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Stanford Business magazine

 

Saved by a Secretary

If you want to see the view from the top, you’d better listen to the view from the bottom. Jeffrey Bewkes learned this lesson in his first job after business school.

Bewkes, MBA ’77, was working at Citibank in international accounting, lending money to ships, when Greek shipping heiress Christina Onassis called frantically and asked him to move $24 million in gold from Athens to New York. Cold War tensions were high, and Onassis was sure the Soviets were poised to invade Greece.

As Bewkes recalls, he panicked. It was lunchtime and his bosses were gone. He went in search of advice and happened upon a back office where the clerical staff worked. “Jeff, you don’t ship gold,” said one of the clerks. “You sell it in Athens and buy it in New York.”

Twenty seconds later, it was done. The woman in the back room had saved him from his first business disaster, Bewkes told a student audience in May as part of the View from the Top speaker series. Lesson learned, Bewkes moved to the fledgling cable company HBO in 1979 and became its chief executive in 1995. He is now president and COO of HBO’s parent company, Time Warner.