Businessman
Burton M. Tansky
Notes from Evan Smith
"It’s an unenviable job — having to step into the finely polished, impeccably styled shoes of the late Stanley Marcus, the man who for so many years sat atop the Neiman Marcus empire — the jewel in the luxury retail crown in Texas and across the country. But Burton Tansky knows how to sell, and buy, and serve the customer’s every whim, wish, and need in a way that would surely have met with Mr. Stanley’s approval. You might even say that 70-year-old president and chief executive of the Neiman Marcus Group, was cut from the same cloth as his legendary forebear. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsyvlania, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Tansky began his career as an assistant buyer at Kaufmann’s department store. Over the next twenty years, he moved around and rose through the retail business, doing time at Filene’s in Boston, Rike’s in Dayton, Forbes & Wallace in Springfield, Massachusetts, and I. Magnin in San Francisco before assuming the presidency of Saks Fifth Avenue, the New York-based luxury retailer, in 1980. Ten years later he jumped to the Neiman Marcus Group — first as chairman and CEO of Bergdorf Goodman, then as president and CEO of Neiman Marcus, and then finally as some combination of chairman, president and CEO of the whole shebang, with responsibility for the Bergdorf’s, Neiman’s, and Horchow brands as well as the increasingly profitable neimanmarcus.com. Today he is an industry leader not only in execution but philosophy and vision — someone looked to constantly by his competitors for a read on where the business is going and what its prorities and agenda should be. And he’s being celebrated for presiding over the 100th anniversary of his company’s founding, which was marked last year with parties galore, glamour both home-grown and imported from the couture capitals, and a healthy recognition that the world has changed — that the taste and buying habits of customers have changed, that relationships with designers and other vendors have changed, that a commitment to core principles cannot preclude a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances. Only the strong survive, in retail as in so much else, and with this charming old-schooler at the helm, the survival of one of the state’s most iconic institutions seems assured." - Evan Smith, Texas Monthly Talks, Broadcast 03.6.08
