His vision wasn't quite 20/20: insurance executive Gerald Isom set out in pursuit of a humble career goal: to be a branch manager.

His vision wasn't quite 20/20

"I can't remember when I didn't have a vision," says a soft-spoken Gerald Isom in a slight Texas drawl.

Throughout most of his life, that vision was a modest one, to be a branch manager of an insurance company.

His career went better than planned, however, and Isom ended up as president and chief executive of multibillion-dollar Transamerica Insurance Group, the Los Angeles-based insurance subsidiary of Transamerica Corp. of San Francisco.

That has worked out well for both Isom and Transamerica Insurance. Since he took over the company's helm in 1984, Transamerica Insurance's income has grown from $800 million in premiums in 1984 to $2.1 billion in 1990.

Behind the dramatic growth was a shift in the company's focus from a generalist property/casualty insurer to a firm that increasingly serves specialty markets such as entertainment coverage, excess workers' compensation, professional sports and reinsurance. "For generalists, in my opinion, there's not much of a future," says Isom, recently named a group vice president at Transamerica Corp. and given the additional duties of supervising the corporation's real estate tax services.

Now perhaps more than ever, Isom will need his vision. The subsidiary's net income slowed to $61 million for 1990, compared to $75 million in 1989, largely because of a cyclical downturn in the commercial property liability market.

But not all of the challenges are cyclical. There are too many insurance companies chasing too few risks. In the late 1980s, many of the largest companies and best risks set up their own captive property/casualty insurance subsidiaries.

Competition for the specialty market is stiffening as more companies reach the conclusion that Isom reached seven years ago and decide to tack toward specialty insurance.

Isom is perhaps the most prominent property/casualty insurance figure in the state, largely, say industry analysts, because of several leadership positions in industry associations and his stainless reputation in business circles.

"He's a white knight and he's riding a white horse," says John McCann, editor of the property/casualty biweekly Insurance Journal, of Isom's reputation.

Among the positions Isom holds are chairman of the Insurance Information Institute, a national property/casualty consumer information organization, and chairman of the Association of California Insurance Companies, the leading property/casualty trade and lobby association in Sacramento.

At Transamerica, Isom's goal now, he says, is to transform the company into an upper quartile performer in the industry.

The way to do that, he says, is to make the company more enterpreneurial.

Isom runs his insurance group components the same way Transamerica Corp. runs Transamerica Insurance Group, as a separate profit-making center that must stand on its own earnings.

That presumes a smarter and more educated work-force. A big Isom tenet is education - perhaps because it cost Isom so much.

He spent 10 years in night school while working fulltime before obtaining his marketing degree from Oklahoma City University.

"It can be done," admonishes Isom to young insurance executives who complain that there is no time to work and pursue their education. In fact, he says, that is the best way to learn: applying in work what you learned the night before.

Isom's modest office is lined by small pyramids - as per the company's pyramid headquarters building in San Francisco - and by books he says he is able to apply to his company's business.

One he particularly recommends is "The Japanese Mind" by Edward de Bono, which outlines six ways of going about thinking. "To accomplish something, you can take the contrarian view to get people thinking," he says. "Why can't we do this? Much of today's technology spun out of that."

The model for the values Isom seeks in his employees and his company comes from the moral values his father set as a manager of Black Angus cattle ranches in Texas. "I'd give anything in the world if my kids had that kind of upbringing," he says of the many years he spent herding animals on horseback, growing grain for the cattle and taking the animals to shows.

Yet, that did not stop Isom from leaving the ranching business. "As a young person growing up on a cattle ranch, the first thing you want to do is grow up and move away," he says.

Far from the gregarious stereotype of a Texan, Isom is amiable but reserved in manner and speech. Words appear to be a precious commodity that he is reluctant to waste.

In 1957 Isom began as an underwriter trainee in the Dallas office of Fireman's Fund Insurance Co., where he would spend his next 28 years.

Behind his rise at the company was a man who met Isom as a trainee and saw something in him - exactly what, Isom isn't sure.

Max (Isom refuses to divulge his last name) was in charge of all inland marine business in Dallas at the time and recommended Isom for a management position in Oklahoma City.

Isom continued to move up the ranks, occupying various positions.

In 1970 he was asked to run a new line of insurance in the excess and special risk division.

"It was `wow' and `why me?,'" Isom said. (Max, by now special assistant to the CEO, had recommended him).

Isom was interested but worried that a branch manager position continued to elude him. That concern was settled in a matter-of-fact observation by his wife, Lucille: "Has it ever occurred to you that they might not ask you (to be a branch manager)?"

"I said `good point,' and took the job," Isom said. The position was particularly good for Isom because it put him into close contact with the company's chairman. He became vice president in charge of excess and special risk and then senior vice president of all the company's specialty and reinsurance operations in 1978.

Isom might have continued happily in his post had not American Express Co., which owned the company, installed a new chairman and chief executive at Fireman's Fund in 1984 "who were not insurance people."

At that point Isom was approached by Transamerica. "There was chemistry," Isom says. "We clicked and we knew it too." So Isom made the jump from $2.5 billion (1984 premiums) Fireman's Fund to $800 million Transamerica Insurance as chief executive.

Fireman's Fund subsequently went public and was later bought by premiere insurer Allianz AG Holding of Germany.

What might have been at Fireman's no longer concerns him. "I never look back," says Isom.

Like many insurers, he is concerned about public mistrust of the insurance industry, which appears to rival that against lawyers.

"It's kind of scary," he says. "If the public had a really sound awareness of what makes this business run, there would be a totally different understanding of the industry.... But it's difficult to discuss that with consumers who pay way too much money for auto insurance."

He has eased the company out of the auto insurance frying pan. Auto insurance has declined as a percentage of the company's total business from 35 percent in 1983 to 10 percent in 1990.