From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Wallace was ‘Wallace’ throughout the whole company. If you overstepped the mark
you knew who was the boss, but there were no airs and graces.”
In the McCain philosophy, trying and failing is better than not trying at all. And
mistakes are all right as long as they aren’t repeated. Harrison McCain introduced
Nick Vermont to that philosophy during a meeting in 1984, a year after Vermont
joined the company as product manager for chips.
“I had run a consumer promotion that had come in something like five times over
budget in terms of redemption and therefore cost. And I had spent about two weeks
of sleepless nights wondering how I was going to tell Harrison this. And I gingerly got
up and did my presentation and in the end I said, ‘Well, I do have to confess that I got
it horribly wrong and it’s cost five times what it was budgeted for.’”
Harrison replied, “Nick, Nick, I don’t mind if you were five times over budget,
don’t mind that at all, if it meant you sold five times as much, and I don’t mind anybody
making a mistake once. But just never make the same mistake again.”
Allison McCain held a series of jobs in Britain after being trained in Florenceville
and working for three years as manufacturing director in Australia. His first British
assignment was as plant manager at Scarborough. He then became director of manufacturing
for McCain GB, deputy managing director, managing director, and finally
CEO. He points out that while the U.K. company had autonomy, “there was a Canadian
flavour to it or, more precisely, a Harrison and Wallace style of management to it.
We’ve been able to take the best elements of what we do in Canada and apply them
elsewhere without going in with a formula that says, ‘This is the way you are going
to do it.’
“A lot of American companies have more control from head office. Instead, we
have a managing director reporting to head office and the other people reporting
to him. I used that as a positive in England when I hired someone. I would say, ‘You
don’t have to worry about working for somebody in Canada, you work for me. I have
to worry about working for somebody in Canada.’”
Nick Vermont, 2006. An English potato field.
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