The Man from Medicine Hat

"The people who work in this business are not sissies, and they don't like sissies either," says a Canadian oilman who once worked with John Kenneth Jamieson, Exxon's chairman and chief executive. "Jamieson is .one of the toughest and most evenhanded men I have ever met. When you are supposed to get something done for Jamieson, you had better get it done."

"Ken" Jamieson is a product of the rough-and-tumble earlier days of the Canadian oil business. His father, now 96, is the oldest living veteran of the North West Mounted Police. Jamieson, 63, was born in Medicine Hat, then a frontier outpost on Alberta's bleak prairie with a population of 5,600. Once he shot a bear that wandered too close to the family domicile. He went to the University of Alberta, but determined to become an engineer, transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On his return to Depression-struck Alberta in 1931, he took any work that he could find: straightening tracks on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and prospecting for gold along the Eraser River.

Finding no gold, Jamieson signed on as a laborer in a small refinery near Calgary. Because of his engineering background, he was made manager of a refinery in Moose Jaw, Sask., the first of a remarkable series of jobs that during the next 30 years put him into every facet of the petroleum business. During World War II, big (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.), craggy-faced Ken Jamieson was appointed an Ottawa-based oil liaison officer between the Canadian and U.S. Governments. When peace came, Imperial Oil Ltd., the Canadian subsidiary of Standard Oil (New Jersey), made him a lucrative offer, and he accepted even though he had reservations about "just ending up in the back office."

At Imperial, he became assistant to Michael Haider, who was fast rising to the top of Jersey's hierarchy. Clearly impressed with Jamieson, Haider took him along as he moved up. Jamieson succeeded Haider as president of Jersey's International Petroleum Co., which handled some of the firm's Latin American refining and marketing. After that Jamieson became president of Humble Oil, the Houston-based subsidiary that ran all U.S. operations. --Humble had long been dominated by independent-minded Texans, and Jamieson's job was to bring it under more direct control of Jersey's central management. He melded the operation of five U.S. affiliates into a smoothly functioning division and cut the work force from 40,000 to 28,000. The division was later renamed Exxon Co., U.S.A. The consolidation left scars; some longtime Humble employees still call the Exxon Tower in Houston "Yankee Stadium." Jamieson became a U.S. citizen in 1964. "It only made good sense," he says, "because when you're dealing with U.S. Government people, you can't deal with them adequately if you're a foreigner representing a U.S. company."

The skillful performance in Houston led Haider to hand-pick Jamieson to succeed him as Jersey president when Haider became chairman in 1965. Jamieson says that he was surprised. "I had never worked for the parent company," he recalls. "I came in over the heads of an awful lot of people." Just be fore his elevation, Jamieson was the most junior of nine Jersey vice presidents. "I guess you could say it's a tribute to the people who work with this company that they were willing to pick a foreigner to head it."

When Haider reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 1969, Jamieson took over as chairman, moving in 1972 into a huge, sparsely furnished office on the 51st floor of the Exxon Building in mid-Manhattan. Jamieson, who earned $401,666 in salary plus $195,000 in bonus last year, smoothly delegates authority. "In a big organization like this," he says, "you've got to push decision making to as low a level as possible and get it done. There is a fine line between pushing too far and not far enough." Says one Exxon insider of Jamieson's style of leadership: "It's an unusual thing when he breaks in with a decision in a management committee meeting. If there's strong disagreement, he asks, 'Do we have to decide today?' Members of the committee take this as an implied order to resolve their differences and come back the next day with a recommendation." --Last year Jamieson spent 116 days on the road, visiting Exxon operations at home and abroad. "On my latest trip I slept in eight beds in eight nights," he says. During weekends and on vacations, he carves out time for his favorite pastimes: golf, quail hunting, salmon fishing-and gardening with his wife, Ethel May, at their rambling house in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

There is a new strain on Jamieson's time: answering Exxon's critics with what he calls "our own version of Project Candor." He concedes that the industry's public image is bad: "The friction point we've got at the service stations is god-awful." But he also gives feisty defenses of company policy. Speaking to the Detroit Economic Club, he said of the oil industry's critics: "Being angry with the oil companies or the Government is more satisfying than being upset at economics or politics or the way nature doles out its resources." He manages, however, to keep a-sense of humor. In Detroit, one questioner asked him if "considering all that has happened, would it not have been better to retain the name Humble?" Ken Jamieson reared back and laughed.

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