New York-born Stephen Frasher has made a career in the iconic North American industries of rail, barges and shipping – and a name for himself as the guy to call when a company is ailing. Western Forest Products Inc. lost $85.6 million last year, and the red ink continued to flow with a loss of $25.5 million in the first quarter this year. All eyes were on Frasher when he took the helm in July.
People ask me that all the time. My father said that his family migrated from France, through Canada, down into northern New York. My grandfather worked most of his adult life as an acid-maker in a paper mill in Dexter, New York, and he spoke French so fluently that during World War I he was an attaché for a captain in France. The language died with him, though, unfortunately.
I was an aeronautical engineer, and I graduated the year Boeing was bankrupt and Nixon couldn’t fund the space program anymore. I’d wanted to be an aeronautical engineer since Shepard and Glenn went into space, and I didn’t work one day because of fate.
That labour relations are really important. Washington grew very fast, and through amalgamation, so you had all those subcultures still fighting. What was happening was management was focusing inward, trying to figure out its culture and values, and the unions were all focusing inward. There was no capital to burn between the two. Every problem became a grievance, and every grievance went to arbitration. So we took the issues on.
What I tried to do there – and it bleeds over into what I’m trying to do at Western Forest Products – is create an environment where you don’t have to go to your old values and your old culture to seek safety. What separates good organizations from bad ones is how conflict gets resolved. The other element is transparency; everybody has to know what’s going on. I call it Know Your Boss’s Problems, which means that the boss has to let the people who report to him know what his problems are. Don’t hoard information. Be the same person in front of everybody, in the boardroom or on the shop floor.
Well, I know [International Forest Products Ltd. CEO] Duncan Davies has indicated he wants to get together with me. I know [West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. president] Hank Ketcham from my Seaspan days. [Tolko Industries Ltd. CEO] Al Thorlakson and I sat on the B.C. Business Council for a while. Those three, I’ve always been comfortable with, and I don’t see why that would change.
There’s only one sport I have any time for, and it’s Duke University men’s basketball. One of my sons is married to a daughter of Mike Krzyzewski, the coach.
Well, it’s Duke against [archrival] Kentucky, with two seconds left on the clock. The entire audience is filled with [Western majority shareholder] Brookfield guys, and you need to win the game. I’m the coach, and I’m going to get the ball into the hands of the person who’s going to make that shot.
Determining what “normal” is going to be and adjusting the company to be cost-competitive in that normal. You know, for the last 25 years, normal, for a company that took in U.S. dollars and paid its costs in Canadian dollars, was a 25-cent advantage. That’s probably gone. From 2002 to 2007, there were two million housing starts in the U.S. Even that was high, but it lasted for a long time. What’s the new normal going to be? Nine hundred thousand, a million?
When I was with Washington Marine Group, we had a clinical psychologist evaluate our senior leadership team, and he identified two traits in me that he thought were very positive. One – and I have no idea what my IQ is – but I tested very well on his IQ tests, especially around conceptual reasoning. The other, he said, is that I’m an essentially egoless person. People are willing to talk to me because they’re not concerned I’m going to make a judgment about what they say. Egos get in the way.
