On the Line with Darren Entwistle

He’s been the CEO of B.C.’s largest company for almost five years, yet in the eyes of both the public and the business community Darren Entwistle remains a mystery, the largely invisible leader of our most visible corporate entity.

He’s been the CEO of B.C.’s largest company for almost five years, yet in the eyes of both the public and the business community Darren Entwistle remains a mystery, the largely invisible leader of our most visible corporate entity. He’s someone we feel we should know but don’t. Everyone has a Jimmy Pattison story, whereas Entwistle is an enigma even to executive recruiters, the people paid to know. The salient facts: he is only 42 years old to Pattison’s 77, which makes him 14 years younger than the average age of a Fortune 500 CEO. He earned $5.25 million last year in salary and bonuses. His conversation is liberally sprinkled with terms like ‘trenchant’, ‘efficacy’ and ‘embarkation point.’ And he has needed that prodigious vocabulary to explain why he cut nearly 6,500 jobs from the company payroll, why his union workers have been without a contract since December 31, 2000 and why Telus shares plummeted from $41 to less than $6 in the first two years of his watch.

Bell, Shaw and Virgin want his market. Union bosses want his head. Eight million customers want improved service. Analysts and journalists want answers. Shareholders want better results. Charities want his time. And, oh yeah, his twins want to see him, too.

These days Entwistle prefers to let his financial results speak for themselves. He has led the effective, if painful, reinvention of an organizational dinosaur. Telus’s stock is now rated a ‘buy’ by more analysts than any other telecom company in Canada – rated second only to Verizon in North America. The share price was back up to almost $38 as this magazine went to press. And Telus is making a steady climb up KPMG’s Most Respected Companies list, moving from 37th in Canada for 2002 to 22nd in 2004.

But five years is long enough for anyone this important to B.C.’s economy to remain a stranger. Entwistle remains frustratingly reluctant to talk about anything remotely personal, perhaps partly due to rumoured threats made against his family during the worst of the union conflicts in 2002.

He is tall, fit, precisely coiffed, every burnished dark hair in place with a pair of silver-rimmed glasses perfectly framing his piercing blue eyes: if it’s possible to be intensely calculating and disarmingly humble in the same breath, that’s Entwistle. He is a leader who is more complex than either the analysts who respect him or the union reps who despise him would have us believe.

Here are two theories for Entwistle’s low profile in B.C.: he frankly doesn’t care to de-mystify himself for the public; or he doesn’t have the time. With Bell, Shaw, Rogers and now Richard Branson’s Virgin Canada tearing at its heels, Telus must move fast. In telecommunications terms, that means making aggressive capital expenditures in high technology while trimming the soft excesses of a monopolistic culture and an entrenched union – war from without, unarmed but determined resistance within. And then there’s the geography: Telus’s rapid national expansion means that Canada’s 25th-largest company – with investors all over the world – operates more than 4,000 kilometres away from the bulk of the country’s population and its corporate heart: Toronto.

This explains why Entwistle’s days begin with meetings in Vancouver at 7:30 a.m. and often end with business dinners that wrap up at 10 p.m. in Toronto. He spends more time than anyone should in a plane. A single two-week period in January saw him in London, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Geneva, Zurich, Paris, Edinburgh, Edmonton, Vancouver and Toronto, travelling either in the company’s Cessna Citation X passenger jet or catching a lift on one of the two company float planes that are otherwise used to ferry Telus service people to remote coastal locations. Between his meetings with and presentations to investors, customers, Telus teams, analysts and community leaders, there are no breaks. Fourteen hours a day. Six or seven days a week.

Exactly how this insane schedule impacts Entwistle’s home life can only be guessed at. He is fiercely private when it comes to discussing his wife, twin six-year-old boys or anything about his home life.

Telus has about 25,000 employees now and Entwistle’s mandate is to speak to the troops (in groups of 100 or less) once every three months. His four road shows a year run on a tight, exhausting schedule but he says he finds meeting with employees on the front lines and seeing the results of macro-strategies implemented on the ground to be energizing. “I wish I could bottle it,” Enwistle said during an interview that was several weeks in the scheduling.

Entwistle talks about trends in the lightning-pace telecom sector as if he invented the industry. Polished to perfection and oozing confidence, the immaculately groomed Entwistle’s intensity can be overwhelming if not completely intimidating. He brooks no distractions and when he speaks he is fully and completely engaged in the subject.

The industry itself is energizing, he says. “Wireless technology behaves like it refuses to be bound. There are so many new applications coming online for customers and the pace is mind-boggling. I can’t see an endpoint; it can’t be predicted or even anticipated. It changes the way people communicate. It changes lifestyles, business models.”

On Sundays he spends the afternoon reading the employee emails he receives during the week (on average 17 a day) and writing his weekly letter to employees. The letter is a mixture of project completions, new initiatives, community service events and acknowledgements, with his personal thanks to each member of teams that havesuccessfully “demonstrated the Telus values.” And he always adds an inspirational quote from sources as diverse as General S. Patton, Bruce Springsteen and Vincent van Gogh.

Born in 1962, Entwistle was raised in Montreal where his father, whom he cites as his primary mentor, worked for Bell for 40 years. While in university, Entwistle Jr. also worked for Bell. After graduating with an honours in economics from Concordia and an MBA from McGill, he joined Bell full time and rose meteorically through the ranks. He ascribes it to two factors: “Good luck and the fact that I had the good fortune to work for a number of people who promoted me beyond my ability at the time – who were willing to take a risk on me.”

In 1993 he moved to London, England, as the general manager of corporate finance at Mercury, a joint venture between Bell and Cable & Wireless. He made enough of an impression that Cable & Wireless hired him to orchestrate the largest telecom merger in British history, and he handled that well enough that he’d already been promoted to president of Cable & Wireless’ operations in the U.K. and Ireland by the time Telus’ recruiters came calling.  

• Tags
  • Telus, 
  • lori bamber, 
  • Darren Entwistle, 
  • Business Leadership, 
  • People, 
  • Telecom, 
  • Technology