Biography|Stuart Graham — The Lunch Room on Regeringsgatan That Named an American CEO

On 12 September 2002 Skanska's board named Stuart Graham president and chief executive of the parent company.

The announcement was not staged at the Solna head office.

It was presented at 13.00 at Restaurant Stacy's, Regeringsgatan 61, in central Stockholm.

Sverker Martin-Löf, the new chairman, hosted the press conference.

Graham was fifty-six.

He would move to Stockholm and take the job the same day, succeeding Claes Björk.

He was the first non-Swede to hold the post.

The company release is dated that morning and still sits on the Cision wire.

It records the path in one paragraph: economics degree, CEO of the firm Skanska bought in 1990, executive vice president from 2001 with the United States, South America, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Skanska International Projects under him.

Stacy's is gone from the doorway.

The building at number 61 is still the pin.

Regeringsgatan runs north from Gustav Adolfs torg through Norrmalm.

A visitor standing at 61 is on the street where the appointment was made public, not in the office where the board voted.

Graham ran the group until April 2008.

Johan Karlström took the chief-executive chair after him.

Graham stayed on the board and later became chairman of Skanska AB, a seat he left in April 2016.

The American from Kingston had by then spent the better part of a decade signing letters from Stockholm.

Photo: Holger Ellgaard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Regeringsgatan, 2008)