On the night of Wednesday, July 26, 1989, Bristol-Myers and the Squibb Corporation signed a definitive merger agreement. They announced it the next day. The deal was a stock swap worth about $12 billion, and it would create the world's second-largest drug company.
Squibb's story is the counterpoint to Clairol's. Edward Robinson Squibb was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 4, 1819. He spent five years as an apothecary's apprentice in Philadelphia and saved enough of his small pay to enter Jefferson Medical College, from which he graduated in 1845. He then served a decade as a surgeon in the U.S. Navy. That service persuaded him that American medicine was being poisoned by impure drugs. He developed a better way to make ether using steam distillation and shared the method with the rest of the profession instead of patenting it. In 1858 he rented a brownstone in Brooklyn for his own firm. That December an ether fire badly burned him and nearly destroyed the business. A group of doctors and surgeons raised $2,100 to get him running again in 1859. When the American Medical Association wouldn't adopt his stricter purity standards, he self-published his own alternative to the national pharmacopeia. He was a man of measurement and purity who did not accept "good enough."
Squibb sold purity. Clairol sold a convincing illusion. The 1989 merger joined the two, and the man who would run the combined company had come from the illusion side.
The terms were tight. Bristol-Myers would issue 2.4 of its shares for each Squibb share, 242 million new shares in all, worth $11.98 billion at the July 27 closing price. To discourage hostile bidders, Squibb gave Bristol-Myers an option to buy about 20 percent of its outstanding stock at $123.90 a share. The two companies also signed a separate agreement to market each other's products, effective immediately and not contingent on the merger closing, so the commercial relationship would survive even if the corporate one fell apart. Combined, the two companies had 1988 sales of $8.6 billion, a market value of nearly $27 billion, a sales force of more than 4,000, research spending above $600 million (second-highest in the industry), and, they noted, a five-year compound annual earnings growth rate of 17.2 percent.
Wall Street rendered its verdict the same day. Squibb's stock jumped $24.75 to close at $112.50 on the New York Stock Exchange. Bristol-Myers fell $2.375 to $49.50. The market concluded, as it nearly always does, that the buyer had paid up. "This is great for the stockholders," a New York analyst named David Saks told the Los Angeles Times. He didn't say which stockholders.
The chief executives issued their statement together.
— Richard L. Gelb and Richard M. Furlaud, joint statement, July 27, 1989The Bristol-Myers Squibb merger is a unique combination of two successful and financially strong companies. We are confident that by combining our respective strengths in pharmaceuticals, health care, consumer products and nutrition, we will create an even stronger competitor in the health-care industry of the 1990s.
Squibb's chief executive was Richard M. Furlaud. The sources consulted for this profile say almost nothing about him beyond his name and title, which is its own small lesson about how merger partners get remembered. Under the agreement the companies would at first operate separately. Bristol-Myers kept its New York headquarters, eventually at 345 Park Avenue. Squibb stayed in Princeton. Gelb became chairman and chief executive of the combined company. Furlaud became president and a director, responsible for the pharmaceutical business. Two Richards: one the son of a hair-dye family, one the head of a company founded by a navy surgeon obsessed with purity. The one from hair dye ended up on top.
Analysts liked it. Squibb gained diversification, and Bristol-Myers gained strength and a set of drugs in development. Squibb had what the newspaper called a "near-lock" on the market for hypertension drugs, and Bristol-Myers had consumer products, over-the-counter medicines, and cancer treatments. Gelb's own list of strengths, "pharmaceuticals, health care, consumer products and nutrition," was exactly the order in which the company's successors would later dismantle it, starting from the end. That wasn't a failure of the 1989 vision so much as a sign of its age. It was a vision for "the health-care industry of the 1990s," and he had said so.
The Brother Who Went Abroad
The Gelb brothers split the world between them, and it is worth seeing how they did it.
Bruce was the one who went outward. He had met George H. W. Bush at Andover in 1941, and the Washington Post would later call Bush his "old prep school hero." In January 1989, a few days into his presidency, Bush announced that he would nominate Bruce S. Gelb, then vice chairman of Bristol-Myers, to direct the United States Information Agency, succeeding Charles Z. Wick. USIA was the government's instrument for telling the world about America: broadcasting, exchanges, cultural diplomacy. Bush was in effect asking the man who had marketed The closer he gets, the better you look to market the country.
It didn't go smoothly. "Bruce S. Gelb left behind the $936,500-a-year vice chairmanship of Bristol-Myers Co. to take over the United States Information Agency for his old prep school hero, George Bush," the Post's Judith Havemann wrote in June 1990. "But projecting America's image around the globe, let alone surviving the Washington bureaucracy, is proving to be a whole lot harder than marketing Clairol, Drano and Excedrin." In March 1991 Bush nominated him ambassador to Belgium, and he served there from November 10, 1991, to July 11, 1993. Later Mayor Rudolph Giuliani made him New York's commissioner for the United Nations, Consular Corps and International Business, and he served from 1994 to 1997. He chaired the Council of American Ambassadors. He was married to Lueza Thirkield Gelb for sixty-three years. He died in Naples, Florida, on November 17, 2025, at 98, more than two decades after his older brother.
Richard stayed in New York, and he stayed inside. That isn't an accusation of timidity. It describes where he chose to put his influence. Read his board memberships as a map and you see the controls of a city. He was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, of the New York Times Company, of New York Life Insurance, and of Bessemer Securities. He was director emeritus of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, vice chairman of the Board of Overseers and Board of Managers of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a director of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, and trustee emeritus of the New York Racing Association. He was an Andover charter trustee from 1976 to 1994, exactly the span of his chairmanship.
And there was the police. One biographical summary, in an aside that reads as though someone who knew him wrote it, says he was "fascinated by police work." With Mayor John V. Lindsay he helped found the New York City Police Foundation. It is a revealing detail. The executive whose family fortune came from a product built to keep a secret was drawn, in private, to detectives, to the people whose job is to find out what really happened.
With Bruce he ran the Lawrence M. Gelb Foundation, named for their father, which the IRS recognized as tax-exempt in September 1958, a year or so before the family sold Clairol. It supported education, cultural programs, and hospitals. Lawrence died on September 27, 1980, at 82. By then his eldest son had been running Bristol-Myers for eight years and his younger son was its executive vice president. The chemical broker who brought a bottle home from France lived long enough to see what that bottle had turned into.
What the Company Kept, and What It Sold
Gelb gave up the chief executive's title in 1993 and the chairmanship in 1995. In 1994, the year in between, the company went through a major reorganization and reported worldwide revenues of $11.4 billion. In 1995 the Wallingford campus took his name. He stayed on as chairman emeritus and consultant, with an office on Park Avenue where he could receive presentations from his old school.
The company he left seemed, for a few years, to confirm everything about it. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Bristol-Myers Squibb the National Medal of Technology, the country's highest honor for technological achievement, "for extending, and enhancing human life through innovative pharmaceutical research and development and for redefining the science of clinical study through groundbreaking and hugely complex clinical trials." That year sales were $20.22 billion and the company had 54,500 employees. Its mission statement promised "to extend and enhance human life by providing the highest quality health and personal care products." Personal care was still in the sentence. Clairol was still in the building, running ads in the late 1990s for Herbal Essences shampoo, promoted as "a totally organic experience," in which women washing their hair made sounds that weren't about hair.
Then the disassembly began, and it went in roughly the reverse order of Gelb's 1989 list.
In 1998 the company announced it would sell three consumer brands. In 2001 it sold Clairol to Procter & Gamble for $4.95 billion, the family's bottle passing to the company where Bruce had learned brand management half a century before. In January 2005 it put Excedrin up for sale along with its U.S. and Canadian consumer medicines business. In 2009 it split off Mead Johnson, the nutrition business it had bought in 1967, the year Richard became president. The company described all this as a move from a large, diversified pharmaceutical company to a specialty biopharma company, a transformation that also involved closing half its manufacturing plants. Clairol kept moving after it left: to Coty in 2016 as part of a $12.5 billion deal for P&G's beauty brands, and then into Wella, controlled by KKR. In 2004 Clairol's hair-care products had annual sales of $1.6 billion.
There was worse. From 1999 to 2001, years when Gelb held only the emeritus title, the company booked sales improperly by "channel stuffing," pushing excess inventory onto wholesalers to make revenue look bigger. It restated its results, settled with the Department of Justice and the SEC for $150 million, and in 2004 restated five years of financial results. In 2002 it paid a total of $670 million to settle cases accusing it of illegally maintaining a monopoly on the cancer drug Taxol and of trying to keep a generic version of BuSpar off the market. Its former pharmaceutical chief and former chief financial officer were indicted for securities fraud. Under a deferred prosecution agreement the company was placed under a monitor, the former federal judge Frederick B. Lacey. On September 12, 2006, Lacey urged the company to remove its chief executive over a separate dispute involving Plavix. The company announced that day that he would step down. That chief executive was Peter R. Dolan, the same man who two years earlier had stood in Sterling Hall and praised Richard Gelb for following up.
None of this happened while Gelb ran the company. It is part of the record anyway, because institutions don't stay the way their builders leave them. The Wallingford center, the research campus he had commissioned in the 1980s, renamed in 1995, and built for the drug company he wanted his conglomerate to become, was slated for closure in June 2015, three years after its neighbors had first heard the layoff numbers, and torn down in 2018. Its 982,000 square feet became an empty lot in central Connecticut.
The company went on growing in a direction he might or might not have recognized. In 2019 it bought Celgene for $74 billion, or $95 billion including debt, more than eight times the value of the Squibb deal that had once made it the second-largest drug company in the world. By 2025 it reported revenues of $48.2 billion. The products that brought in that money were immunotherapies, anticoagulants, and cancer drugs. No hair dye. No drain cleaner. It had become fully what Gelb had been steering it toward since 1972, and it had gotten there by selling off everything that showed where it came from.
Gelb's private affairs leave only a faint trace. A Federal Trade Commission notice dated January 27, 2000, records that Deutsche Bank AG received early termination of the antitrust waiting period for its acquisition of something called The Charter Corporation, and it lists the acquired party as "Richard L. Gelb." Early termination was granted. It is a single line in a government database, the kind of record a fortune leaves when it doesn't want to be written about.
Red Brick, Granite, and Glass
In 2003 Yale gave him its George H. W. Bush Lifetime of Leadership Award, named for the old prep school hero of his younger brother. It was nearly the last public honor of his life. In January 2004 the Gelb Science Center opened at Andover and students moved into its labs. On April 4, 2004, in New York, he died. The pharmaceutical trade press ran a short notice: chairman emeritus, former chief executive, aged 79.
Barbara Landis Chase, who had made the presentation in his Park Avenue office, called him "a man of dignity, integrity, and commitment." She would miss his wisdom and his counsel, she said, and Andover would miss "a generous, loyal alumnus." These are the words schools use for important donors, and here they also seem to have been true. People who worked with him remembered how he behaved, not anything he said. The Andover tribute didn't quote him, and neither did Yale's. The company's eulogy praised his follow-through.
Fifteen years later, Phillips Academy inducted him into its Athletics Hall of Honor. The ceremony took place in Kemper Auditorium on Saturday, June 8, 2019, during reunion weekend. It was, though the press release didn't mention it, the day he would have turned 95. The citation listed his javelin throws, his sixth place in the NCAA, his tenth at the Olympic Trials, his father's company, the board seats, the police foundation. It noted that he was the father of Larry Gelb '69 and grandfather of Emily Gelb '05. Three generations, then, in the institution his parents' hair dye had paid for.
The building is still there. It sits on what was once the campus east lawn, on the site of a 1963 hall that never matched anything around it. It has three floors of 16,000 square feet each, biology, physics, and chemistry on separate levels, central stockrooms, and a chilled-water plant in the partial basement that also serves the old buildings next door. The design brief said it should encourage students "to learn science by doing science." It was also, in the words of the alumni guide, "painstakingly fashioned to complement the Georgian revival look of the campus, with its traditional use of red brick, granite and glass." The building opened in 2004 and was built to look as though it had always been there.
On the roof is the observatory, 18 feet across. From the lawn below, if no one points it out, you would take the whole thing for one of the old buildings.
Part IIThe Playbook
Richard Gelb left no management philosophy in writing. What he left is a pattern of decisions, each of them recorded somewhere in the documents: being sold and then rising inside the buyer, funding science he didn't practice, merging with a complement under deal terms built to hold, dividing work with a sibling, and accumulating board seats that added up to influence across New York. The principles below are taken from that record. They concern an executive who worked mostly out of sight, and they hold most strongly for operators who are inheriting something, being acquired, or trying to change what an institution is without announcing it.
The principles
- 1.Treat being acquired as a way in, not an exit.
- 2.Sell the permission, not the product.
- 3.Make the proof survive the suspicion.
- 4.Leave the lab, then fund it.
- 5.Change the company's identity slowly enough that nobody notices.
- 6.Partner across institutional lines, then follow up.
- 7.Merge with your opposite.
- 8.Write the safeguards into the deal.
- 9.Split the work with your closest ally.
- 10.Build influence through the boards you sit on.
- 11.Name the decade your strategy is for.
- 12.Give when you recognize the right thing.
G
From Hair Dye to the Corner Office
The decisions that took a family business inside a conglomerate, and the family to the top of it.
1931
Lawrence and Joan Gelb, with James Romeo, bring a French hair-coloring preparation to the U.S. and name it for Joan's professional name.
1948
Richard finishes 10th in the javelin at the U.S. Olympic Trials and graduates from Yale.
1950
Richard earns his Harvard MBA and joins Clairol, later becoming its president.
1956
Miss Clairol becomes the first at-home permanent hair color. "Does she... or doesn't she?"
1959
Bristol-Myers buys Clairol under a strategy of acquiring "well-managed smaller companies." Richard stays as Clairol's president.
1960
Richard joins the Bristol-Myers board.
1967
Richard becomes president of Bristol-Myers. The company acquires Mead Johnson.
1972
Richard becomes CEO and starts the Yale School of Medicine partnership.
1976
Richard adds the title of chairman.
1984
Bristol-Myers builds its Wallingford research facility.
1989
$12 billion stock-swap merger with Squibb creates the world's second-largest drug company.
1993
Richard steps down as CEO.
1995
Richard retires as chairman. Wallingford is renamed for him.
1999
He makes one of the largest gifts in Andover's history for the Gelb Science Center.
2004
The science center opens in January. Gelb dies April 4.
Principle 1
Treat being acquired as a way in, not an exit
When Bristol-Myers bought Clairol around 1959, the deal followed a stated thesis. Frederic Schwartz and Gavin MacBain wanted to buy "well-managed smaller companies." They were buying management as much as a balance sheet, and that gave the managers of the acquired company leverage most of them never think to use. Richard Gelb used it. He stayed as Clairol's president, joined the parent board in 1960, became parent president in 1967, and succeeded MacBain as CEO in 1972. Within thirteen years of the sale, the founders' son was running the company that had bought his parents' business.
Most founders and heirs see an acquisition as the end of the story: the money arrives and the job is over. Gelb saw the larger company's ladder as something he now had standing to climb. The acquirer had bought Clairol for its management, so it had already declared that it valued the people. He took the parent at its word and became the management of the whole company.
The point isn't loyalty for its own sake. A business acquired because of its team carries credibility into the parent company, and that credibility fades quickly. Gelb's board seat in 1960 meant he was in the room where corporate strategy was decided, not just where Clairol's numbers were reported. When the buyer's reasoning is about people, the people in the target have more power than they realize, but only while they stay.
Tactic: If you're being acquired for your team, negotiate for a seat on the parent company's governing body, not just your division's, and treat the acquirer's whole leadership structure as your next career.
Principle 2
Sell the permission, not the product
Miss Clairol didn't win because of chemistry, though the one-step formula mattered. It won because Shirley Polykoff's campaign gave American women social permission to do something they already wanted to do and were ashamed of. "Does she... or doesn't she?" never answers itself. The ads showed matching children instead of glamour models, and the matching child was evidence that nothing had been done. Gladwell called the result "a useful fiction," a way to close the gap between who a woman was and who she was supposed to be.
The lesson for operators is that the main obstacle to adopting a product is often social, not functional. Lawrence Gelb saw this in 1931 when he argued that hair color was "no different from other cosmetics" in a market that thought it risqué. For twenty-five years that argument stayed with salons, where professionals could keep the secret. When the company brought the product home, it had to bring the secrecy home too, and the slogan did exactly that: the customer was promised that other people wouldn't know.
The results were dramatic. Hair coloring went from 7 percent of American women in the 1950s to 40 percent in the 1970s, and Clairol's sales roughly quadrupled within six years. Few product features could have achieved that. Removing a stigma achieved it.
Tactic: Before improving your product, find out what your customer is embarrassed to admit they want, and design your marketing so they can buy it without having to say so.
Principle 3
Make the proof survive the suspicion
At the 1949 International Beauty Show, the professional audience assumed Clairol was cheating. "The hairdressers in the crowd were convinced we were doing something to the models behind the scenes," Bruce Gelb recalled. So Clairol's salespeople brought buckets of water and rinsed the models on the convention floor. The demonstration wasn't designed to impress people. It was designed to rule out every explanation except that the product worked.
A breakthrough that looks too good runs into a specific kind of resistance: the more effective it is, the more experts will assume a trick. The answer is not better slides. It is a demonstration that can't be faked and is done where the skeptics can watch. Bruce's comparison, computers to adding machines, explains why the doubt was rational. When performance jumps by an order of magnitude, the reasonable first guess is fraud.
The same logic ran through the Gelbs' later decisions. Bristol-Myers under Richard spent heavily on clinical research in public. The National Medal of Technology the company won in 1999 specifically cited its "groundbreaking and hugely complex clinical trials." The buckets of water and the clinical trial do the same job: they show the result in a way the skeptic can verify.
Tactic: Identify the most expert doubter in your market, ask what would convince them, and stage exactly that test in front of them.
Principle 4
Leave the lab, then fund it
Gelb dropped chemical engineering at Yale. He made his fortune "not in the lab, but in the corner office," as Andover put it. Yet nearly every lasting thing tied to his name is a laboratory: the 1972 Yale partnership, the 1984 Wallingford facility, the Wallingford center renamed for him in 1995, and the Andover science center with its twenty-six fume hoods. He knew he wasn't a scientist, and he didn't pretend to be one. He did something more useful. He made sure scientists had money, institutional support, and his continued attention.
Leaders who don't come from the technical side of their industries often make one of two mistakes. They defer to the technical staff so completely that they stop steering, or they resent it so much that they starve it. Gelb did neither. His letters to James Watson in 1983 and 1990 show a chief executive who kept up a correspondence with the top of the scientific world, and the "Awards and Prizes" tag in the archive suggests he paid attention to how scientific excellence gets recognized.
There is a lesson about range here as well. Harvard Business School taught him "advertising, manufacturing and finance." Those are the skills that turn a lab result into a product on a pharmacy shelf. He didn't need to make the discovery. He needed to build the company the discovery could move through.
Tactic: If you don't come from the core technical discipline of your business, make yourself its most dependable patron: commit multiyear funding, show up in person, and keep the relationship going over years.
Principle 5
Change the company's identity slowly enough that nobody notices
In 1972 Bristol-Myers was, in the public mind, the company that made Ban, Excedrin, and Drano. By 1989 it was merging into the world's second-largest drug company. That shift happened without any public rebranding or announced turnaround. It came through research grants, a new research campus, and finally a merger. The Los Angeles Times was still describing the company by its deodorant and drain cleaner on the day it announced the Squibb deal.
Gradual change has real advantages. The consumer businesses kept producing cash, which paid for the move into drugs, and nothing about the strategy invited activists, journalists, or competitors to attack it too early. Employees in the legacy businesses weren't told they belonged to the past. The company's character changed underneath its familiar brands, the way Polykoff's slogan promised a color change that would look natural.
The approach has costs. A company changing quietly can end up with two cultures and a public that misunderstands it. Gelb's successors eventually had to finish the job loudly, by selling Clairol, splitting off Mead Johnson, and closing half the manufacturing plants. Still, gradual change bought him seventeen years of building before anyone outside the company had to agree with him.
B
Conventional Wisdom vs. the Gelb Approach
How Gelb's decisions differed from what you'd expect in each situation.
| Situation | Conventional move | Gelb's move | Mode |
|---|---|---|---|
| Family firm sold to a larger company | Take the money and leave | Stay, join the board, climb to CEO | Inside |
| Non-technical CEO of a science business | Defer entirely or underfund R&D | Fund university research from year one and keep in touch with top scientists | Patron |
| Changing a consumer conglomerate's identity | Announce a transformation | Change gradually through grants, facilities, and finally a merger | Gradual |
| Major merger | Assume the deal will close | 20% lockup option plus an immediate co-marketing agreement | Protect |
| Sibling in the same company | Compete for the top job | Divide roles: one inside the company, one in public and government | Inside |
| Major gift | Pick a cause early and announce it | Wait until the right project is in front of you | Gradual |
Tactic: If you're steering an institution toward a new identity, let the profitable old business pay for the new one, and don't announce the change until the new business is large enough to defend itself.
Principle 6
Partner across institutional lines, then follow up
The most specific praise Gelb received after his death came from Peter Dolan: he believed collaborations "across institutional and disciplinary lines were absolutely essential," and, "most importantly, he followed up and took specific actions." The Yale partnership he started in 1972 lasted more than three decades. It paid for research in cancer, genetics, neuroscience, and virology. It helped create a graduate program that the dean said he could not "overstate" the importance of. Through Prusoff and Lin's work, it contributed to Zerit, a drug central to AIDS treatment.
Partnerships between companies and universities are usually announced with fanfare and then quietly forgotten. Gelb's lasted because someone at the top kept attending to it. The first grant went to Leon Rosenberg, who was building a new department, not to an established program. Over time the relationship grew to include the 1996 graduate restructuring and, in 2001, a renegotiated patent agreement that cut the price of Zerit in Africa thirty-fold. Only a long relationship can renegotiate like that. A one-off transaction would never have had the trust.
What made it work was persistence. An initial grant gets a company a press release. Continued involvement over decades gets it a share of discoveries nobody could have planned for in 1972.
Tactic: Choose one outside research partner, make the first grant to a rising leader instead of an established name, and personally review the relationship every year for at least ten years.
Principle 7
Merge with your opposite
The 1989 merger worked on paper because the two companies were so different. Squibb, founded by a navy surgeon who crusaded for drug purity, had a "near-lock" on the hypertension market and little else. Bristol-Myers had consumer products, over-the-counter drugs, cancer treatments, and several promising drugs in development. Analysts praised the deal because it gave Squibb diversification and Bristol-Myers more pharmaceutical strength. The joint statement listed the combined company's areas plainly: "pharmaceuticals, health care, consumer products and nutrition."
Mergers of near-identical companies promise cost savings and often deliver culture wars. Mergers of complementary companies promise reach and give each side something it couldn't build alone. Combined research spending of more than $600 million put the new company second in the industry. A sales force of more than 4,000 could carry Squibb's cardiovascular drugs and Bristol's cancer drugs through the same doctors' offices.
Wall Street's reaction showed the price of this kind of deal. Squibb rose $24.75 and Bristol fell $2.375. The buyer's shareholders paid for the complement right away. Gelb accepted that, betting that the combination would be worth more over time than the drop in his stock that day.
Tactic: When you evaluate a merger, map each side's gaps against the other's strengths, and accept a premium for a partner that fills a gap you couldn't fill yourself within a decade.
Principle 8
Write the safeguards into the deal
Two details in the Squibb agreement show how carefully Gelb thought about deal risk. First, Squibb gave Bristol-Myers an option to buy about 20 percent of its stock at $123.90 a share, which made a hostile counterbid much more expensive. Second, the companies signed a separate agreement to market each other's products, effective immediately and "not conditioned on completing the merger." If regulators, shareholders, or a rival bidder blocked the combination, the commercial partnership would still stand.
Between signing and closing, a merger is fragile. The two provisions handled two different dangers. The lockup made it harder for someone else to take the deal away. The co-marketing agreement meant that even if the merger failed, the relationship would still produce value. That is the reasoning of a man trained in "advertising, manufacturing and finance." The finance protected the deal, and the marketing agreement made sure the effort paid off either way.
The general principle is that a well-built deal pays off in more than one outcome. Gelb's deal was designed so that even if the merger fell through, the companies would still have a working partnership and a stock position.
Tactic: For any transformative deal, include at least one provision that keeps value if the deal never closes, such as a commercial agreement, an equity position, or a license.
Principle 9
Split the work with your closest ally
Richard and Bruce Gelb spent about thirty years in the same family company and then in the same conglomerate. They never appear to have competed openly for the same job. Richard took the inside track: Clairol president, parent board, parent president, CEO, chairman. Bruce took the market-facing track: P&G brand training, Clairol advertising and marketing, Clairol president from 1965 to 1976, then executive vice president and vice chairman with worldwide responsibility for consumer products and health care. After that he went into government, as director of USIA and ambassador to Belgium.
The pairing worked because the roles were clearly different. Bruce's Andover friendship with George H. W. Bush opened public doors Richard didn't need to go through himself. Richard's board seats at the New York Fed, the Times, and Sloan Kettering kept the family's influence anchored in New York. Together they ran their father's foundation. The family operated in two settings at once, and neither brother had to be good at both.
There is a cautionary note. The Washington Post's line that projecting America's image was "a whole lot harder than marketing Clairol, Drano and Excedrin" shows that skills don't transfer perfectly. Splitting roles works best when each person stays in the setting their skills were built for.
Tactic: If you're building alongside a sibling, co-founder, or longtime partner, divide your roles explicitly, with one facing inward and one facing outward, so you're never competing for the same position.
Principle 10
Build influence through the boards you sit on
Look at Gelb's board seats as a single collection and they amount to a strategy. Federal Reserve Bank of New York: money. New York Times Company: the press. New York Life and Bessemer Securities: capital. Memorial Sloan Kettering: medicine, closely related to his own business. Council on Foreign Relations: foreign policy. Lincoln Center: culture. Citizens Crime Commission and the Police Foundation he co-founded with Mayor Lindsay: public safety. New York Racing Association: old New York society. Andover, as charter trustee from 1976 to 1994: the schools that shape the next generation of that establishment.
None of these seats made headlines. Together they gave a chief executive who rarely spoke in public a network of relationships covering nearly every institution that mattered to his company and his city. They also tied the family to an establishment it had entered only a generation earlier, by way of a French hair dye and a Depression-era trip abroad. The sons of a chemical broker ended up on the governing boards of the city.
The lesson isn't to collect boards for status. Each seat was a source of trust and information. A pharmaceutical CEO on Sloan Kettering's board learns how cancer care actually works. A CEO on the New York Fed's board learns how the economy moves before most people do.
Tactic: Treat outside board seats as a deliberate set, choosing one each in capital, media, your core industry, and your community, and expect the benefit to come from relationships over years rather than from any single seat.
Principle 11
Name the decade your strategy is for
The 1989 joint statement promised "an even stronger competitor in the health-care industry of the 1990s." It was a dated promise, and that turned out to be a kind of honesty. The four-part combination of pharmaceuticals, health care, consumer products, and nutrition was right for its time. Within a few years after Gelb left, his successors were taking it apart: three consumer brands sold in 1998, Clairol to P&G for $4.95 billion in 2001, Excedrin and North American consumer medicines in 2005, Mead Johnson split off in 2009. The Wallingford campus named for him was demolished in 2018.
Reading this as Gelb's failure gets it backward. He built for the decade he named, and the company that came out of the disassembly, a specialty biopharma company with $48 billion in revenue by 2025, rests on the pharmaceutical core he spent two decades building. The consumer businesses had funded the drug business, and then they were sold off once the drug business no longer needed them.
What is worth learning is the dating itself. Strategies have expiration dates. A leader who knows that builds pieces that can be separated and sold later. Clairol stayed a coherent, sellable brand inside Bristol-Myers for forty years, which is why it fetched $4.95 billion when the time came.
Tactic: Put an explicit time horizon on your strategy, and structure acquired businesses so a successor can sell them cleanly when that horizon passes.
Principle 12
Give when you recognize the right thing
At the start of Campaign Andover, Gelb didn't have a project in mind. "I didn't know what it would be," he said, "but I knew I'd know it when I found it." When Chase and Ramsey brought him a presentation on science education, he recognized it, and the result was one of the largest gifts in the academy's history. The building was carefully designed, with three floors dedicated to the sciences, an observatory, and brick chosen to match the old campus. It opened three months before he died.
His patience as a donor matches his patience as an executive. He didn't pick a cause to give his name to. He waited until the institution brought him a real need, and then he funded it fully. The building he paid for was built for the kind of learning he had walked away from, chemistry and physics, done hands-on. He had left the laboratory, and at the end of his life he paid for a new generation of students to work in one.
This kind of giving puts the recipient's need ahead of the donor's preferences. Telling a school what it should want is easy. It is harder, and more useful, to stay open, pay attention, and commit decisively once the school shows you what it needs.
Tactic: Before a major gift, ask the institution to show you its most urgent need, and commit only when that need fits what you most want your money to do.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Richard L. Gelb, on his gift to Phillips AcademyI didn't know what it would be, but I knew I'd know it when I found it.
— Richard L. Gelb and Richard M. Furlaud, joint statement announcing the Bristol-Myers Squibb merger, July 27, 1989We are confident that by combining our respective strengths in pharmaceuticals, health care, consumer products and nutrition, we will create an even stronger competitor in the health-care industry of the 1990s.
— Bruce Gelb, on the 1949 debut of Miss Clairol Hair Color BathThis was to the world of hair color what computers were to the world of adding machines.
— Barbara Landis Chase, former head of school, Phillips AcademyDick Gelb was a man of dignity, integrity, and commitment. I will miss his wisdom and his counsel, and Andover will miss a generous, loyal alumnus.
— Malcolm Gladwell, “True Colors,” The New Yorker, 1999In writing the history of women in the postwar era, did we forget something important? Did we leave out hair?
Maxims
- Treat being acquired as a way in. A company bought for its management has handed its managers a path up through the buyer.
- Sell the permission. Customers often already want the product; what they need is a way to buy it without admitting it.
- Show your proof in front of the skeptics. When a result looks too good, rule out the trick in the open, with the buckets of water on the floor.
- Fund what you didn't study. A non-technical leader can still be the most reliable backer the scientists have.
- Change a company's identity gradually. Let the profitable legacy business pay for the new one until the new one can stand by itself.
- Follow up. Most partnerships fade after the announcement; the ones that last have someone senior attending to them for decades.
- Merge with a complement, and pay for it. The market may punish the buyer on day one for a combination that is worth more later.
- Make the deal pay off even if it fails. Write in at least one provision that keeps value if the deal never closes.
- Divide roles with your closest ally. One partner faces inward and one faces outward, and neither competes for the other's job.
- Date your strategy. A plan built for a particular decade should be made of pieces a successor can sell when that decade ends.
