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Smith was even willing to be outvoted by the other OOC members. Woody Ives, the company’s talented CFO, remembers one of his proudest moments at General Cinema (Ives later left to lead a successful turnaround at Eastern Resources), when a joint venture to enter the cable business with Comcast and CBS was shot down by the board after Smith let Ives voice a dissenting opinion: “He gave me permission to publicly disagree with him in front of the Board. Very few CEOs would have done that.”5
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William N. Thorndike Jr. (The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success)