Skip to main content

Gerry Birnbach Tribute


I recently attended the funeral for Gerald Birnbach.  Up from humble beginnings as the son of a Boston funeral director, and suffering from a variety of serious childhood ailments, Gerry became the CEO of Rowe Furniture, and, as far as anyone could determine, was the longest-serving NYSE CEO.  Employees at all levels called him “Mr. B.” and he treated them all with respect and a smile.
Gerry was the consummate salesman.  He had many standard lines and clever sayings that all his friends and acquaintances knew.  One that I recall well, was “I know my customer”.  And he did.  He knew all about them, and how to help them and how to help make their businesses grow.

He was also a family man, leaving four children and a growing band of grandchildren behind.  He hosted the entire bunch to Maryland University basketball games (in first row seats by the way).  He loved his grandchildren and, as far as I can tell, they returned his love and then some.
Gerry was my boss and a man far ahead of the times in his chosen industry, home furnishings.  Gerry had great personal taste (more on that in a minute) and was early in recognizing home furnishings as fashion, and in seeing what a poor job most furniture retailers did in presenting products in that manner.  He led by example, making the Rowe Furniture showroom at the semi-annual High Point Furniture Show a consistent leader in look and style, with each vignette ready for Architectural Digest.  Every detail was thought through, from pictures on the walls, to books on the shelves, to the candy in the candy dishes. He described the furniture industry as “ingrown, slow-moving and mired in tradition”.  He was right and did his best to foment change.

While I only reported to Gerry for about three years, he made an indelible impression.  On an investor swing to New York, we detoured through Ascot Chang, where he bought a variety of custom-made shirts in the best colors and finest fabrics.  He was a regular there, and the staff and managers all knew him by name.  The shirts, along with the suits he had made as well, were shipped to the office, not his house, so that he could take them to the laundry and then take them home in laundry bags in a (doomed) attempt to convince wife Miriam that he hadn’t been out buying something new when he already had more clothes than he could wear.  In his seventies, he was the best-dressed man I knew.  And I know some guys who dress well.
His funeral service drew hundreds, all the tales and reminisces.   There were far more smiles than tears, which I took as a great tribute.  RIP Mr. B.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: What Matters Now by Gary Hamel

Interview of Eric Schmidt by Gary Hamel at the MLab dinner tonight. Google's Marissa Mayer and Hal Varian also joined the open dialog about Google's culture and management style, from chaos to arrogance. The video just went up on YouTube. It's quite entertaining. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Cover of The Future of Management My list of must-read business writers continues to expand.   Gary Hamel , however, author of What Matters Now , with the very long subtitle of How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation , has been on the list for quite some time.   Continuing his thesis on the need for a new approach to management introduced in his prior book The Future of Management , Hamel calls for a complete rethinking of how enterprises are run. Fundamental to his recommendation is that the practice of management is ossified in a command and control system that is now generations old and needs to be replaced with somethi...
1 comment
Read more

Stimulus Plan

Mr. President: The House stimulus bill is awful. Dangerous. Counter-productive. It has a very high probability of making things worse!. Your man Rahm Emanuel is supposed to be a tough guy: turn him loose on the House Dems - they are selling you down the river. Some simple tests: the spending will improve long-term productivity; the spending will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and the spending will happen fast; very, very fast. There may need to be some legislation to enable spending without years of environmental review. For example, spending on wind farms would improve long-run productivity and reduce dependence on foreign oil. But let's say the wind farm is a couple of miles offshore. You can't have environmental groups stopping the development to see if some fish will be harmed. This spending has to happen now. And, no tax cuts with the possible exception of AMT. People aren't going to spend any tax savings; they are going to pay their credit card bills or r...
10 comments
Read more

Romney/Thompson dream ticket?

The role of Fred Thompson in yesterday's SC primary is as murky as his next step. Did he divide the religious vote and thereby hand Huckabee a loss? Or would those votes, had he not been there, have gone elsewhere? My instinct is that more of those votes would have gone to Romney or McCain than to Huckabee. Fred comes across to me as the thinking person's conservative: thoughtful on positions, a sense of history, a Federalist, serious about the war on terror and prepared to take the long view on it. His addresses have content, not sound bites - which may, unfortunately, be a drawback in 2008. Mitt is quickly seizing the stage as the most knowledgeable in the field on economics, growth and job creation. With a war still consuming dozens of billions, it isn't clear that the race will be won on voters' views of candidates job creation prowess. However, he gives off as much energy as Fred seems to absorb - Mitt's electron shell could power Fred. So, Mitt may be drawi...
5 comments
Read more