Bruce Mosler, outgoing Cushman & Wakefield CEO
From the January issue: By any measure, 2009 was a tough year for commercial services firm Cushman & Wakefield. It suffered through the economic crisis with even greater losses for the first nine months of the year than two of its larger international rivals, CB Richard Ellis and Jones Lang LaSalle. While CBRE is struggling more in New York (see “CB Richard Ellis’ New York woes”), internationally, Cushman saw revenues down 25 percent, while operating expenses fell by just 22 percent, hurting the bottom line. Compounding matters, just two weeks after the third quarter ended, company president and CEO Bruce Mosler announced he would step down from the top spot and this month start “transitioning” into a position as a board co-chairman alongside John Cushman III. (He will remain as CEO until a successor is named.) To find a successor, privately held Cushman & Wakefield, owned by the publicly traded Italian company Exor, made the unusual decision to look both outside and inside the industry for a replacement, hiring executive search firm Spencer Stuart to bring in candidates. Mosler told The Real Deal he had always planned to stay in the CEO post for only five years after taking over in January 2005, and that the change was unrelated to company finances. Yet a senior broker at the firm said Exor, which bought Cushman in 2007, was “not terribly impressed” with his tenure. [more]
