Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s incoming chief executive, inside the company’s studio in Pawtucket. He says that the toymaker must work to push more toys and games to movies, television, cell phones and the Internet.

>

The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski

PAWTUCKET

Electronic gadgets figure into Brian Goldner’s life every day: some he works with, some he plays with and some he competes against.

He owns an iPod, an iPhone, a BlackBerry hand-held communicator, a PlayStation 3 and a Nintendo Wii.

“I probably could do without them all in some ways and in other ways I can’t do without any of them,” he said, while sitting in his office at Hasbro Inc.’s headquarters in Pawtucket. “I would probably be accused of being on my BlackBerry a little too much.”

On Thursday, Goldner, 44, becomes the first out-of-stater to lead Hasbro — the nation’s second-largest toy company and producer of such American childhood icons as Transformers, Monopoly and Mr. Potato Head.

The decisions he makes in his new role as chief executive officer will help shape how people around the world use their leisure time and affect the fortunes of one of Rhode Island’s largest employers, which last year earned a record $333 million on $3.8 billion in revenue.

But on this morning, he concerns himself with how an earthquake in China earlier in the day affects Hasbro’s workers and manufacturing partners in that Asian country. “We run a business that’s global,” he said. “You try to stay in touch.”

The workers and partners, he said, had come through the earthquake unharmed.

THE COMPANY, founded 85 years ago in Providence, has long been one of the world’s dominant toy companies. By the late 1990s, however, evolving technology, changing family dynamics and global development patterns threatened toy companies, forcing Hasbro to transform itself.

It also forced the company to develop a new kind of leader.

“I always say leaders have to be looked at in the context of the period in which they’re going to lead,” said Vijay Govindarajan, a professor of strategy at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Management. “This is a watershed appointment for Hasbro.

“To me, Brian Goldner is perfect.”

Goldner’s own evolution began on the shores of Long Island Sound, near his boyhood home in Huntington, N.Y., continued in the woods and mountains of Northern New England and brought him to Los Angeles –– the entertainment capital that now figures heavily in Hasbro’s fortunes.

“I spent a lot of time, during my high school years, doing outdoor kinds of programs, wilderness programs, sailing programs and hiking programs,” he said.

He took part in a 370-mile whitewater canoe trip stretching from Maine into New Hampshire.

“I found it interesting to go out with a group of people and sort of test your mettle,” said the boyish-looking Goldner. “To build those personal skills, being outside without those creature comforts, I found that very helpful to my development.”

It also influenced where he went to college.

Goldner’s father, Norman, is from Utica in central New York. His mother, Marjorie, grew up in Mississippi where her own father, Henry Meyer, was head of the journalism department at Mississippi State University in Starkville. The couple met after she came north to work for UNICEF, they married in 1961 and settled down in a small split-level ranch in Huntington.

After graduating from Huntington High in 1981, he headed north to Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

“I really enjoyed being in that part of the world,” he said. “Dartmouth was an amazing education. . . . College to me sort of taught you how to learn something and taught you to learn it at a pace. It was really more about the discipline of learning.”

He majored in government but has yet to pursue any type of public service beyond membership on Dartmouth’s 1985 class council.

Goldner was a member of the board of Bradley Hospital in East Providence from 2003 to 2006, and he and his wife, Barbara, are involved in its current capital campaign. He is a member of the Toy Industry of America’s board of directors.

AT DARTMOUTH, he pursued interests that have since served him well: public speaking and radio deejaying.

“I liked debating,” he said, “taking a topic and understanding it and being able to present it in a really compelling way.”

He still has a way of emphasizing his points with the small hand movements of polished public speakers, shaping fingers as if gripping his subject matter and then taking it apart piece by piece.

By the end of the fall term of his senior year, he had gathered enough credits to graduate.

He went off to work in the spring of 1985, as a marketing assistant for a health-care consulting firm on Long Island.

It was at that job that Goldner met his future wife, Barbara. She was a clinical director on the same sales program.

They married in 1987 and have two children; a boy, now 15, and a girl, now 12.

Goldner moved deeper into the marketing business and by age 34 was a senior partner in the Los Angeles office of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency.

He was named in 1997 to head the agency’s new entertainment-account division and shortly thereafter, was lured away by toymaker Bandai America Inc.

Meanwhile, the splintering leisure time of American families, combined with the growing popularity of video games and the emergence of the Internet, and an over-reliance on selling movie-related merchandise, threatened Hasbro.

Hasbro began a gut-wrenching reorganization in 1997 that ultimately slashed nearly 5,000 jobs from the payroll and closed manufacturing plants.

There was turnover in the executive suite as well. A former Quaker State Corp. executive brought in as president and chief operating officer resigned in August 2000, after less than two years on the job.

Hasbro promoted company veteran and Rhode Island native Alfred J. Verrecchia to fill the roles. It put Goldner, then just months into a job at Hasbro’s Tiger Electronics unit, in charge of its U.S. toy division and brands.

Sales rose as the changes began to take hold by the middle of 2003. The company was once again earning praise from Wall Street.

Alan Hassenfeld, a member of the company’s founding family, felt confident enough to put another part of Hasbro’s restructuring into place. He pushed forward with the company’s succession plan, turning over the chief executive officer’s job to Verrecchia.

Hassenfeld remained chairman of the company’s board.

Three years later, the next part of the succession plan fell into place as Verrecchia tapped Goldner to be the company’s chief operating officer.

SPEAKING TO Wall Street analysts in early 2006, Verrecchia said Goldner “has been at the forefront of Hasbro’s drive to bring innovation and growth to the toy industry and his tremendous experience and entrepreneurial spirit will serve him well in his new role.”

Toy industry analyst Chris Byrne said people who work for Goldner appreciate his team-oriented approach.

“I think he’s a guy who surrounds himself with people who know things he doesn’t,” Byrne said on the eve of the 2006 American International Toy Fair. “When I’ve been up there [in Pawtucket], people are really happy to see him and they enjoy working with him.”

Vijay Govindarajan, the Dartmouth professor, has known Goldner since Hasbro sent him back to his alma mater to attend the Tuck School’s leadership training program.

“Hasbro is more than product, it is about culture,” he said in a phone interview. “This is a company with a strong emotional infrastructure. That is how Alan Hassenfeld built this company; the emotional bonds are very important.

“Brian Goldner has that in his blood.”

Goldner also has the ability to make big things happen, as last year’s Transformers movie proved. Goldner served as co-executive producer for the live-action movie, along with movie industry heavyweight Steven Spielberg.

The movie brought to life one of Hasbro’s classic toy lines, regenerating interest in the robot-inspired toys and earning the Pawtucket company millions in revenue.

Hasbro brought in $484 million on sales and licensing fees for Transformers-related products, such as T-shirts, bedding, shoes, and video games. The movie did $700 million at the box office and was the top-selling DVD in the United States last year. “That brand will never be the same,” Goldner said.

THE MOVIE helped show how Hasbro had transformed itself from a traditional toy manufacturer to an owner of entertainment properties.

“We have demonstrated that our brands can be reinvented in a contemporary format via the motion-picture business . . . you can activate the brand across any platform,” he said.

It also solidified Goldner’s stance as the heir-apparent to Verrecchia, whom he will follow into the chief executive’s role. He’ll lead a company that, with about 5,900 workers worldwide, desires to be an international player in the entertainment industry and the digital world.

“It’s a very seamless evolutionary process,” he said. “There’s nothing revolutionary about this.”

Verrecchia will become the company’s chairman, taking over from Hassenfeld, who will remain a member of Hasbro’s board of directors.

Goldner agrees to show a reporter one of the new tools in Hasbro’s toolbox — Cake Mix Studios — a video-production studio the company built deep inside one of the two buildings on Newport Avenue that make up its headquarters.

The idea for the studio grew out of the early planning for the Transformers movie, as Hasbro workers produced small vignettes to illustrate their ideas for the motion picture.

The studio’s name derives from an analogy Goldner uses to describe how Hasbro must work to push more toys and games to movies, television, cell phones and the Internet. The work, he’s known to say, is like making a “seven-layer cake.” The pieces build one on another to make the finished product.

Inside the two-story studio, opened in January, Hasbro workers this year will shoot 58 commercials and film clips destined for the Internet, along with 5,000 to 6,000 photographs of toys and games.

“Hasbro today versus Hasbro eight years ago is a very different company,” Goldner said.

Among the bigger projects now on his plate are a Trivial Pursuit television show, a Transformers sequel and a live-action movie aimed at regenerating interest in G.I. Joe –– the toy considered the first action figure.

pgrimald@projo.com