Biography|Greg Hayes — The Gold Building Where the Board Made Him CEO

People remember United Technologies as a Hartford name that always had an operations man at the top.

On 24 November 2014 the board put a career finance officer in the chair.

The announcement was dated Hartford.

UTC's headquarters since 1974 had been One Financial Plaza, the 26-story gold-glass tower at the corner of Main and Pearl, leased through December 2014.

SEC filings that year still listed the business address as the United Technologies Building, One Financial Plaza, Hartford, CT 06101.

Louis R. Chenevert retired as chairman and chief executive that Monday, effective immediately.

The board elected Gregory J. Hayes, then 54 and six years the chief financial officer, as president, chief executive, and a director.

Edward A. Kangas, the lead independent director, became non-executive chairman.

Hayes had entered the company in 1989 at Sundstrand in Rockford and come across in the 1999 UTC merger.

He had been named UTC vice president and controller in 2003 and senior vice president and CFO in 2008.

The 2014 change was abrupt enough that Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Hartford papers called it a surprise.

Company spokespeople told analysts it was not a financial-restatement event.

From this building Hayes later sold Sikorsky to Lockheed Martin in 2015, bought Rockwell Collins in 2018, and prepared the Otis and Carrier spin-offs that cleared the way for the 2020 merger with Raytheon.

The Gold Building is still a downtown office tower.

UTC no longer occupies it as a world headquarters.

The pin marks the address on the letterhead the day the title changed, not a current executive floor.

Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons