The Operator
Execution, delivery and performance, gets the hard thing done.
Andrew Liveris reads as The Operator because his Dow Chemical tenure was a study in disciplined execution and unflinching accountability. He steered the company through the 2008 financial crisis without abandoning the transformative Rohm and Haas merger, restructured Dow's portfolio with precision, and delivered on commitments when pressure was most severe.
“Yeah, so two amazing American iconic companies, 300 years of corporate history between them. DuPont founded on explosives, Dow founded on chlorine.”
“Did she expect me to retire? No, she knew me better. The story on the Olympics is a classic. That call came, I don't know, two months ago on a Saturday. We're in Sydney in our living room. I got a call from the Premier of the State of Queensland saying we'd like to offer you the presidency of the Olympics. I said, excuse me.”
“The visionaries that ran down in the 60s that led to my recruitment in the 70s had this view that to go international, you had to hire local well before it was vogue. And they went around the world looking for people who were willing to go to these far-flung locations, Hong Kong at that time wasn't a sophisticated city that it is today.”
“Yeah, diversification, the Vision 2030 that was put in place and you're quite familiar with by His Highness the Crown Prince has a big piece of it to diversify away from oil and to go into other businesses and other activities that might be related, so chemicals and plastics and downstream, creating a circular carbon economy, hydrogen, an…”
The David Rubenstein Show: “Andrew Liveris”
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