Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

In 1976, Frederick Ross Johnson, “a shaggy-haired young Canadian,” was the second in command at the food company Standard Brands, where Henry Weigl was the “crusty old chairman” (10). As the personalities of the two leaders clashed, Weigl sought to push Johnson out of the company, precipitating a confrontation that ended with his own ouster and Johnson’s elevation to chief executive.

Born in 1931 in the prairie city of Winnipeg, Canada, during the Great Depression, Johnson came from a lower-middle-class family. The boy proved entrepreneurial from the start, renting out his comic books and working after-school jobs. He went on to attend Winnipeg’s University of Manitoba. For the first 20 years after graduation, Johnson worked in middle management for a variety of Canadian companies, including Canadian General Electric and T. Eaton. At one point, Johnson also taught at the University of Toronto. His business philosophy was “shit shirring,” that is, a “love for constant restructuring and reorganizing” (14).

In the early 1970s, Johnson oversaw Standard Brands, an American company, in Montreal. The company was “hopelessly outdated” (15), and Johnson radically transformed its bureaucracy by replacing its executives with his own hand-selected group of younger, more aggressive businessmen—a group that came to be known as Johnson’s “Merry Men.