Leading with Conviction by Shalom Saada Saar

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. / It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. / -Albert Einstein

General Re Corporation (known as Gen Re) is a Stamford, Connecticut–based holding company for life and property-and-casualty reinsurance, as well as risk-management services. A subsidiary of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, Gen Re has about fifty offices around the world. Ronald E. Ferguson, in his mostly distinguished thirty-three-year career at Gen Re, served in a number of senior capacities, including president and chief operating officer (COO), before being named CEO in 1987. He served as CEO until late 2001 and retired as chairman in June 2002. At the time Ferguson became CEO, Gen Re was considered the lone U.S. member among the troika of giants that dominated global property-and-casualty reinsurance. It was an elite, old-line company, the largest of all American reinsurers, and long viewed as one of the best managed. In his 1998 "Chairman's Letter," Warren Buffett praised Gen Re's management, concluding "There's a lot they can teach us," and he paid $22 billion on December 21, 1998, for its acquisition and for 82 percent of the oldest reinsurance company in the world, Cologne Re.1