Hasbro has used the studio as its in-house TV and film production arm while leveraging the acquired IP for toys and merchandise. Goldner also served on the board of directors for entertainment giant ViacomCBS , where he was chair of the compensation committee.
His passion for delighting consumers also shone through in his long-time partnership with Paramount Pictures that helped build Transformers into an iconic film franchise. He will always hold a special place in our hearts and he will be forever missed. His visionary leadership, kindness and generosity made him beloved by the Hasbro community and everyone he touched.
On behalf of the Hasbro family, we extend our deepest, heartfelt condolences to his wife, daughter and entire family. The feud was resolved only when Harold's Empire Pencil Corp. In retrospect, Merrill's elevation of Stephen to the presidency in , when Stephen was only 32, was a foolish move in the short run and a brilliant one in the long run.
As Stephen later described it, "If my father had operated the business as a father normally would — with him making the decisions — we would have done better through the seventies. But he wanted to make sure we learned, so he threw Alan and me into the water and let us make mistakes. But because Stephen and Alan learned from their mistakes, Hasbro roared back in the eighties — acquiring such household names as Milton Bradley, Playskool, Child Guidance toys, and Coleco Industries, the maker of Cabbage Patch dolls.
A bigger toy chest helps protect Hasbro from the boom-and-bust cycles that plague most companies in the fickle toy business. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Stephen and Alan seemed to complement each other nearly perfectly.
Stephen — quiet, demure, disciplined — concentrated on finance, product development, and marketing. Alan — more relaxed, robust, and outgoing — spent his first eight years at Hasbro setting up the company's international operations. His approach was to take a toy that had faded in the U. He subsequently ran Hasbro's sales and marketing group before Stephen made him president in Throughout most of the seventies and eighties the bachelor brothers shared living quarters — a waterfront home in Bristol, R.
Just as Merrill Hassenfeld granted his son Stephen the freedom to fail, so Stephen extended the same freedom to Alan — apparently with the same positive results. When he was 22, Alan recalls, "I was in the Far East and I made some minor company decision by myself. And I realized that once you respect yourself, it really doesn't matter what others think of you.
It was a turning point for me. Thereafter Alan happily deferred to his brother in public, at least partly because the corporate decisions announced by Stephen were usually the result of constant dialogue between the two brothers.
The Hassenfelds decided to have one boss — Steve — and everyone knew who the boss was. The first clue that things would change occurred in late July , when Stephen missed ten weeks of work, closeting himself in his New York apartment, receiving few visitors, and handling company business almost entirely by phone. When he returned in October, he announced that he had fully recovered from endocarditis. Nevertheless, even as Stephen sought to assure employees, customers, and shareholders that his health problems were over, during the next year Hasbro took steps that effectively minimized the impact of Stephen's subsequent death.
The company put into effect a "poison pill" plan that enables existing stockholders to buy more shares as a defense against an unfriendly takeover bid. And Stephen put the finishing touches on a strong board of outside directors which he'd begun assembling in the mid-eighties; it includes such heavyweights as Preston Robert Tisch of Loews Corp. John Rosenwald Jr. Another plus: An outside board keeps members of the founding family from growing complacent.
Most significantly, Stephen and Alan reorganized the company's management, creating three new operating divisions run by veteran Hasbro executives and delegating long-term planning to another veteran, executive vice-president Barry Alperin.
The reorganization was announced in December — just six months before Stephen died — but the company has publicly maintained that Stephen's illness wasn't a factor in the reorganization. You had to give people the authority to go along with the added responsibility.
Even when Stephen was hospitalized in May , Alan says he refused to contemplate the prospect of his brother's death. I had no inkling — or inclination to believe — Stephen was terminally sick. When Stephen entered the hospital, Hasbro stock shot up in heavy trading amid rumors that the company would be sold. But Stephen's crisis seemed to have marked an epiphany of sorts for Alan.
At an emergency board meeting summoned by Alan, the Hassenfelds vowed to maintain the company's family identity. Within two weeks of Stephen's death Alan was elected to succeed him as chairman and CEO while retaining his previous title as president. With the transition, Alan's peripatetic globe-trotting all but ground to a halt. He shelved his previous plans to take an apartment in London — from which he had hoped to personally lead Hasbro's assault on Europe's consolidated economy in A Christmas trip to Japan, Thailand, and Hong Kong represented his first jaunt in 18 months to that once-familiar part of the world.
And he's exercised greater caution about making internal changes. You don't necessarily react the first moment; you take a step back and size it up. Some of the moves I've made recently, some people think I should have made long ago. I had people reporting to me longer than necessary. Because toy companies plan their products at least a year before bringing them to market a verdict on Alan's first six months as CEO would be premature.
He has served on Hasbro's board since Philip as lead independent director, and Tracy A. Leinbach as chair of the nominating, governance and social responsibility committee of the board. Philip has more than 30 years of business and management experience, including as both an operating executive and chief financial officer of multinational corporations.
Leinbach served as the executive vice president and chief financial officer for Ryder System , a global logistics and transportation and supply chain solutions provider from until
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