The legendary journalist Geoff Colvin started as a researcher at Fortune Magazine on Sept. 11, 1978. Over the next 48 years, he went on to deliver some of the finest business journalism in our industry.
This week, the Fortune newsroom celebrated and paid homage to Geoff as he retired from his role as Senior Editor-at-Large after working here for half of the publication’s 96 years.
As my colleague, Executive Editor Lee Clifford, wrote of Geoff, he brought a gravitas and intellectual rigor to every story he told: “He no doubt would have made an esteemed academic or polished CEO himself,” Lee wrote. “But his special gift is in how he saw complex ideas and trends emerging before anyone else—and helped readers make sense of the world around them.”
Among his many blockbuster features, Lee noted a couple of Geoff’s favorites: A nuanced portrait of GM CEO Mary Barra nine months into her tenure in 2014, and his incisive assessment of Randall Stephenson’s ill-fated quest to remake AT&T as a media giant, above. Personally, I have a particular fondness for Geoff’s elegiac look at Hollywood’s fading identity as an “industry cluster,”the last feature of his that I had the honor of editing, in March of this year.
Outside the pages of our magazine and website, Geoff shared his insights on his five weekly broadcasts for CBS Radio, as the anchor of Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS, on stages across the world, and in books including Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else and its follow-up, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will.
Over his half-century tenure, Geoff interviewed the likes of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates, and President Donald Trump. Through it all, he maintained an aspirational composure, generosity of character, and quietly wry sense of humor—as well as a sartorial flair for bespoke suits that led Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell to declare him the newsroom’s “best-dressed by far.”
Geoff Colvin on a panel during the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco on Nov. 3, 2015.
Photo: Kimberly White—Getty Images for Fortune
In a conversation with Alyson this week, Geoff reflected upon his time at Fortune and upon the journalism he has practiced since before many of Fortune’s staffers were born. I was particularly struck by the pep talk that Geoff says he gives himself as he begins writing each article: “It goes like this,” he told Alyson and the rapt newsroom audience. “‘Everybody you want to reach is being pulled away by the big tech companies that have spent billions on getting people’s attention, and advertisers individually spent millions to get people to look at their ad. What in the world makes you think anyone is going to read your pathetic article in that environment?’ And with that pep talk, I then try to just answer that question.”
Among his many expertises (which include, we learned this week, a mastery of the bagpipes and the gymnastics parallel bars), Geoff is a great authority on Fortune’s founder, Henry Luce, having coauthored a book on the Time Inc. empire Luce built. Geoff spoke of Luce’s love for technology.
“My question is: What would Henry Luce think if he looked at today’s technology?” Geoff asked. “What would he see that nobody else had thought about or had seen in our business? I don’t know the answer to that, but I do think that’s the question to ask… And we could have—and should have—a fantastic future if we do.”
If Fortune does indeed have a fantastic future ahead, it will be in no small part because Geoff Colvin showed us how to look for it. He leaves us not just with an extraordinary body of work, but a challenge: to see farther, think harder, and write something that’s actually worth a reader’s time.