By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
George M. Ferris Jr., 81, the chief executive who made Ferris, Baker Watts one of the largest investment-banking firms in the mid-Atlantic region and who had an active role in the District's civic and philanthropic life, died Oct. 20 at George Washington University Hospital after a heart attack.
Mr. Ferris was not a vibrant fixture on the city's social circuit but instead quietly used his experience in finance have an impact on the community.
He applied his fundraising talents to many organizations, including the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, where he was elected board chairman this year. He was also an officer in the business-oriented Federal City Council and co-chaired a committee that suggested ways to improve Washington's troubled school system.
To many Washingtonians, he was also a familiar voice as pitchman for his company. In radio advertisements, he pledged his sales staff would never interrupt the dinner hour with a pesky call soliciting business -- unlike, he would add, "New York firms with whom you have no relationship."
During a five-decade career, Mr. Ferris helped guide a small Washington-based securities firm started by his father during the Depression into a regional force. He retired in 1997 and became board chairman of Ferris, Baker Watts, which was created in 1988 after Ferris & Co. acquired a venerable Baltimore company after a stock market crash.
Although small by Wall Street standards, Ferris, Baker Watts became a top investment bank for high-tech businesses as well as federal contractors. It was purchased in June by a division of Royal Bank of Canada in a deal valued at more than $230 million.
Following Merrill Lynch's lead, Mr. Ferris helped transform the securities industry by emphasizing the need for a professional management team focused on planning and controlling a firm's growth. This was a departure from the traditional practice of tapping a brokerage company's most successful producers to become partners.
"These producers recognized that their security blanket was their production," he told the Washington Times, "so none of them ever gave up production to become full-time managers. . . . So back at Ferris & Co., since I was the founder's son, I didn't need a security blanket, so I gave up my production and became managing partner."
He explained that many firms he came across while a governor of the New York Stock Exchange were led by strong personalities with little apparent concern for the overall company's welfare. Many of those businesses went defunct, he said, "a pretty sad commentary for an industry that preaches to investors that 90 percent of what you buy when you buy a company's stock is management."
George Mallette Ferris Jr. was born in Washington on March 11, 1927. He was a 1944 graduate of St. Albans School and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton University, where he received an engineering degree in 1948.
He joined the family business after getting a master's degree in business administration from Harvard University in 1950. Decades later, he told The Washington Post that he was driven in part by outdoing his father's business accomplishments.
His devotion to work, he said, affected his private life and led to his divorce from the former Helen Willard.
Survivors include his wife of 44 years, Nancy Strouce Ferris of Chevy Chase; two children from his first marriage, George Ferris III of Baltimore and W. Bradley Ferris of McLean; two children from his second marriage, Kimberly Crocker of Chevy Chase and David Ferris of Potomac; a stepdaughter, Karen Warner of Chevy Chase; a sister, Gene Benedict of McLean; and seven grandchildren.
Starting about 1960, George Ferris Jr. began a long career of consulting work overseas for development organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and finance ministries in Asia and Africa. He specialized in spurring private-sector development by establishing stock exchanges and other financial infrastructure.
In the early 1990s, he headed a presidential commission that released a scathing report of USAID's management inefficiencies. The report is most remembered for its recommendation that the agency be folded into the State Department and sentenced to what the National Journal called "bureaucratic oblivion" and repositioned as "a more direct instrument of U.S. foreign policy."
J. Brian Atwood, who headed the agency from 1993 to 1999, said yesterday that he used the commission's report as a blueprint for many dramatic reforms. That prompted Mr. Ferris to withdraw his recommendation of a merger with the State Department, Atwood said, although the investment banker continued to fault the agency's emphasis on humanitarian assistance and democracy projects ahead of economic development.