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Photograph by Jeff Mermelstein for Bloomberg Businessweek; Parsons's A-List: Bloomberg (11); Getty Images (8)
Parsons is not a visionary; no one waits for his announcements or lusts after his products. He is, instead, a master in the art of the relationship, particularly as practiced in back rooms: the pat on the back, the well-told joke, the gossipy anecdote. He's an old-fashioned fixer who works the system with people skills and political connections. He's even sort of cool, with his jazz obsession and his Tuscan winery with its tongue-in-cheek motto, "We drink all we can and sell the rest." Parsons has spent a good chunk of his professional life assuaging furious employees, aggrieved shareholders, and frustrated regulators. His success is a reminder that, as much as we celebrate creativity and innovation in business, the schmoozer abides.
The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who considers Parsons a friend, says the banker can assess a challenging situation and negotiate it like a master improviser. "If Dick were a soloist, he would be Thelonious Monk," Marsalis says. "You get the sense listening to Monk that he sees everything that's going to happen in a song in advance."
Like Monk, Parsons occasionally hits an off note, and some of his have been pretty awful. He supported the widely derided AOL Time Warner merger that Gerald M. Levin, his predecessor at the company, oversaw. The combination of old and new media operations eventually resulted in a $54 billion writedown of shareholder value. Parsons was president of Time Warner when the merger agreement was reached, but he did nothing to stop it. He says he had some questions about the top-of-the-Internet bubble valuations used to justify the deal, but ultimately, he says, "It was Jerry's deal."
Then, for many years, Parsons sat on Citigroup's board of directors, which nodded while the company pushed into the mortgage-backed securities that nearly caused the company's collapse. Parsons is hardly contrite: "No one foresaw what would happen," he says. "Should we have? That's another issue. But none of us did."
Yet Parsons seems to have skated past Time Warner's debacle and Citigroup's brush with extinction. In late February, President Barack Obama appointed Parsons to his council of outside economic advisers. Few others associated with Citigroup's crash have recovered so well.
Parsons keeps an office at Citigroup's New York headquarters; he doesn't spend much time at the bank. "If you are there, people mistake you for management," he jokes. He parks himself instead at Providence Equity Partners, where he works part-time reviewing potential buyouts of media firms. "I don't go out and forage for deals," Parsons says, munching M&M's in a glass-enclosed conference room high above Central Park. "I'm here to give advice and general comic amusement."
The son of an electrical technician and a homemaker, Parsons grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn and didn't do much schoolwork as a youngster. It apparently didn't hurt him. He skipped a grade in elementary school and another in high school. "I test well," he says by way of explanation.
He went to the University of Hawaii, where he partied more than he studied. After four years, he still needed six credits to get his diploma, but he discovered that if he aced his pre-law exams he could get into law school in New York state without a college degree. He did well on the test and was accepted to Albany Law School, where he graduated at the top of his class.
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