MONTREAL — Over the next few weeks, Hunter Harrison will move to Montreal, walk into his new downtown office as chief executive of Canadian National Railway Co. and try to remember what’s its like to be at the top, the Montreal Gazette reported.
It probably won’t be that hard.
Working out of Chicago as chief operating officer, some say he’s been CN’s non-official chief executive ever since he came on board after CN’s 1998 acquisition of Illinois Central Corp.
And though he claimed yesterday he was “still in a little bit of shock” at his promotion, it’s also clear that former CN boss Paul Tellier has done little without his consent.
“Paul and I have worked very closely,” he said. “Hand in hand. We have built this operating philosophy and vision. I don’t see any significant change taking place. It’s just more of the same.”
But tell the 58 year-old American four years ago he’d be leading one of Canada’s biggest companies and he might have laughed in your face.
As a teenager in Memphis, Tenn., Harrison, now a father of two, lived down the road from Graceland. He swam in Elvis’s pool and attended his private movie screenings and parties, hovering on the fringes of the King’s entourage.
In 25 years, he’s cruised through 29 jobs. As a teenager headed for college, he worked two jobs at once – at a bakery and a gas station – before realizing there was more money to be made doing dirtier work. He became a car-man oiler for the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Co. He crawled under railcars to oil their wheel bearings for $2 an hour.
He worked for over two decades at the railway in various jobs before moving to Illinois Central. There, he became what everyone now calls him: a railroader’s railroader.
He led the company to become the most efficient railway in the country. Other railways started copying his business practices. And when CN bought Illinois in 1998, its executives wanted Harrison as part of the package.
Harrison thought he was headed for retirement when the merger went through. An avid golfer and horse-lover, he’ll have to wait even longer now to indulge in those passions full time.
People say Harrison, like Tellier, is a hard taskmaster who drives his staff to produce results. Many thought the two had such similarly aggressive natures that they’d be at each other’s throats fighting for power.
Instead, each has had his own turf. Now the turf is Harrison’s alone.
There are a few things he’ll have to get used to again. The rough-and-tumble leader said he doesn’t like investor roadshows and quarterly-result conference calls. Some analysts wonder how he’ll stack up to Tellier’s polished “statesman CEO” image and personality.
“He’s a physical guy,” said one analyst.
“He’s going to say: ‘God damn, I said this was supposed to be done.’ He’s not going to debate you. … He’s going to use words that Paul (Tellier) probably would not have used.” If the end result is more profit, few are likely to mind.