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Repeating Greatness
Ron Bruder is not a household name, but he is a great leader. In 1985, he stood
at a crosswalk with his two daughters waiting for the light to change so they
could cross the street. A perfect opportunity, he thought, to teach the young girls
a valuable life lesson. He pointed across the street to the red glow of the “Do Not
Walk” signal and asked them what they thought that sign meant. “It means we
have to stand here,” they replied. “Are you sure?” he asked rhetorically. “How
do you know it’s not telling us to run?”
Soft-spoken and almost always wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit when
he comes to work, Bruder looks like you would imagine a conservative
executive to look like. But don’t assume you know how things work simply
based on what you see. Bruder is anything but a stereotype. Though he has
enjoyed the trappings of success, he is not motivated by them. They have always
been the unintended by-product of his work. Bruder is driven by a clear sense of
WHY. He sees a world in which people accept the lives they live and do the
things they do not because they have to, but because no one ever showed them
an alternative. This is the lesson he was teaching his daughters that day at the
crosswalk—there is always another perspective to be considered. That Bruder
always starts with WHY has enabled him to achieve great things for himself. But
more significantly, it is his ability to share his WHY through the things he does
that inspires those around him to do great things for themselves.
Like most of us, the career path Bruder has followed is incidental. But WHY
he does things has never changed. Everything Bruder has ever done starts with
his WHY, his unyielding belief that if you can simply show someone that an
alternative route is possible, it can open the possibility that such a route can be
followed. Though the work he is doing today is world-altering, Bruder hasn’t
always been in the world peace business. Like many inspiring leaders, he has
changed the course of an industry. But Ron Bruder is no one-hit wonder. He has
been able to repeat his success and change the course of multiple industries,
multiple times.
A senior executive at a large food conglomerate that sold vegetables, canned
goods and meats decided to buy a travel agency for his nephew. He asked
Bruder, as the chief financial officer of the company at the time, to take a look at
the financials of the agency before he went through with the purchase. Seeing an
opportunity others didn’t, Bruder decided to join the small travel agency to help
lead it. Once there, he saw how all the other travel agencies worked and took an
alternative course. Greenwell became the first travel agency on the eastern
seaboard to take advantage of new technologies and fully computerize their
operations. Not only did they become one of the most successful companies in
the region, but after only a year, their business model became a standard for the
whole industry. Then Bruder did it again.
A former client of Bruder’s, Sam Rosengarten, was in some dirty businesses
—coal, oil and gas; all industries that created brownfields, land that had been
contaminated by their operations. Little could be done with brownfields. They
were too polluted to develop, and the liability to clean them up was so high that
the insurance premiums alone made it too prohibitive to even try. But Bruder
doesn’t see challenges the same way as everyone else. Most avoided brownfields
because they could only see the cost to clean them up. Bruder focused instead on
the actual cleaning. His alternative perspective revealed the perfect solution.
Bruder had already formed his real estate development company, Brookhill,
and with eighteen employees, he was doing quite well. Knowing what he needed
to do to seize the opportunity, he approached Dames & Moore, one of the largest
environmental engineering companies in the world, and shared his new
perspective with them. They loved his idea and formed a partnership to pursue it.
With an engineering company with 18,000 people on board, the perceived risk
was greatly minimized and the insurance companies were happy to offer
affordable insurance. With affordable insurance in place, Credit Suisse First
Boston offered financing that gave Brookhill the ability to buy, remediate,
redevelop and sell almost $200 million worth of former environmentally
contaminated properties. Brookhill, so called because Bruder comes from
Brooklyn and, as he puts it, “it’s a long, uphill climb to get out of Brooklyn,”
was the pioneer of the brownfield redevelopment industry. An industry that
thrives to this day. Bruder’s WHY not only steered a path that was good for
business, but in the process also helped clean up the environment.
It doesn’t matter WHAT Ron Bruder does. The industries and the challenges
are incidental. What never changes is WHY he does things. Bruder knows that,
no matter how good an opportunity looks on paper, no matter how smart he is
and no matter his track record, he would never be able to achieve anything
unless there were others to help him. He knows that success is a team sport. He
has a remarkable ability to attract those who believe what he believes. Talented
people are drawn to him with one request: “How can I help?” Having defied
accepted perspectives and revolutionized more than one industry, Bruder has
now set his sights on a bigger challenge: world peace. He founded the Education
for Employment Foundation, the megaphone that would help him do it.
The EFE Foundation is making significant headway in helping young men
and women in the Middle East to significantly alter the course of their lives and
indeed the course of the region. Just has he taught his daughters at the crosswalk
that there is always an alternative route, he brings an alternative perspective to
the problems in Middle East. Like of all Bruder’s past successes, the EFE
Foundation will drive businesses and do tremendous amounts of good in the
process. Bruder doesn’t run companies, he leads movements.
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