John Thain

By Daniel Kadlec

For an idea of how different things are at the New York Stock Exchange these days, peek inside the office of CEO John Thain, the M.I.T. grad and former president of Goldman Sachs who had to be talked into taking the job after former CEO and chairman Richard Grasso's bitter departure amid an excessive-pay flap and charges of board cronyism. Grasso, a passionate stock-exchange lifer, famously littered his office with several hundred treasured mementos from the companies whose shares are traded at the exchange. The more clinical Thain, 49, displays mainly his own collection of modern art. But he's putting his stamp on more than the office walls. Thain calls restoring the Big Board's tarnished reputation job No. 1. Gone are all of the Wall Street insiders who once dominated the board and ran the exchange like a secretive, exclusive club. The conflicting duties of running the business while also regulating exchange members and listed companies have been separated. So have the roles of chairman (John Reed) and CEO. And Thain has introduced a new level of transparency in the area that got Grasso into so much trouble--executive pay, which has been drastically scaled back and made public. "We have an annual report that discloses much of what any public company must disclose"--and more than is required by law, Thain notes. His hope is that the companies that list with the Big Board, and many others, will follow his lead. --D.K.