Tisches

"For Larry, the destruction of Laurel-in-the-Pines was no cause for tears. Indeed, one of his strengths as a businessman was emotional de- tachment from investments. “You just don’t fall in love with your as- sets,” son Andrew said. That detachment allowed the Tisches to build equity fast. They traded hotel properties much the way a Wall Street money manager works the stock market. They bought or leased or built. They added value. They sold them. Sometimes they leased them back. “By the late 1960s, we had 13 hotels,” Andrew noted. In 1994, “we still have 13 hotels, though not all the same hotels. We leased them, sold back leases, managed them. Each deal has been a profitable deal unto itself. We never had to be somewhere. Even in the hotel business, we’ve just been trading assets.”"

"Word of repeated successes travels fast within any industry. The hotel business is no exception. The Tisches already were building a reputation as highly effective managers with deep pockets. It made them automatic targets for pitches by owners of poorly performing ho- tels who wanted to either sell or lease them to someone who could do a better job operating them and would improve their resale value. The"

"Even before the World’s Fair opened, the Tisches enjoyed a 15 pen cent higher occupancy rate than their rivals in the city’s hotel bush ness. Why? Bob Tisch attributed it to having newer properties and bigger rooms. Also, unlike their competitors, the Tisches were pro- moting their hotels at their 74 movie theaters and were even taking hotel reservations at the theaters. One former executive pegged their success in large part to having assembled the finest hotel sales force in the world. More important, Bob suggested, was having management housed just a few blocks away. “We are sitting on top of our operations and are not absentee owners,” he said."

"with $50 million of convention business. The deal, for more than $16 million, included a 35-year leaseback to the Tisches. Effectively, the Tisches were perfecting the art of having their cake and eating it too: they retrieved much of the cash invested to build the Americana and rented the resort back, along with its annual revenue of $12 million."

"As Tisch explained it, “We let people have authority, otherwise they lose their effectiveness.” But the Tisches weren’t known for pa- tience. They did not wait for problems to solve themselves. “A decline of any kind concerns us,” Bob said. “We go in immediately to see how we can do better.”"

"In Tisch’s view, if a business had no prospect for yielding the mag' nitude of returns he could get in the highly liquid stock and bond markets, then that business should be sold and the cash added to the investment portfolio until something better came along. The Tisches put Lorillard on a crash diet. Besides Bennett, six more top executives left. Their jobs “simply vaporized,” according to one executive, leav- ing behind “a residue of bitterness” that Tisch acknowledged. 1"