By Greg Rudder, Editor, Pulp & Paper Week, RISI
SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2008 - I guess I forgot to put the alarm clock on when I started napping.
My interview with Abitibi-Consolidated CEO Jim Doughan was at 4 PM that day in the company’s downtown Montreal headquarters.
I woke up at 4:30 PM in my room at the InterContinental Hotel (IC) after a short nap that turned into a longish nap following a day of meeting after meeting with paper industrial players.
I rushed to reach Doughan’s office by a few minutes after 5. The headquarters appeared mostly barren, except for Doughan’s assistant outside his office. Most workers were bundled up in the subway below the freezing streets of Montreal this January day in the late 1990s.
I found Doughan behind his desk, working away, as if his day wasn’t yet close to being done. I apologized for being late and then asked a variety of questions. We spoke for an hour.
He told me he was in the paper business by happenstance. He returned home from the Korean War in the late 1950s and needed a job. He found one with a bag paper company. The rest over the next 40 years was history. He was now the CEO of one of the largest newsprint companies in the world.
This forthright anecdote was one of many he provided about the company and the newsprint business.
He never assailed me for being 60 minutes late for our talk.
For all of us, the best CEOs, who manage multi-billion-dollar companies against loads of questions from the public, Wall Street, and shareholders, are the ones who speak clearly and communicate easily yet distinctly.
While I cabbed back to the IC, that’s what I thought of Doughan.
That’s also my read of Tembec CEO Jim Lopez who I interviewed along with our Pulp & Paper Week pulp editor Bryan Smith during International Pulp Week in San Francisco this month.
Lopez told about his son and daughter’s experience with Little League baseball in North Bay, ON, about the commitment it takes to make money in the pulp and paper business, about the Nackawic-Birla mill conversion project – and about the global market pulp pricing dynamic and demand trend in the short-term, in his opinion. He touched upon five or six other topics as well.
When he didn’t like a question, he once asked: “Why did you ask me that question?”
In the almost 13 years I’ve worked for Pulp & Paper Week, Lopez was the 30th CEO I interviewed either one-on-one, in a team interview, or on the spot. I’ve interviewed paper industry CEOs from 21 different companies (including three from AbitibiBowater, three from Cascades/Norampac, and three from Smurfit-Stone Container) and from six different countries (USA, Canada, China, Ireland, Sweden, and Japan).
My memories are colorful.
One CEO’s forehead seemed to blaze red with contempt when I asked about global sourcing and he went into an anti-SUV spiel in relation to fossil fuel use.
I interviewed one CEO for a company that owed about $0.80 on every $1 in revenue near the top of a sky-rise major city mansion apartment that was gorgeously clean. I wondered if the sky-rise apartment rent was tied up in debt.
Over the years, my best five CEO interviews (in alphabetical order) are as follows, and to me were similar for their simplicity and clarity: Harris DeLoach of Sonoco, Doughan of Abitibi-Consolidated, Raymond Lee of Lee & Man Paper, Gary McGann of Smurfit Kappa, and Lopez of Tembec.
Some CEOs won’t do interviews unless there’s some sort of branding for their company they can emphasize. Others want a communications manager at the interview. Some want questions provided before the interview or a list of topics to be discussed.
Others like Lopez just flow into the interview, sit down at a table in a restaurant, eat their breakfast, and tell their story.
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