Now the Job of Filling Leaders’ Shoes Begins
Though still in shock, Parsons Corp. and a dozen other companies began on Thursday the somber job of filling the voids left by the deaths of their senior executives who were killed along with Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown in an airplane crash in the Balkans.
The executives included Leonard J. Pieroni, the 57-year-old chairman and chief executive of Pasadena-based Parsons, a leading provider of engineering and construction services worldwide. Directors of the privately held company will meet within a few days to discuss his successor, company spokesman Ronald Wildermuth said.
Their meeting is part of a management-succession plan that Parsons already had in place, Wildermuth said, adding: “We’ll bring the board together, and it will address the situation.”
Parsons, which is owned by its 10,000 employees, currently is being headed by its president, Thomas L. Langford, a 25-year veteran of the company. There was no immediate word on whether Langford, 55, would be named acting chief executive, and he was not available for comment Thursday.
Brown, Pieroni and 33 others were killed when their plane--an Air Force version of the Boeing 737 jetliner--crashed Wednesday on a hillside in Croatia in poor weather. They were in the region to seek business opportunities for U.S. goods and services, and Pieroni was especially hopeful of providing help for rebuilding the region’s infrastructure.
Another major engineering concern, San Francisco-based Bechtel Group Inc., also lost an important manager, P. Stuart Tholan, who was president of Bechtel’s operations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and southwestern Asia.
One coincidence of Peroni’s unexpected death is that it forces Parsons to utilize a managment-succession plan that Pieroni himself had enhanced only six month ago, Wildermuth said.
Pieroni at that time consolidated Parsons’ 13 business units into just four divisions, and that streamlining effort has helped the company quickly regroup from the tragedy “and move the corporation forward,” Wildermuth said.
“That is his legacy,” the spokesman added.
Some of the other companies that lost key managers also began the job of quickly finding interim replacements.
The engineering firm ABB Inc., for instance, promptly named Richard J. Slember acting president and chief executive, succeeding Robert E. Donovan, who was 54. ABB, based in Norwalk, Conn., is a unit of the Swiss-Swedish giant Asea Brown Boveri Ltd.
AT&T; Corp., Foster Wheeler Corp. and Air & Water Technologies Corp. also were among those firms that lost executives in the tragedy.
Brown took U.S. executives on several overseas journeys in an effort to help them find new markets for their goods and services, and an array of corporations Thursday mourned his loss.
“He has probably secured more opportunities for U.S. business in overseas markets than any recent secretary of commerce,” said John A. Krol, president and chief executive of chemical giant DuPont Co.
Times wire services contributed to this report.
* CRASH INQUIRY
Officials launched an investigation into the Croatia plane crash. A1
