Former Travelers Cos. CEO Jay Fishman died Friday at 63 after a battle with the terminal neurodegenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the Associated Press reports.
“Though he would be too humble to admit it, Jay was an icon among corporate leaders,” Travelers CEO Alan Schnitzer said in a prepared statement. “As his friend, I’m grateful to Jay for his mentorship and counsel. As his successor, I’m grateful to Jay for everything he did to set the stage for our company’s future success.”
Fishman stepped down as CEO in December, but became the executive chairman of the company’s board. He continued to work in this role almost daily, the Associated Press reported in July.
Fishman became CEO of Travelers’ predecessor company in 1998, led a merger between The St. Paul Cos. Inc. and Travelers Property Casualty Corp. in 2004, and moved the company’s headquarters from St. Paul to New York in 2009. The company employed more than 2,000 people in Minnesota as recently as 2014.
After his 2014 diagnosis, Fishman became an advocate and active philanthropist for ALS research, the Associated Press noted. He helped raise money for a Boston Children’s Hospital project that provides ALS patients with computers that can speak in their own voices after the disease takes their ability to speak. He also helped fund a national project that is gathering information from ALS patients that could help researchers learn how to fight the disease.
"You can be a skeptic and say, 'Well, the only reason he's doing it is that he has the disease," Fishman told the Associated Press in July. "The answer is, 'Yeah, of course.' If not me than who? If I'm not going to reflect all the good things that have happened to me in my life and find a way to plow that back to help people deal with what I personally know is a horrible disease, then shame on me."
