Idea Makers

Clive at Carnegie Hall

Clive Gillinson wants audiences to hear music in a brand-new way

Clive Gillinson lived in Bangalore, India, for only the first few months of his life, but when he became Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director, in 2005, he got a call from the Bangalore Times. “They wanted quotes for a front-page story: ‘Bangalore Boy Takes Over Carnegie Hall.’ I told them I only lived there for six months, but they didn’t care,” Gillinson says. “It showed me that Carnegie Hall matters everywhere.”

Nearly all the big musical legends have played at the famed auditorium — the list includes Gustav Mahler, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Luciano Pavarotti, and even the Rolling Stones. “Carnegie Hall has always brought the best of the world to New York City,” says Gillinson, sitting in his seventh-floor corner office overlooking midtown Manhattan. “It’s one of the reasons I came.”

Just like the old joke goes, it was practice, practice, practice that got Gillinson to Carnegie Hall. However, his path wasn’t a direct one. Gillinson’s mother, a professional cellist, was determined that her son study math instead of music — she feared he would struggle to make a living as a musician, just as she had. But Gillinson’s passion for the arts outweighed his mother’s concerns. “After the first year of university, I knew I’d made a mistake. I had to study music,” he recalls. “So I dropped out and entered the Royal Academy of Music in London.”

Not long after graduating, Gillinson joined the London Symphony Orchestra. He spent 14 years playing cello with the ensemble, but by 1984, the LSO was in financial trouble. “It was technically bankrupt,” he says. “The board sacked the manager, and they couldn’t find anyone who wanted the job.”

The board asked Gillinson to take on the role of managing director of the orchestra. Rather then accept outright, Gillinson proposed a one-year trial period. “It was a total nightmare,” he remembers. “Not only was the work ferocious, but my wife had just given birth to twins three months early; they weighed only two pounds each. That was an exhausting time.”

But surprisingly, Gillinson began to feel more artistic freedom in his administrative role with the symphony then as a cellist. “I found that the creativity of being involved in a business that I’m passionate about was fascinating,” he says.

Despite a lack of management experience, Gillinson helped the LSO make a financial comeback and also launched a number of successful music education programs — accomplishments so significant that in 2005, Queen Elizabeth awarded him a knighthood, making Gillinson the first orchestra manager to receive that honor.

Since his arrival at Carnegie Hall, Gillinson has expanded the scale and reach of the institution’s programming, which consists of roughly 200 events a year. Last year he launched Carnegie Hall’s first interdisciplinary festival, Berlin in Lights, a 17-day event that featured the Berlin Philharmonic and enlisted some of New York’s most renowned institutions to host not only musical programs, but also film screenings and panel discussions relating to Berlin’s multidimensional transformation. “These big festivals look right across the spectrum of arts and culture,” he says.

Gillinson’s contribution to his adopted city also extends to education with the introduction of the Academy, a two-year fellowship program established by Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School, the Weill Music Institute, and the New York City Department of Education. The initiative offers performance opportunities and music education training for 34 postgraduate musicians. “We look for people who are not only great musicians but who also want to serve as missionaries for what music can do for people’s lives,” says Gillinson.

Presenting opportunities seems to be a ubiquitous theme for Gillinson since he took up the post at Carnegie Hall. As he puts it, “If people approach life at a hundred percent, the windows of opportunity will always arise.”

Continental is the official airline of Carnegie Hall.

Sea Change

FMC Technologies’ Peter Kinnear takes the search for petroleum deeper than ever before

While most corporate executives are looking to build a business platform, Peter Kinnear is trying his hardest to dismantle his. That’s because his company, FMC Technologies, a $4 billion oil services business based in Houston, has taken the search for petroleum to new depths. FMC has established itself as the leader in subsea oil production systems. Its business plan revolves around eliminating expensive and unsightly oil rigs in favor of putting pumping gear down on the ocean floor, where it is not only out of sight but also positioned to do its work perhaps even better than ever.

“There have been huge advances in technology that have completely altered how we go after oil and gas,” explains Kinnear, FMC’s chairman, CEO, and president. “Subsea systems are able to reach reserves that would otherwise go untapped.” Essentially, a subsea system consists of computerized “trees” (huge structures with valves that control the flow of oil and gas) and an array of hoses and pipelines arranged on the ocean floor. The systems include sophisticated computer controls that let human operators on the surface keep close tabs on what’s happening below. If there’s a problem, or engineers need to conduct maintenance or repairs on equipment, they use an unmanned submarine to swap out components and other subsystems.

Subsea technology had its genesis in the 1980s. That’s when engineers realized that there is plenty of oil below the ocean floor that existing technology could never tap into. Visionaries at places like FMC began to dream about doing all the hard work down on the sea floor. But at those depths, pressures are enormous and temperatures are extremely cold. “At the time, a lot of questions existed,” Kinnear says. “People asked, ‘Is this reliable? Is it safe? Is it environmentally friendly?’”

Those questions have largely been answered. Today, subsea systems are expanding in use and appearing farther and farther offshore. An upshot is that oil companies are tapping into reserves at depths that were unimaginable just a decade ago. In fact, FMC Technologies recently set a world record by installing an undersea field in the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of 8,995 feet — more than one and a half miles down.

Subsea installations are also growing in size. For example, one complex located about 95 miles off the coast of Africa (near Angola) now encompasses 49 trees, an equal number of wellheads, an array of separation devices and pumps, and miles of distribution lines. Operators can view the underwater complex on a display screen and use cameras and lights to illuminate various pieces of equipment within the underwater facility. They can also use thrusters to dynamically position or adjust the equipment. Onboard sensors and systems keep the devices in place.

Kinnear, who has been with FMC since 1971 and was instrumental in developing the technology, believes that it will play an increasingly crucial role in discovering deep-sea hydrocarbons and managing their future production. Not only are the undersea systems more efficient at extracting materials, they’re also less likely to be damaged by storms. “In places such as the Gulf of Mexico, placing the equipment underwater virtually eliminates problems related to hurricanes,” he points out.

Concludes Kinnear: “The evolution of this technology is absolutely amazing. A few years ago, I would never have thought we could have solved so many technical problems and created such remarkable systems that play such a key role in providing energy resources.”

King of Hearts

A world-famous mentor helped Dr. James Willerson reach the top at the Texas Heart Institute

When he was 14 years old, James Willerson often joined his physician parents (his father was a general practitioner and his mother an anesthesiologist) on hospital rounds. Willerson’s parents noticed their son’s keen interest in medicine, so when a much-talked-about young heart surgeon came to their hometown of San Antonio one weekend, they arranged for their son to meet him. That rising star, Dr. Denton A. Cooley, went on to become one of the most famous heart surgeons in the world and performed the first artificial heart transplant. He also became James Willerson’s mentor.

In 2004, 55 years after they first met, and following countless hours spent together in operating rooms and in hospital corridors late at night, Cooley asked Willerson to take his place as president of the Texas Heart Institute (THI), which Cooley founded in 1962. “I was inspired by his work ethic and commitment,” Willerson says. “Heart disease is the number one killer in the world, the number one killer of men and women in the U.S. Something about the heart was always magical to me.”

Willerson, now 68, has made a name for himself as one of the nation’s top heart doctors. His reputation is due in large part to his groundbreaking research into the identification of dangerous, hard-to-detect plaques that form in the arteries and contribute to heart attacks. “Early in my career, I became fascinated with why some patients would have heart attacks all of a sudden, some would have symptoms and never have a heart attack, and still others would have symptoms and then finally have a heart attack,” he says.

Because at least 50 percent of heart attacks occur without warning, Willerson hypothesized that something other than a narrowing of the artery — which often sends the body signals via chest pains — was at play. His studies led to the development of medicines such as Plavix — which helps prevent heart attacks by keeping blood platelets from sticking together and forming clots — and the identification of certain genes that can help predict a patient’s chance of suffering a heart attack before it occurs.

At age 88, Cooley remains on staff as THI’s president emeritus and surgeon-in-chief. “We have adjacent offices,” he says. “Before I arrive at 6:30 a.m., James puts a mug of coffee on my desk. When I see that cup of steaming coffee, it’s such a comfort to me. I’m always reassured just knowing that he’s here.”