Jonathan Tisch (LA '76), co-chairman of the board and member of the Office of the President of Loews Corporation, delivered a lecture yesterday afternoon on his personal experience in business. The lecture took place in Mugar Hall at 12:30 p.m. and was sponsored by The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Tisch began the lecture, titled “The Power of We: The Role of Business in Solving Society’s Challenges,” by speaking about his family’s history in the hotel business, which began in the early 1940s.
Tisch’s grandparents were immigrants from Russia who first moved from Brooklyn, N.Y. to Lakewood, N.J. to lease and run a summer camp. The camp was successful, and they bought a resort hotel in Lakewood after encouragement from their sons Laurence Tisch and Preston Robert "Bob" Tisch, Jonathan's father. This prompted the family to buy several more hotels in the Catskill Mountains.
The family then relocated further south to Atlantic City, where they purchased five more hotels and where Tisch was born.
“I have vivid memories of when I was five years old of welcoming President Eisenhower to the hotel," Tisch said. "That was the kind of reception this hotel was receiving in Atlantic City.”
According to Tisch, the family then moved south to Florida to begin construction on a new hotel, the Americana, in Bal Harbour, Fla., with a budget of $7 million.
“It was risky because all the former development had been further south ... and everybody thought they were a little crazy to open a 700 room hotel with about 40,000 square feet of living space, but they decided that this was something they wanted to do,” Tisch said.
When the family opened this hotel, it was one of the first locations where corporate meetings could take place in Miami, instead of the traditional cities of New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, Tisch added.
In 1959, Tisch’s father and uncle bought Loews' Theatres in order to use the land under the theaters to build more hotels. In the 1970s, the family began to buy businesses that were not related to the film or hotel industry, which marked the beginning of Loews Corporation, Tisch said.
“Loews Corporation has about $80 billion of assets," he said. "We get about $20 billion a year in revenue, and we are in four distinct and separate businesses, all owned by Loews Corporation, the parent.”
According to Tisch, the subsidiaries include companies in the insurance, energy and hotel industries along with the movie theater sector.
“We only have 22 hotels, with two under construction right now, but we have been very focused on growth," he added. "In the last two years, we’ve bought five hotels and we’ve built two hotels.”
The title of Tisch’s talk was taken from his book, "The Power of We: Succeeding Through Partnerships."
“We all have an opportunity to be successful," Tisch said. "That is something we want to do, whether in the for-profit world or the not-for-profit world, but in our journey towards that success, we also have a responsibility to help others get to the same place.”
Tisch stressed the importance of understanding one’s customers, but also having a good relationship with one’s employees.
“We have 8,000 co-workers," he explained. "Having an understanding of what the men and women who are at the front lines of this business, what they need to make themselves successful in their jobs, and also to make sure that they can put food on the table for their families and send their children to college, that’s an important part of what we do.”
According to Tisch, businesses must partner with their communities, and Loews Corporation does this partly through the Loews Hotels Good Neighbor Policy. The policy includes donating leftover food from banquets to food banks, giving away sheets, towels and furniture when hotels are renovated and making conference rooms available for community organizations.
“We feel that when we are helping the community, it does come back to us because when groups are thinking about which hotel to use, they have commented to us, ‘Well, we’re going to use your hotel because we know that you care about us in this community,’” Tisch noted.
Tisch explained that he believes in partnering with competitors within the industry because there are certain issues that are simply too large for individual companies to handle, and joining with other groups in the industry can be beneficial to solving problems they all face.
He added that Loews Corporation also partners with the government to solve problems.
“The reality is that government will always be in our lives .. and if you can find the issues where government also can make a difference, you will see that it will help your business, [and] it will also help your community,” Tisch said.
