Fast Focus
	Who is this guy? Few heard of the McKinsey consultant before he took over leadership of Aon in April 2005.
	He has built a culture that enables him to attract some of the best talent in the business.
	A rarity in a leader: He has both execution skills and people skills.

Greg Makes His Case

With nearly three years under his belt, Aon’s Greg Case has persuasively moved his firm’s culture and taken advantage of market changes to shift into high gear.

By  Leslie Werstein Hann

As Pat Ryan was in Chicago assembling the insurance agencies that would one day become Aon Corp., Greg Case, the current CEO, was 700 miles away, demonstrating early signs of his leadership style at Salina High School Central in Kansas.

Valedictorian of the class of 1981, Case was also a force on the football field, making the I-70 All-League offensive and defensive teams. During sweltering Kansas summers, Case kept in shape by throwing 100-lb sacks of flour at the local mill, and once school started, he was the first in and last to leave the gym, pushing himself harder than anyone else in the weight room. On the field, Case knew everyone’s responsibility for every play. If a player was slightly out of position, Case told him so, but he did it quietly. “We need a foot here,” he’d say.

“At that age, most kids don’t pay that much attention to detail,” says Matt McMillen, Case’s teammate at tight end and now right-hand man to University of Oklahoma head football coach Bob Stoops. “He always corrected me on how I was lining up, and I’m going, ‘Does it matter that much?’ And it did.”

Case was far from the stereotype of the wildly popular, ego-driven football star. But he was serious about winning, and the example he set inspired his teammates to work harder. “He wasn’t always a vocal leader, but we reached a point where we didn’t want to let him down,” says Bob Reinsch, a former teammate. “He was the one who seemed to be the most invested. I think he understood what winning meant more than anyone else on the team.”

No one who knew Case then is surprised at what he has achieved since. A Harvard MBA, Case, 44, left a comfortable consulting career at the prestigious management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to steer a 46,000-employee company that seemed adrift on turbulent seas. It’s been 2 ½ years since Case stepped into founder Pat Ryan’s extra-large CEO shoes at Aon, a job that paid him $7.5 million last year, and there is a palpable sense that he is leading a forward march down the field toward the goals he set early on in his tenure: delivering distinctive client value, creating a culture focused on performance, and attracting and retaining the most talented employees. The three-pronged strategy is repeated so often that you’d be forgiven the impression that there’s a brainwashing department hidden on one of the 83 floors of the Aon Center in downtown Chicago.

“He has established a very easy-to-understand, clearly and consistently communicated strategy for the company,” says Corbette Doyle, Aon’s longtime national healthcare practice leader whom Case tapped last year to become the company’s first chief diversity officer. “Everybody knows what the strategy of the company is. We didn’t have that before.”

Case became CEO of Aon in April 2005, while the pall of Eliot Spitzer’s crusade against the major insurance brokers still hung over the industry. He predicted that the breach would have a lasting impact on the industry, but looking past the tempest, Case could see Aon coming out a winner.

“The turmoil, while disconcerting to some, was incredibly exciting to me. Opportunity is born out of turmoil,” he says. “To me, as a new CEO, my god, what an unbelievable opportunity. An industry going through a huge amount of change, a company with intrinsic capability that is unbelievable, that’s never really been fully coordinated. Wow. What a wonderful thing to be part of.”

The bubble of Case’s words belie his muted tone. Greg Case says he’s extremely passionate about his work, but he is as even-keeled as they come. He may be the most self-deprecating CEO in the Fortune 250, taking personal credit for virtually nothing.

“Greg Case doesn’t change anything at Aon, he really doesn’t.” This is Case talking, referring to himself in the third person. “We have a leadership team, a group of colleagues, who are changing our firm. And changing it in a way in which we have a deep love and respect for the past, but an incredibly high aspiration for the future. Those aren’t just words. I can’t be more candid.”

He can pass out all the kudos he wants, but it is Case himself who has become the company’s globe-trotting ambassador, meeting individually or in town-hall style meetings with more than 40,000 Aon employees around the world and continuing his schedule of meetings with 100 clients a month. He listens keenly, while constantly scratching notes in a rapidly growing collection of little black notebooks. (They’re mine, and no one else gets to look at them,” he says.)

He’s having an effect inside and outside the company.