Eric Gleacher, ’67, attended Chicago Booth after serving in the US Marine Corps. He created the mergers and acquisitions business at Lehman Brothers and established his own investment banking firm in 1990. Gleacher Center is named in his honor. In 2016 Gleacher donated $10 million to Booth to fund scholarships for veterans. The family of the late Charles “Mike” Harper, ’50, former CEO of ConAgra, recently made a matching $10 million gift to increase veteran financial aid.
You studied stock market data in the early years of the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). How did these experiments influence your interest in valuing companies?
We would devise a hypothesis and sit down with [then accounting assistant professor] William Beaver, MBA ’65, PhD ’65, to figure out how to test it. We used Fortran, so the computer would spit out this big deck of cards. CRSP was a fantastic asset—you could test risk and other factors using the prices of various securities. You could compare the performance of companies that had certain characteristics to the companies that didn’t. That taught me how to think.
You took a leap into M&A when it was brand new. How did you do it?
Goldman Sachs had started something called the exclusive sale business, and then Morgan Stanley did the first big takeover. I gave up all my client sat Lehman and started from scratch. My friends said, “You’re crazy.” But my vision was that American businessmen are aggressive and want to build their companies. I worked hard, calling on people. I guess I was a good talker, because mergers and acquisitions became a huge business.
What was it like to be involved in the high-profile takeover fights of the 1980s, such as Gillette and Union Carbide?
From 1985 to 1990 I was head of M&A at Morgan Stanley. There’s never been another stimulus like there was in the late 1980s wave of mergers. I won every deal I was involved in. There was an intensity—I must say, it was exhilarating. M&A was like a sport, and this was the World Series. You were totally consumed by it.
How did you and Mike Harper grow the ConAgra business together?
Mike asked me to sell a division of ConAgra to raise some needed cash. At that time ConAgra was $160 million in debt and had a total NYSE market value of about $10 million. I had a contract ready to sign, but he decided not to sell because the business had improved. We came from that point to where the total market value was around $15 billion when he retired. I did all the deals for him. We both made tremendous returns and became great friends. When I left Morgan Stanley to start my own firm, he was one of my first clients.
The Marines taught you valuable leadership lessons for business. What did you learn?
It’s all about self-confidence. You spend three months going through OCS [officer candidate school] followed by six months at the Basic School for officers in Quantico, Virginia, and then, cold turkey, you are a rifle platoon leader in the USMC infantry. You’ve got to have the instinct to do things right, or the troops will reject you. So coming out and going to work after business school I had no fear. I said, “I can do this. There’s nobody better than me.” You’ve got to pursue excellence for every minute, and you have to believe in yourself.
How will the gift from the Harper Family Foundation help you support veterans at Booth?
The veterans scholarships are a natural offshoot of how I benefited from the Marines. Most people who receive the scholarships were officers, so they’ve been in leadership. If you attract them to business schools, some will run big corporations, or they’ll become great entrepreneurs.
It immediately resonated with Mike Harper’s son when I talked about doing this. When I go out to raise more money for veterans, it gives it much more credibility if it’s not just me. I know that somebody’s going to emerge from this program and do something special.
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The Book of Booth: Health-care VC Leader Immanuel Thangaraj, AB ’92, MBA ’93 »
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