AIG's Benmosche Wins Showdown With Chairman Harvey Golub

Golub's public criticism of Benmosche eventually precipitated the latter's saying to the board that the CEO/chairman relationship had become ""ineffective and unsustainable." Golub cited Benmosche's sentiments in a letter of resignation hand-delivered yesterday afternoon to George Miles, chairman of AIG's governance committee.

As Insurance & Technology reported yesterday afternoon, the conflict between AIG CEO Bob Benmosche and chairman of the board Harvey Golub has resulted in the latter's departure. Golub resigned yesterday afternoon pleading the rationale that it would be easier to replace a chairman than a CEO.We've written before about the debate about whether strong personalities should be considered a liability in determining the future success of AIG. Maurice "Hank" Greenberg's larger-than-life autocratic style was seen by many as a liability and perhaps a cause of AIG's problems. We noted that big personality returned to AIG with the appointment of Bob Benmosche as CEO after the brief tenure of Ed Liddy, the genial ex-CEO of Allstate, in that role.

Benmosche's outsized ego proved to be a problem after all, resulting in a this-town's-not-big-enough-for-the-two-of-us struggle with chairman of the board Harvey Golub. During their stormy relationship, Golub had complained about the sometimes grossly undiplomatic pronouncements of Benmosche such as his saying on one occasion that he couldn't "be running the business here and dealing with all those crazies down in Washington," at the same time. The two had also locked horns about the disposition of AIG's Asian operation, with Benmosche pursuing selling the unit to Prudential plc and Golub favoring spinning off the subsidiary.

It's hard not to sympathize with Golub, who appears to have acted in good faith and with a desire to heal the troubled company. However, there is something reassuring about the return of big personality to AIG. The company was founded by Cornelius Vander Starr, a man with a larger-than-life personality, and reached its peak under the leadership of the aforementioned titanic personality of Hank Greenberg, as fascinatingly described in Ron Shelp's "Fallen Giant: Hank Greenberg and the History of AIG." It remains to be seen what Benmosche can do with the ailing company, but it's hard to think of AIG and its outsized success without the leadership of a towering personality. Could the company ever be AIG again without it?

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio