Two of a KIND - sibling chief executive officers

Chief Executive, The, April, 2001 by Chris Sandlund

Sibling CEOs say the source of their business acumen lies somewhere between nature and nurture.

While preparing for his college graduation back in the '70s, Ron DeFeo, now chairman and CEO of Terex, interviewed for a job at Proctor & Gamble. After running DeFeo through the usual drill, the recruiter asked him a question most job candidates never hear.

"Both your brothers work for P&G. If you succeed, only one of you can be CEO. How would you handle

"We'd have to act as a triumvirate," he replied.

DeFeo got the job, but P&G never had to divvy up its executive office. Each of the brothers found his own company to lead. Today, older brother Philip is chair man and CEO of the Pacific Stock Exchange and Neil (Phil's identical twin) is president and CEO of Remington Products.

Unusual? Sure. But not as much so as you might think. Even putting aside family-run businesses where brothers or brother and sister act as co-CEOs, a fair number of siblings have reached the tops of different firms.

Like the DeFeos, Larry and Arthur Weinbach represent the fruition of years spent climbing the corporate ladder, with Arthur now CEO of Automated Data Processing and Larry the current CEO of Unisys and for mer CEO of Arthur Andersen.

In a classic American immigrant tale, the Jain brothers helped one another come over from India and build lives in the States. Naveen Jain became a billion aire as CEO of InfoSpace, while brother Atul helms his own company as CEO of Teoco and holds the chair man role at startup netgenShopper.

The Hawaiian-born Case brothers found success in related fields. Steve Case co-founded America Online and served as its CEO before taking his cur rent post as chairman of AOL Time Warner. His brother Dan, a Princeton grad and Rhodes Scholar, is CEO of J.P. Morgan H&Q (formerly Hambrecht & Quist), an investment firm with a specialty in new economy financing.

Two brothers in banking, Jerry and Jack Grunhofer, found their ways to the top posts at Firstar and U.S. Bancorp respectively. Always close, the brothers are about to be colleagues--their two banks are merging, with Jerry to be CEO and president and older brother Jack to serve as chairman.

Then there are the Keanes--Mod-Pac CEO Dan Keane and brother Robert of VistaPrint.com--and the Peters: John and Jerry, chairman and CEO and president and COO respectively of Handl-it; their brother Joseph, CEO of Logistics International; and their sister Janice Gusich, CEO of Akhia Public Relations. And that's not all. Other sets of prominent CEO siblings include:

* Dick Brown of EDS and brother Greg of Micromuse;

* John Sculley, two-time former CEO--Apple Computers and PepsiCo--and his brothers David, former president of H.J. Heinz, and Arthur, former managing director of J.P. Morgan;

* Jim Burke of J&J and brother Dan, former CEO of Cap City/ABC, whose sister Phyllis Burke Davis also found business success as a senior VP at Avon; and

* Marion Sandler, co-CEO--with her husband Herbert--of Golden West Financial, and brother Bernard Osher, the former chairman of auction firm Butter field & Butterfield (now owned by eBay).

Despite these myriad examples, the vast majority of CEOs don't have similarly placed siblings. So what accounts for these pockets of success? Good genes? Extraordinary parents? Andrall Pearson, professor emeritus of Harvard Business School and founding chair man of Tricon Global Restaurants, votes for all of the above. "I think it's the same combination of ingredients that leads to success for an individual," he says. Pearson knows firsthand, having served as president of PepsiCo from 1969 to 1984 while his twin brother was president of Avery International, now Avery Dennison. "The fact that you find it twice in one family," he adds, "suggests that there's something genetic and something environmental that goes on where they both get infected with that capacity."

The Family Way

EDS's Dick Brown agrees. "At the end of the day, I think a lot of this is about the genes--and that we were fortunate to have great parents," he says. "From our mother, we got unwavering optimism, energy, and a sense of humor. Our father, who was a teacher, was very bright and very principled. He was also a strict disciplinarian. Growing up, we'd do a paper and he'd say, 'Let me take a look,' and the red ink would flow. But it made us better."

"Dad was about responsibility and accountability," agrees Greg Brown of Micromuse, Dick's younger brother by 13 years. "You did what you were supposed to when you were supposed to do it. While we were playing out on the street, he'd give the warning whistle that we had to be home for dinner. It was very systematic. He also had an insatiable appetite for information. Even holding two jobs--as a math teacher and running the family hardware store--he would always have a book, magazine, or newspaper in his hand."

Education was also a focus in the DeFeo household. "The philosophy growing up was, 'You don't have to get an A, but it's not acceptable not to try. If you try and get a B, that's fine,'" says Neil DeFeo. "Our parents gave us a lot of reinforcement and self-confidence."