MONTREAL — Bombardier Inc. shareholders are smiling at news that Paul Tellier will take over the top job at the transportation giant. But the company’s executives are, no doubt, shaking in their boots, the Montreal Gazette reported.
After all, the last time Tellier changed jobs, five vice-presidents at Canadian National Railway Co. found themselves unemployed within weeks.
More white-collar employees were sacked when Tellier hacked out six levels of management from CN’s hierarchy over just 10 months. Within five years, he had slashed 14,000 jobs from the railway’s payroll.
When it was all over, Tellier confessed he had regrets: he wished he had moved twice as fast.
“I don’t believe this crap about people having to adjust,” he told an interviewer in 1998. “If you really want to make a change and create your revolution, you have to do it quickly.”
That’s pure Tellier: tough, uncompromising and impatient. The 63-year-old former federal bureaucrat even enjoys recounting stories about his own abrasiveness.
He has recalled, for instance, how a friend once told him he was “as subtle as a blowtorch,” and how another remarked that “you’re never going to have ulcers because you provoke them in others.”
But the bottom line for investors who bought stock in the former crown corporation’s 1995 initial public share offering is this: the railway under Tellier tripled operating profit to $1.9 billion from 1995 to 2001 and delivered a 410-per-cent return to shareholders.
Not bad for a man whose appointment to Canadian National in 1992 was pooh-poohed by many as pure patronage.
At the time, CN was a bloated money-loser and few were betting on a turnaround under Tellier, a top Ottawa bureaucrat under Pierre Trudeau, Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, where he reached the civil-service pinnacle as clerk of the privy council.
“He’s very intense … a highly cerebral person,” said Yves Fortier, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who is Tellier’s friend and occasional tennis partner.
“He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He’s impatient with people around him if he doesn’t feel they’re pulling their weight.”
Stories about Tellier’s hard-driving, workaholic style are legion. He’s obsessive about time-management and maintains an elaborate colour-coded filing system. Visitors to his office 16 floors about Central Station are kept from dawdling by a chiming clock that is set five minutes ahead of time. Tellier, who prefers shirt-sleeves to a suit jacket for all but the most formal occasions, works long hours, six days a week, with Friday evening and Saturday reserved for leisure.
One of those leisure activities is riding a high-powered motorcycle through the countryside. Once a year, he takes off for a motorcycle-touring trip abroad.
When in Montreal, he rises early each morning at his Westmount house to go jogging or mountain-biking to keep his wiry frame in top shape. He shuns the social circuit, preferring the company of his wife, Andrée, with whom he has an intense relationship, according to Fortier. “They are one another’s best friend,” Fortier said.
Tellier showed a rebellious streak as a teenager, getting kicked out of school in his native Joliette, and even running away from a boarding school to become a ski bum. He eventually settled down and ended up studying at Oxford.
After briefly teaching law at Université de Montréal, he went to Ottawa in 1967 as an aide to cabinet minister Jean-Luc Pepin.
He briefly moved to Quebec City to work for then-Premier Robert Bourassa, landing himself right in the middle of the October Crisis.
Back in Ottawa, he quarterbacked the federal government’s unity efforts after the Parti Québécois came to power in 1976.
He then rose quickly through the civil service, reaching the rank of deputy minister at the age of just 40.
Bombardier executives would do well to arrive at meetings well-prepared, with open minds and a readiness to debate ideas vigorously. In his early days at CN, several execs bought themselves a one-way ticket out the door by clinging passively to the status quo.
Tellier also likes to say that the world is divided into complicators and simplifiers.
“I don’t want people to bring me problems. I want them to bring me solutions to their problems,” he once said. “Often people talk and talk and debate issues because the problem has not been well-defined, so I insist on this.”
Nevertheless, in Bombardier, Tellier has chosen for himself a challenge that involves a multifaceted, far-flung and, yes, complicated transportation empire. It’s a challenge that chairman Laurent Beaudoin obviously believes Tellier is up to.
In a 1998 interview, Beaudoin compared Tellier to Robert Brown, another former deputy minister and the man he’s replacing at the top of Bombardier.
“As deputy ministers, their jobs were very demanding,” Beaudoin said. “They have dealt with complex issues and I can see how well their judgment works. I like Paul’s personality – he’s very practical, very people-oriented.” As he has throughout his career, it looks like Tellier has once again finished first among equals.