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Jonathan D. Green ’68 doesn’t have to go far in search of job satisfaction – he just takes a little detour past a skyscraper he helped build.
“You can drive by your building,” he says of his career detour away from work as a real estate lawyer. “You can’t drive by your bond offering.”
President and chief executive officer of Rockefeller Group, a privately owned commercial real estate corporation, Green takes pride in contributing to a city’s skyline.
“I liken building a 40-story skyscraper with planning a military maneuver,” says the former history major, Navy diver, and graduate of New York University Law School. “There’s the architecture, the engineering, the leasing, decorating, all the details. It’s very complicated, but intellectually stimulating.”
Rockefeller Group is perhaps best known as the onetime owner of Rockefeller Center in New York City, including Radio City Music Hall, which it sold to a group of investors in 1997.
Now a part of Mitsubishi Estate Co. Ltd. of Japan, the company owns nearby landmarks the Time-Life and McGraw-Hill buildings, as well as properties in Florida, California and New Jersey.
A Manhattan native, Green joined Rockefeller in 1980 as an assistant vice president and real estate counsel, rising to his current position last October.
Most exciting, he says, are Rockefeller’s prospects in China, where it is helping rehabilitate sections of the city of Shanghai and may eventually build “something on the skyline” of the scale of Rockefeller Center.
“You should see Shanghai — it’s bustling,” says Green, 56, a resident of Pelham, N.Y. “They’re also building a whole new city across the river. Shanghai wants to be one of the cities you’d say in the same breath as London or New York, a really dynamic place.”
Like the buildings of Rockefeller Group, Green is a higher-up, beholden to shareholders and more than 10,000 employees, which he says is both rewarding and daunting.
“You feel that everything that happens is your responsibility, but you have to get over it. It’s not good for your mental health!” he comments. “Good or bad, it’s your issue, and you want there to be more goods than bads. At the same time, it’s very rewarding. There’s a lot of pride in accomplishment.”
One event he’s particularly proud to have been involved in is the merger of Rockefeller into Mitsubishi in 1997, which also required the meshing of the Japanese consensus-based culture with the American spirit of risk and entrepreneurialism.
“We’ve created a wonderful rapport. If we hadn’t been financially successful, it would have been hard to come to a cultural success,” Green says. “But we shared a lot of ideas, shared people, and ways of doing things, and it was very exciting, this challenge of adopting to change. It’s intriguing to have to make it work. Language aside, the way people communicate is very different in Japanese companies than in the U.S.”
He says consensus seems to work best when the economy is strong, but when it flags, the entrepreneurial attitude kicks in.
In fact, one of his current goals for Rockefeller, in addition to enhancing the company’s reputation as a leader in real estate, is simply to weather the difficult business climate.
According to Green, the company hasn’t substantially cut back because it has found a niche constructing big distribution centers for major retailers, including one for catalog store Crate and Barrel in Cranbury, N.J., as well as suburban office complexes
“We have finished a bunch of buildings and sold them. We’re hoping they’ll be a bright spot,” he says. “The geniuses are telling us the rebound’s coming in ’04.”
A secret to his own success as an executive, Green believes, is not straying too far from his role as a legal counselor by acting as a sounding board to others’ ideas and providing a place for managers to vent decisions.
“They bounce ideas off me, and I try to help them,” he says. “I feel that the ultimate success of the venture is when you’re responsible not for the daily decisions – although you can’t allow bad decisions, but for setting goals and strategy and making sure the right people are in the right place.
“I provide guidance and counsel, which seems to be very much what people are looking for: ‘Don’t tell me, just help me occasionally.’ You want people to feel the decisions are theirs and you aren’t imposing your will. I want everyone to feel the way I do, responsible for the outcome.”
About 30 percent of his time is spent traveling, which is less fun because of increased airport security. In New York, much of his day is spent in meetings.
“I try to eat dinner at home, though it’s not always possible, and I try not to work on weekends,” says Green, whose wife Sally is a retired lawyer and oldest son, David, graduated from Lafayette and is now a real estate lawyer in Milwaukee. Green also has three other children.
Still a history buff, he enjoys golfing, has a fishing boat and fishes, summers at Montauk on Long Island, and scuba dives.
“My wife and I are planning to build a place in Carmel, Calif., someday,” says Green, noting that he’s not closing in on retirement yet. “I have much more to do before then!”
Even so, his accomplishments loom as he looks out the car window at the octagonal office tower at 180 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan, for which he served as the developer’s lawyer, and at 745 Seventh Avenue, world headquarters for Lehman Brothers. Then, there’s 444 South Flower Street in Los Angeles, which was the setting for the television show “L.A. Law.”
“When the kids were small, I used to try to impress them by pointing out buildings I had been involved with,” says Green. “But they were singularly unimpressed. On the other hand, Rockefeller used to own Radio City. Good seats at the Christmas show – they found that impressive!”