Bible, Geoffrey C.
(PM President & CEO (1994-2002)) After a long career with Philip Morris, the Australian-born Bible served as the company's CEO from 1994 until he reached the company's mandatory retirement age in 2002.Biographical Information:
Australian-born accountant Geoffrey Bible struck many as an implausible choice when he was named CEO of Philip Morris in 1994. During the eight years that he served in that position before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65 in August of 2002, he made controversial statements that infuriated some and puzzled still more. With Philip Morris’s image under more intense scrutiny than ever before, how could it entrust its leadership to a man who seemed to give so little thought to public relations? Yet in a curious way the contradictions of the man who became known as “the Crocodile Dundee of the tobacco industry” paralleled the position of the company that he headed during those crucial years.
Born in August of 1937, Geoffrey Cyril Bible went to work at the age of fourteen, stamping dates on drivers’ licenses for Australia’s Department of Transport. He eventually studied accountancy, earning a F.C.A. from the Australian Institute of Chartered Accountants and an A.C.M.A from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. According to Bible, however, the formative years of his life began in 1959 when he went to work for a United Nations relief agency that helped Palestinian refugees. “I’ve seen a lot of misery in my life,” he told Business Week in 1999. “If you see these little toddlers with flies all over their eyes, a rag over them and nothing else in one-hundred-degree heat, you sort of get a real taste of what hunger is.”
After five years of refugee work, Bible relocated to Europe. He joined Philip Morris in 1968, working in the office of planning for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, but left after only two years to head the Geneva office of Ralph W. King & Yuill, an Australian financial services group. In 1976, he returned to the tobacco industry to stay when he accepted a position as director of planning for Philip Morris International.
After two years, Bible was transferred to New York and put in charge of Philip Morris International’s operations in Canada and Australia. The following year, he began a brief stint as head of the international operations of one of the company’s new acquisitions, the 7-Up soft drink company. Then in 1981, he was sent back to Australia and made managing director of Philip Morris’s operations in his native country. Faced with a dwindling Australian market share, Bible made a bold decision. He increased the number of cigarettes in each pack of the company’s Peter Jackson brand from twenty to thirty without increasing the price. It was the sort of decision that makes or breaks a career, and in Bible’s case, it was the former. Sales of Peter Jackson soared and Bible reaped the rewards.
In 1984 he was transferred back to New York and became a protégé of Philip Morris CEO Hamish Maxwell. Bible was promoted to executive vice president in 1983 and put in charge of operations in Canada and Europe, then was made president and CEO of Philip Morris International three years later. In these positions, he was entrusted him with masterminding the company’s positioning in one key country after another and he showed a keen eye for successful entry into emerging markets. He spent $400 million to build a new plant in Turkey that soon rewarded the investment. When Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe at the end of the decade, he moved adroitly to position Philip Morris as the leader in each new country. In addition, Bible gained a reputation for being able to negotiate favorable tax arrangements with the governments of each new market that Philip Morris entered.
Along the way, Bible was becoming a respected Philip Morris insider. He was known for starting work by 7:30 each morning and being able to make the tough decisions. Yet he remained aware of the need for a personal touch, often dashing off a handwritten note to congratulate one of his employees on a promotion. A few began to wonder if he might be tabbed to succeed Maxwell, who would reach the company’s mandatory retirement age in 1991. There seemed to be some basis for that speculation when Geoff Bible was named President and Chief Administrative Officer of Kraft Foods in 1990, giving him crucial experience with one of Philip Morris’s giant food subsidiaries. Instead Kraft CEO Michael Miles was chosen to succeed Maxwell.
Bible, who claimed that he had never coveted the top spot, was appointed Executive Vice President in charge of international food and tobacco operations. In April of 1993, Bible was named to the newly created post of Executive Vice President, Worldwide Tobacco. In that position, he took advantage of the experience he had gained in waging price wars in European markets and helped Philip Morris execute successful price wars in the United States.
Now in his mid-50s, Geoff Bible was beginning to make plans for retirement when his surprise ascendance to the head of Philip Morris occurred. Miles’s tenure as CEO had been plagued by the increasingly vehement warnings from the public health community and by the threat of litigation. The company had responded by going on the defensive and Miles seemed to embody that hesitance. To those steeped in the Philip Morris culture, it mattered that Miles was a food guy who didn’t even smoke. According to analyst Chris Hoyt, Miles “didn’t understand about tobacco bonding. He was suspicious. He was paranoid.”
By June of 1994, the company’s board had grown tired of feeling that Philip Morris had become a punching bag. Miles resigned under fire and Geoffrey Bible was named to succeed him. The selection, noted Hoyt, was an example “of Philip Morris closing ranks. Philip Morris tried the experiment of an outsider, and it didn’t work. So what you have is the succession of insiders.” In his first press conference, Bible signaled that Philip Morris would remain on the defensive no longer. He stressed that Philip Morris was a diverse giant with sixty different brands with revenues of more than $100 million and that international and domestic tobacco sales were stronger than ever. “We are continuing to fire on all cylinders,” Bible boldly proclaimed.
The new CEO also made clear that the company would no longer be passive in its response to the dual threats of litigation and government regulation. He attacked the “zealous” anti-smoking advocates in Washington and maintained, “There is no new ‘news’ on the litigation front, just new lawyers with no underlying change in the claims.” He pointed out that Philip Morris was already the nation’s biggest taxpayer in the United States and declared, “It is our intention to defend our industry and the rights of our consumers as briskly as we possibly can, as strenuously as we possibly can.” Perhaps most symbolically, Bible lit and smoked two Marlboros during the less than an hour that the press conference took.
Geoffrey Bible then moved quickly to spread this new mood of defiance and to consolidate power. With his blessing, Philip Morris began filing lawsuits against its nemeses, including the ABC show “Day One” and the Food and Drug Administration. He dismissed talk of separating the company’s tobacco business from its food businesses, a plan that Miles had been widely believed to have championed, and made investors happy by raising dividends. With sales and revenue also improving, the chairmanship of the board was added to Bible’s titles in February of 1995.
The newly unapologetic air at Philip Morris was most evident at the company’s 1996 Annual Meeting. In separate speeches to company employees and shareholders, Bible delivered what press reports described as “pep talks” in which he proclaimed that his company was the victim of “a reckless campaign of propaganda, mistruths, half-truths, innuendo, false piety, and downright deceit.” That campaign, he maintained, was “fueled by the lawyers suing us, and by various ambitious politicians and bureaucrats, and by an entire anti-smoking industry aiming for prohibition as its ultimate goal.” According to those news reports, he even went so far as to make this inflammatory comparison: “It took Winston Churchill and Roosevelt (more than 5 years) to prevail . . . to get these bad guys and others who tried to prevail against the Allies. It took a lot of smart thinking. We shall fight, fight, fight. When you are right, and you fight, you win.”
This tough talk appalled many, but led industry sympathizers to regard him as “the Crocodile Dundee of the tobacco industry.” The tough talk, however, became more difficult to sustain when Bible was subpoenaed and cross-examined by skilled attorneys. Bible claimed that he did not recall the analogy to the Allies and maintained that he never called the anti-smoking movement the “bad guys.” But he had made too many public statements that made it easy to back him into a corner, forcing him to either equivocate or look unsympathetic to disease victims.
Asked about his assertion that after his wife and family, Philip Morris’s stock value was “the most important thing in my life,” Bible was forced to admit, “I don’t think I’d set money above public health . . . (but) I have responsibilities to employees, stockholders, to the community generally . . . I would say they’re all equally important.” Though he stressed that he was not a scientist, he said that he was “unclear in my own mind whether anyone dies of cigarette smoking-related diseases” and acknowledged that he knew of no reputable organization that did not believe in the link between smoking and disease. When asked point-blank whether a single American citizen had ever “died of a disease caused in part by smoking cigarettes,” Bible replied, “I think there’s a fair chance that one would have, yes. Might have.”
Asked what action he would take if scientists proved “that cigarettes were a cause of lung cancer,” Bible was again forced to vacillate. He replied, “It would depend on the circumstances. It’s a bit hard for me to say in a vacuum here. I think – If you’ll force me to say what would I do in those circumstances, I’d probably say sure I’d shut it down instantly to get a better hold on things, but I would hope to get a better hold and talk with the government very quickly.”
Questions about youth smoking put Bible even more on the defensive, especially after he declared that his company had always been opposed to underage smoking and had done its best to prevent it. But when shown documents suggesting that Philip Morris had taken an active interest in the youth market, Bible was forced to concede that the documents were “anomalous to the Philip Morris I know” and even to say, “I am ashamed. I’m embarrassed about that, yes.”
Answers such as those revealed that no amount of defiance was going to make Philip Morris’s troubles go away. Accordingly, Bible began to work behind the scenes to negotiate a solution to the company’s perilous legal predicament. Many were surprised that the tough-talking CEO would take such an approach, but they merely showed that, like any good accountant, Bible was attentive to the bottom line. As an unnamed company attorney explained to a writer from Chief Executive, “Bible was able to assure people that Philip Morris was not in any trouble. That’s important for a company to continue to grow, tap capital markets, and hire bright people. … At the same time, Bible kept looking for ways to make the pain of the lawsuits less onerous, to give in where he had to and fight where that was necessary. He has stayed closely involved in all parts of the litigation and made the decisions, which is just what a CEO has to do.”
In the end it was Bible who signed off on the historic Master Settlement Agreement, by which Philip Morris agreed to pull the Marlboro Man from all its advertisements and to pay close to half of the $368.5 billion settlement agreed to by the 46 states that had not previously settled their lawsuits. Philip Morris also finally acknowledged that smoking was addictive and caused lung cancer.
The remainder of Geoffrey Bible’s eight-year tenure as top man at Philip Morris were characterized by continued improvement in stock prices and revenue and by aggressive entry into emerging markets. By the time he handed over the reigns to Louis Camilleri in 2002, Philip Morris had passed the British-American Tobacco Company to become the world’s largest tobacco company.
Yet after signing to the Master Settlement Agreement, Philip Morris was forced to abandon the defiant talk of Bible’s first two years as CEO and Bible himself kept out of the headline. In a symbol of changing times, Bible, who had been smoking since the age of fourteen, quit smoking in 2000 on the advice of his doctor.
Since his retirement, Geoffrey Bible has continued to maintain a low profile but has served on a number of corporate boards, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Sources:
Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
John A. Byrne, “Geoff Bible’s Class,” Tobacco Control 2002; 11:289-290.
Leslie Eaton, “Philip Morris Goes on the Offensive,” New York Times, June 22, 1994.
Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
Jay Mathews, “The Marlboro Men Strike Back,” Washington Post, June 22, 1994.
Ellen Neuborne and Eric D. Randall, “Australians Are Insiders: Tobacco History May Be Key for New Leaders,” USA Today, June 21, 1994.
“Philip Morris Chief Resigns,” Gannett News Service syndicated article, June 20, 1994.
“Philip Morris: Inside America’s Most Reviled Company,” Business Week, November 29, 1999.
Jeffrey Rothfeder, “Living With Litigation,” Chief Executive, December 2001.
Patricia Sellers, “Geoff Bible Won’t Quit,” Fortune, July 21, 1997.
Patricia Sellers, “Rising from the Smoke: What Was the Hottest Stock on the Dow Last Year? Would You Believe Philip Morris?,” Fortune, April 16, 2001.
Eben Shapiro, “Philip Morris’s New Management Faces Pressure for Split-Up From Big Holders,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 1994.
Eben Shapiro, “Philip Morris Will Consider Stepping Up Buybacks or ‘More Aggressive’ Dividend,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1994.
For More Biographical Information:
Dun & Bradstreet Reference Book of Corporate Managements, annual editions.
Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in Finance and Industry, annual editions.
Synonyms
Bible, GeoffreyBible, Geoffrey C.