(The following article by Dan Piller was posted on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram website on October 3.)
FORT WORTH, Texas — When Walter Drexel, chief executive of the Burlington Northern Railroad, decided in the early 1980s that he wanted to move the company headquarters from St. Paul, Minn., he gave the search committee a special charge:
“Pick a place where a lot of the executives won’t want to move.”
In 1984, the giant railroad announced that it would relocate its headquarters to Fort Worth. Indeed, many of the executives with Minnesota ties decided to stay in the Land of Sky Blue Waters.
“It was an executive downsizing, pure and simple,” says author Lawrence H. Kaufman, who has written an authorized history of what is now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway with the title Leaders Count.
Texas Monthly Press published the book this month to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 1995 merger of the old Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroads.
The work encompasses the complicated histories of the two carriers, stretching back to 1849.
Kaufman, who was paid for his work, says that BNSF didn’t tell him what to write. That the book contains some pointed comments about past Burlington Northern executives, such as Drexel, Lou Menk, Gerald Grinstein and Rob Krebs, seems to support his assertion of independence.
Kaufman worked on both sides of railroads and media with BusinessWeek, and the Association of American Railroads and even did a three-year stint in public relations for the old BN.
“I liked Jerry Grinstein,” Kaufman says of the man who was BN’s chief executive and led it to the 1995 merger that created BNSF. “He got BN’s debt down but was too much of a politician. He couldn’t fire people.”
Kaufman says that when Grinstein put together the 1995 merger with Santa Fe that he intended to work for a while with Santa Fe’s chairman, Rob Krebs.
“But in short order, Grinstein discovered that he and Krebs were entirely different people and they couldn’t work together,” says Kaufman, explaining Grinstein’s abrupt departure from Fort Worth scarcely a month after the 1995 merger was completed.
As for Grinstein’s successor, Rob Krebs, Kaufman describes him as a “hard man.” Krebs, though, developed a softer side in the run-up to his 2001 retirement.
Kaufman credits BNSF’s current success with the culture change wrought by chief executives such as Grinstein, Drexel, Richard Bressler and Darius Gaskins who came to the railroad from outside the industry.
“Of all the carriers, BNSF has done the best job of changing its culture away from the old fixed-rail way of thinking to realizing they are in the service business,” Kaufman says.