Thankfully, members of the next generation of leaders in the property/casualty insurance industry have had no direct experience with insurance company failures, rehabs and restructurings that happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Executive Summary
“Why do people work for you? What makes them stay over the years?”
Those are the types of questions Crum & Forster CEO Marc Adee asked himself to reverse engineer a workplace where employees feel supported and motivated to build decades-long careers.
Here, Adee, who came up the ranks as a casualty actuary and chief financial officer, talks about his focus on culture rather than numbers as he took the helm of a once-struggling insurer, now rehabilitated and growing under the Fairfax Financial umbrella, a hands-off parent with a long-term focus.
Adee is the author of a recently published book, “The Once and Future C&F,” about the history of the company.
Read more about the book in the related article, “Cigar Butts and Toxic Sludge: The Rebirth of a P/C Insurer.”
One man who remembers them, and worked alongside leaders who did heavy repair work that happened in those years, is Marc Adee, the chief executive officer of Crum & Forster. Adee wrote a book about the history of his company, which includes recollections of his experiences as chief actuary and chief financial officer of two companies related to the C&F backstory that no longer exist—and says that his experiences with “really crummy jobs (no pun intended)” gave him the confidence to assess and work through bad situations.
Still, he believes there are better ways for future leaders to figure out how to “come up with a game plan, execute and adjust on the run” when faced with the knowable and unknowable risks they will inevitably have to work through. During a recent interview about the book and his career, Adee spoke about how the combination of working with a company that isn’t going away and uses a decentralized operating model can put employees on track to create long-term career paths.
Highlights of our interview follow.
Learn more about Adee’s book, “The Once and Future C&F,” in the related article, “Cigar Butts and Toxic Sludge: The Rebirth of a P/C Insurer.
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