PEOPLE
INDUSTRY ICON
BUILDING RESILIENCE During his long tenure at FM Global, chairman and CEO Tom Lawson has remained focused on furthering the company’s mission of mitigating risk through engineering expertise
THE PATH to a long and successful career is often more about the journey than the destination. Long before Tom Lawson reached the upper echelons of commercial property insurer FM Global, he began at the firm as a field engineer, conducting risk assessments, providing loss prevention engineering recommendations to clients, and gaining exposure to the wide range of industries and Fortune 1000 companies to which FM Global brings value. For 23-year-old Lawson, the experience proved invaluable, and the more he did the work, the more he enjoyed it and saw how the company’s values aligned with his own. “Forty years later, here I am,” he says. “It’s pretty rewarding to sit back and think about it now – that you can start out as a field engineer and end up as chairman and CEO. For me, it’s been a great journey.” In between his first position at FM Global and his current one, Lawson climbed up the ranks of the company’s engineering group and was responsible for opening a branch office as an engineering manager. He later picked up the title of underwriting manager, which was his first foray into the insurance side of the business. “It was interesting not having any insurance experience, but the real focus was the ability to differentiate risk, which is something that’s fundamental to everything we
16
do in the company,” Lawson says. Later, he created the unit that oversaw the company’s global forest products operations and eventually led the team that built the company’s research campus – the world’s largest center for science-based property loss prevention research and product testing. It was one of the shining moments of his career at FM Global.
2014 before picking up the title of chairman in 2018, he was more than prepared to lead a company whose many sides he had already seen. Today, he’s a key example of FM Global’s ability to retain its team members for an average of 13.2 years, which he credits in part to its mutual structure. “We’re a mutual company as opposed to a stock company, which allows a singular focus
“The fact that we’re a research-based organization, as opposed to an insurancebased organization, allows us to create the science that our engineers then turn into practical solutions and share with our clients” “Our research campus is where everything starts,” Lawson says. “It’s really a foundation for everything the company does related to engineering and underwriting. To be able to design and build a one-of-a-kind facility that is used to deliver on our value proposition was pretty important.”
Employee of the decade When Lawson took over the operations of the company as an executive vice president in 2008, and finally was appointed CEO in
on what’s best for our clients, who are actually our owners,” Lawson explains. “Unlike a publicly traded company, there’s never a conflict between what’s best for our shareholders versus our clients. It also sets the tone for our culture in the way we deal with our mutual owners, our clients. It permeates into how we deal with each other at the company and contributes to long-term relationships.” With FM Global’s high employee retention rate, it’s clear the company is doing
www.ibamag.com
16-19_Industry Icon-SUBBED.indd 16
12/04/2019 4:39:04 AM