Richard D. Parsons, whose humane approach to business made him a serial troubleshooter at distressed companies such as Time Warner, CBS and Citigroup and a sought-after adviser at the highest echelons of American industry, died on Thursday at his Manhattan home. He was 76.
The cause was bone cancer, said Ronald S. Lauder, a member of the Estée Lauder board and one of Mr. Parsons’s oldest friends.
Mr. Parsons’s winding career tracked the biggest companies in American media and finance — and the biggest problems. Time and again, he stepped in when things looked catastrophic and put his smooth leadership style to work, disentangling Gordian knots and assuaging discontented shareholders.
Mr. Parsons, a jazz-loving oenophile who served on the board of the Apollo Theater and owned a Tuscan winery, rose to the top of the business world in an era when he was frequently the only Black executive in the boardroom. A self-described “Rockefeller Republican,” Mr. Parsons spoke out on social justice issues in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, signed a letter protesting a 2021 law that imposed restrictions on Georgia voters and co-founded the Equity Alliance, a fund that backs early-stage ventures led by women and people of color.
Mr. Parsons’s lengthy résumé is a catalog of corporate emergencies: He stanched losses at Dime Bancorp during the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s; cleaned up the disastrous merger of AOL and Time Warner after the dot-com bust at the turn of the century; stepped in at Citigroup as the banking colossus teetered after the 2007-8 financial crisis; served as CBS’ board chairman after its disgraced chief executive, Leslie Moonves, went to war with its controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone; and came out of semiretirement to steady the Los Angeles Clippers after their owner at the time, Donald Sterling, made racist remarks.
Throughout it all, Mr. Parsons deployed his easy manner and extensive Rolodex — he was an aide to Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former New York governor and vice president — to lead, charm and cajole his way out of tight corporate corners. In 2007, as Time Warner was crawling back from the brink of disaster, Mr. Parsons summed up his career during a steakhouse interview with The New York Times before ordering a second bottle of wine.
“I want my legacy to be simple: I left the place in good shape and in good hands,” he said.
Survivors include Mr. Parsons’s wife, Laura, with whom he raised three children.
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