Page 145 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

composure and not getting rattled,” Patricelli explained. “His job was
extremely high-pressure. People were always coming at him, and he was
always a model of calmness and steadiness.”
At the end of his Fellowship year, Patricelli went to work for nearly
three years as counsel to a U.S. Senate subcommittee on employment,
manpower, and poverty whose members included Senators Ted and Bobby
Kennedy, Jacob Javits, and Fritz Mondale, among others. After that, Patri-
celli served as deputy undersecretary at the Department of Health, Edu-
cation, and Welfare and then as administrator of the U.S. Urban Mass
Transportation Administration.
Bob Patricelli never made it to that international law firm he had his
eye on while at Harvard Law School. Instead, when his time in Washing-
ton, D.C., was done, he decided to forgo his promising legal career and
try his hand at business; he went to work in the government relations sec-
tion of Connecticut General Insurance Corporation, which later became
CIGNA. “My government experience from the White House Fellowship
got me in the door,” Patricelli recalled. “I said I’d do government relations
for Connecticut General to start, but I wanted the opportunity to move
into the mainline of business at some point, and that’s exactly what hap-
pened.” After one and a half years, Patricelli moved into a position man-
aging corporate staff and then, after a merger, was given his first full
business responsibility when he was assigned to lead one of the company’s
four divisions. His division oversaw Connecticut General’s fledgling health
maintenance organization (HMO). Over the next four years, as Patricelli
built the division into a national health care organization, he realized that
the next logical step was to merge the company’s health plan segment with
its group health insurance segment. “The world was moving toward health
plan–type organizations with networks of care, and I had a number of ideas
I wanted to implement,” Patricelli explained. “But it became clear there
was going to be an organizational tussle between me and the longtime head
of the group insurance operation—a twenty-five-year veteran of the com-
pany—and he ultimately won out. That was fine with me. I knew I had
some good ideas, and I was ready to go out and test them.”
However, there was a fly in the ointment. Patricelli needed money to
finance his dream company but had no idea how to go about raising ven-
ture capital. A family member introduced him to the people at Warburg
Pincus, a private equity firm based in New York that helps entrepreneurs

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