BC Business
Is there a secret formula for hiring well every time? We can’t claim to know all the answers – but can share our list of movers and shakers who we think made their mark for the better on the companies they joined.
BCBusinessonline.ca gathers a selection of executives whose impact on some of Canada’s best-known companies, including RIM, Bombardier and Nortel, has been indisputable.
Who else do you think should make the list? Add your two cents to the comments below.
Before joining Research In Motion (RIM) in 2000, Don Morrison was Senior VP of Government and External Affairs at AT&T Canada. It was experience that interested RIM, since one of the Ontario-based company goals was to strengthen its international operations. His experience — and the hire — paid off: by 2005, when Don Morrison was named top manager in Sales by the magazine Canadian Business, RIM could count on 80 carrier partners in more than 40 countries — under Morrison’s leadership, the company had signed up another million subscribers in 2004.
“I’ve got a major effort underway to globalize the business,” he said to Canadian business then. “A lot of my time is spent talking with carriers who want to sign up with BlackBerry, and then working with the team here to accelerate that.” In 2009, RIM added over 100 carrier and distribution partners globally making the BlackBerry smartphones available through approximately 475 carriers and distribution channels, in over 160 countries around the world. Expanding the number of these partnerships around the globe remains one of the company’s main goals.[pagebreak]
Retired from his CEO responsibilities since June of last year after 45 years of service in Bombardier, Laurent Beaudoin is considered by many to be a legend of the aerospace industry. He started working at Bombardier, a company founded by his father-in-law, in 1963 as comptroller. Three years later he was already sitting in the president’s chair. What had once been a small snowmobile manufacturer became, under his leadership, a global aircraft and rail vehicles manufacturer. Laurent Beaudoin was so indispensable to Bombardier that he was asked to come back in 2004 after retiring a first time in 1999 to help address company financial issues.[pagebreak]
In 1999, Hal Kvisle left the position of President of Fletcher Challenge Energy Canada Inc — a company he founded — to instead join TransCanada. Joining as Executive Vice-President, Trading and Business development, he was made responsible for power and pipeline ventures in North America and for the marketing and trading activities in power and natural gas.
He has since become President and CEO of the TransCanada Pipelines (TCPL), a company rewarded on many occasions for being a financially sound, corporately responsible and community-minded organization. Hal (Harold) Kvisle was named Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the year (the Caldwell Partners International) in 2008 for his vision: “An energizing corporate dream of creating the leading energy infrastructure company in North America.”[pagebreak]
[THIS IS UNCLEAR] In spite of Nortel’s current woes, the company — formerly known as Northern — had an inarguable impact on Canadian business. In 1971, John Lobb became the first outsider to run Northern and tripled the company’s profit during his first year of presidency. [NOT SURE WHAT YOU MEAN HERE — DID YOU MEAN THAT SCRIVENER IS IN THE PHOTO???] Actually, that’s his predecessor, Robert Scrivener, who advised to hire someone new to the company. He thought that it would make the organization more aggressive and competitive. He was right. At the beginning of 1971, Northern was making $4 million. At the end of the same year Northern was showing $13 million of profit. 1972 was also a good year since John Lobb managed to double that number.[pagebreak]
While he is still the CEO of GSW Inc. a manufacturer of water and heating products in Ontario, Andrew Ferrier receives a call. A headhunter asks him if he would be interested in moving to Auckland, New Zealand to run Fonterra, one of the top ten dairy companies in the world. “I am pretty sure this was because of sugar background rather than GSW”, he says in an interview for iStart in August 2006. Andrew Ferrier started his career in the sugar industry and worked for the British multinational Tate and Lyle.
At Fonterra he took on the culture shift that was engaged before his arrival. The company was and is still changing its approach from a “sales focused” to a “customer centered” one.[pagebreak]
She could teach a friendly lesson to all the executives who think that you need a lot of money to make great things happen. Maureen Kelly proved it: You can achieve multiple IT projects within the many branches of a company and reduce IT costs at the same time! That’s why Canadian Business named her top executive in technology in 2005… and why she made it to our list.[pagebreak]
Last March, The Globe and Mail reported that during Patrick Lauzon leadership, the number of visitors to the Sun Media websites had grown from 6 million to 7.8 million each month. In 2006, Patrick Lauzon left Sympatico/MSN (Bell Canada) for Canoe, a Quebecor Media subsidiary. And in less than 3 years, he made the numbers go up.
His leadership and achievement were recognized when he became one of the recipients of the Canada’s top 40 under 40 in 2007, a national program founded by The Caldwell Partners International. He obtained these results by expanding the company business, by partnering with Yahoo Canada and Rogers Communications and by relaunching Canoe.ca English and French websites.[pagebreak]
After 30 years of experience in the metal industry, Heinz Schimmelbusch arrived at Timminco in 2003 with an idea: producing solar grade silicon metal for the solar-power industry. To achieve that, Timminco bought a silicon manufacturing company in Bécancour, Quebec and came up with a purifying process. The magic silicon purification recipe is a secret very well kept.
In 2008, Heinz Schimmelbusch made it to the top of the National Post Magazine CEO scorecard and to our list of executives today.