Cfo Thought Leader

The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s is as good a place in time as any for Gregg Clevenger to use to begin explaining the mix of professional and personal circumstances that made Rochester, New York, his port of entry into the CFO office. At the time, Clevenger recalls, he was a vice president for Goldman’s Sach’s media entertainment and technology group in Singapore and observed $100 million of recently raised funding “go up in smoke.” Having been recruited to join Goldman while overseas, Clevenger returned to the U.S. as something of an unknown. “People didn’t really know me in the U.S. context,” he remembers. “So it was going to be a very tough row to hoe.” What’s more, the travel to which Clevenger was accustomed was no longer a great match for his young family. “My first two children—one born in Singapore and the other in Hong Kong—I never saw them,” comments Clevenger, who began commuting daily to Goldman’s Manhattan office from a new home in Connecticut. It was at about this time that Clevenge