NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — In his 21 years at Lazard Ltd., Kenneth Jacobs witnessed three chief executive officers, the 161-year-old firm's initial public offering and a power struggle lost by the founding family. Now that he's being rewarded with the top job, Lazard may be in for a period of calm.

Jacobs, 51, will succeed Bruce Wasserstein as chairman and chief executive officer, the Bermuda-based investment bank said yesterday. The announcement came a month after Wasserstein's death at 61 set off a succession contest at the company, the world's largest non-bank adviser on mergers and acquisitions.

Wasserstein brought to a deal a "brand of psychological bullying" that could influence his own clients to stay in the bidding and not give up, Forbes said in a 1989 profile. That trait prompted his critics to call him "Bid-'Em-Up Bruce". Jacobs comes to the job with a style tailored around building consensus, said Andrew Alper, chairman of the University of Chicago's Board of Trustees who worked with the new CEO at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. before he joined Lazard.

"He doesn't have to yell and scream and table-thump to make his point," said Alper, chairman of EQA Partners LP and a former chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs's investment- banking division. "Even if he's not the loudest guy in the room, people listen to what he has to say because it's thoughtful and well presented."

Jacobs joined the company in 1988 from Goldman Sachs when Lazard was a private partnership controlled by a descendant of the founding family, and became a partner in 1991. He has served as deputy chairman and CEO of North American businesses since 2002, shortly after Wasserstein arrived at the firm.

"It fits perfectly," said Felix Rohatyn, the former US ambassador to France who worked at Lazard for almost 50 years. "What he would bring in terms of style as a CEO of the firm is very consistent with the history and tradition of the firm. You don't have to turn the firm upside down to fit Ken Jacobs."

Wasserstein, the pre-eminent Wall Street dealmaker who took Lazard public in 2005, helped recruit high-ranking bankers to the firm such as Gary Parr and William Lewis from Morgan Stanley and Charles Ward from Wasserstein Perella Group Inc. Jacobs said he inherited a strong team and business model that he doesn't plan on changing.

"Bruce's great legacy is that he has put in place a global leadership team, a deep reservoir of talent," Jacobs said yesterday in an interview. "My legacy is to make sure we can retain those people, continue to attract new talent and provide an unrelenting focus on our clients."

Lazard shares climbed 37 percent this year through yesterday.

Michel David-Weill, whose family founded Lazard LLC in 1848, merged its New York, Paris and London offices into a single partnership in 2000. Later that year, he relinquished his CEO title to William Loomis.

Jacobs, then the head of mergers and acquisitions, had to help run the year-end compensation process and be the firm's representative to the press after Loomis was fired in 2001, according to "The Last Tycoons," the 2007 book about Lazard written by William Cohan.

Jacobs was a better long-term option to succeed Wasserstein than interim CEO Steven Golub, 63, and he has shown more interest in the management side of Lazard's business than other dealmakers like Parr, Cohan said.

"So many of the people there just want to do deals and get paid a lot, and don't want to do the administrative part of the job," said Cohan, a Bloomberg Television contributing editor. "He likes the administrative part of the job, and at Lazard, that's especially important."

This year, Jacobs worked with Philadelphia's Haas family, the major shareholder of Rohm & Haas Co., on the company's $16.5 billion sale to Dow Chemical Co. He also helped GlaxoSmithKline Plc on its $2.9 billion purchase of Stiefel Laboratories Inc. Jacobs's clients also include Colgate-Palmolive Co. and International Business Machines Corp.

Jacobs takes over as the worst market for mergers and acquisitions since 2003 shows signs of a rebound. The firm's third-quarter profit beat analysts' estimates as restructuring work helped compensate for the slowdown in mergers, and Chief Financial Officer Michael Castellano said earlier this month that the M&A market is improving.

"There is no Bruce Wasserstein on the horizon to replace Bruce Wasserstein," Michael Holland, chairman of Holland & Co., said in a Bloomberg Television interview in New York. "That person doesn't exist. So if you're not going to replace Bruce with another Bruce, what's the best place to go? And I think they did a good job."

Jacobs graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1980 and received his master's in business administration from Stanford University in 1984. He sits on the board of trustees at the University of Chicago and the Brookings Institution.

His wife, Agnes Mentre, previously worked at Lazard. She served as executive producer of "The Wrestler", a 2008 film that earned star Mickey Rourke an Academy Award nomination, according to Internet Movie Database. She also was an executive producer of the 2004 Michael Moore-directed documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11".

"Jacobs has been with the firm for over 20 years, is highly regarded both inside and out, and appeared to be a leading contender for the role from the start," Sandler O'Neill analysts Devin Ryan and Jeff Harte said in a note to investors yesterday. "We do not expect any material strategic shift with the firm or change in its business opportunity."

Golub will continue as vice chairman of Lazard and chairman of the financial-advisory group.