At the top of his game: top African-American at Chubb creates a legacy of achievement.

THE OVERHEAD LIGHT FLICKERED A WARNING. THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT made her last safety check, and the 747 from Johannesburg descended onto a New York airport runway.

Inside the plane, Sylvester Green, managing director and senior vice president of Chubb Sons Inc. unfastened his seat belt and collected his new-business scouting notes.

His final report to the insurance company's senior management reads in part, "At this time, certain risk factors in an emerging South Africa outweigh potential profits for Chubb."

Green's decision probably disappointed South African President Nelson Mandela, who is hungry for foreign investment dollars. It most certainly shocked the investment community.

Why, when every other major corporation in the United States is looking to set up shop in resource-rich emerging nations, would Chubb pass it by? Who is this guy to give a thumbs-down to an apartheid-free South Africa?

He is Sy Green, a 30-year Chubb veteran. Many industry insiders believe he is the highest ranking African-American in the field of property and casualty insurance. Perhaps more important, he is a tactician who puts business ahead of what is politically correct.

"Even though we give high marks to the [South African] entrepreneurial, banking and financial markets," Green explains, "they have a car-jacking every 30 seconds and there are a lot of fires in the area. Generally, those are the sorts of things that we, as a property and casualty insurance company, try to stay away from."

Chubb Corp. is the parent company of Chubb & Sons, the corporation's property and casualty arm. Chubb Corp. also operates life and health insurance and real estate development subsidiaries. Aside from the obvious earthquake and hurricane coverage, Chubb & Sons also insures museum collections and wineries and provides kidnap/ransom insurance for its clients' executive officers. The company also covers motion picture productions. Chubb handled the claim when actor Dustin Hoffman got sick during the filming of Tootsie and production was delayed. Filling another niche, Chubb developed insurance against product tampering and contamination in the wake of the 1982 Tylenol poisonings.

While risk is what fills the company's coffers, Green says Chubb takes only calculated risks. Taking the hard-line, like postponing investing in South Africa, Green says, is what has made Chubb & Sons the most profitable unit of Chubb Corp. Chubb & Sons kicks in more than 85% of the company's bottom line.

In a fourth-quarter report, Chubb boasted a nine-month net income of $372.6 million, compared with $163.7 million during the same period in 1993. Of that total, Chubb's property and casualty unit generated $353.5 million.

Those figures are impressive for a company in an industry that was walloped by a total $12.7 billion in losses from claims on floods, fires and earthquakes during the first nine months of 1994.

Based on Green's recommendation, Chubb will probably turn its investment sights away from South Africa. "With emerging markets in the Pacific Rim, India and the former Eastern Bloc countries, we fully expect- 25% of next year's revenues to come from abroad," predicts Green. "That doesn't mean that we will never invest in South Africa," he continues, "it just means not now."

Green ticks off several risk factors that influenced his decision: business practices incongruent with the international marketplace; the complexity of making money and getting it out of the country without having it devalued; and a high level of violent crime. "They have some things to work out," he says.

Darwin Davis, senior vice president at Equitable Companies Inc. and Green's longtime friend, says, "They sent him to South Africa to represent the company, but more important, to make some decisions."

The truth is, Green has been making the right decisions for the past 30 years.

Knowing when to risk what is one reason Green became the point man for the South African delegation, says Richard D. Smith, who retired last year as president of Chubb. "His business acumen, intelligence and leadership" are the badges of honor Sy Green wears proudly, says Smith.

A FORWARD THINKER

Today, Green is an avid golfer and skier, but while pursuing his bachelor's at Mount Union College in Ohio, he was a high jumper on the track-and-field team. In successive rounds of the high jump, contestants navigate a jump at one height and then raise the bar. The winner is the one who clears the highest level.

Green has applied that "raise the bar principal" to ascend Chubb's corporate ladder, one rung at a time, says Davis.

Starting in 1964, fresh from college, Green went from management trainee to New Jersey branch manager in just five years. One year later, he was appointed the casualty insurance manager for the entire eastern region. In 1977, he was promoted to vice president, and 11 years later he became senior vice president.

"I was fortunate in the beginning of my career to have managers who let me do a lot of different things," Green says. "I guess it was also fortunate that I was able to [do] those things well."

From his corner office high above Wall Street, Green presides over an $800 million division of Chubb's worldwide operations. He is Chubb's New York zone officer; the zone has eight branches throughout New York and Puerto Rico, and a staff of 1,000 people report directly to him.

As Davis points out, a key to Green's success is his ability to think ahead and make himself invaluable to the company.

According to Davis, Green anticipated company downsizing. He knew that to maintain a high level of productivity with fewer people, some services would have to be farmed out or outsourced to vendors.

"I'd been talking for some time about our need to develop an outsourcing program for the company," says Green, "but it was a fairly new concept and there was resistance from management."

But, as Chubb, Chairman and CEO Dean O'Hare says, "When Sy believes in something, he pushes to make it happen." Foreseeing what is now a multibillion dollar industry, Green attended the Harvard Advanced Management Program.

Green chuckles, "They were talking about the importance of outsourcing just like I was. After the program, I gave a report to senior management, and Harvard's sanction was just the push I needed."

According to O'Hare, Green has since piloted a management restructuring program at Chubb. Green explains, "Instead of the branch managers being separate from the people under them, everyone's now part of the team."

The results of Green's outsourcing and restructuring programs have significantly contributed to Chubb's fiscal bottom line.

Chubb is one of the top 20 property and casualty companies, says Weston Hicks, research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein Co. "It is one of the most profitable companies on the Street, and it's extremely well positioned for long-term growth."

Kevin Morley, director of fixed income research at CS First Boston, echoes that enthusiasm, citing Chubb's double--A rating. "It's got about five bonds outstanding and I think that the farthest one out there is $150 million due in November of 1999. That means that the company is so successful that it doesn't have to come to the bond market very often, and when it does it's only for the short term."

TO THE FUTURE FROM WITHIN

If Sy Green, 54, were to retire right now, he would leave a sterling legacy. But Green says retirement is not on his agenda.

He won't theorize on what he'll do in the future, but it will probably involve the same kinds of things he has done for years--manage, mentor and grow.

As Chubb's Albany, N.Y., branch manager, Charles Cornelius considers Green an icon of corporate achievement. "He's one of those guys that works behind the scenes," says Cornelius. "He gets people to do things that were part of his original plan, but he makes you feel as though it came out of your own head." Cornelius is the next highest-ranking African-American on Chubb's payroll.

Archyne Woodard, Chubb's national diversity coordinator, adds that Green has been instrumental in forming Chubb's Minority Development Council.

Federal regulations on affirmative action and classifying people on the basis of race make it difficult to quantify the number of blacks working at Chubb. But Green is determined that he will not be the last black person to cast a large shadow at the company.

All senior managers are assigned as mentors to two trainees, says Woodard. "Sy has always been committed to his formal responsibility, but informally, God only knows how many careers he's helped along." As a past president of the New York affiliate of Inroads Inc., a national corporate sponsorship program, Green has mentored many minority youths.

Green also founded the National Insurance Industry Association 25 years ago. Anthony Greene, the newly elected president of the New York-based trade association, says, "No one along the way has consistently brought people along both inside and outside the company like Sy."

Should Green embrace the entrepreneurial spirit himself, perhaps with his own property and casualty firm, he already has one sure conduit. Kim, his wife, is one of the few black broker/dealers in the property and casualty field. Her broker/dealership, MGIS, is based in New York. "That's an idea," says Green, "but it would take a major rearrangement of the things I'm doing now."

"He's so involved," Kim laments, "with business, the church and the community. Sometimes I have to stop and remind people that he's human too!"

Whether human or icon, Green sums up his ultimate challenge to younger managers by saying: "You've got to carve your own landscape and be able to build, by consensus, a community that believes in you as much as you believe in yourself."