Career Dynamics of a Vice-President of Human Resources

Maurice Dutrazak Hi, I'm Maurice Dutrazak, and I had a long career as an HR professional. I started after my MBA at age 26 as a level two, probably mid to what we call a personnel supervisor or manager in those days, and stayed there about 14 to 16 months. I felt that the company wasn't large enough for what I wanted to do. And then fortunately, I found a position at a large company called Canada Wire Cable. I was the HR manager there, probably still personnel manager, I think. HR came later, and as personnel manager, I took care of a site of 1000 people; at corporate, there was also a factory. I also did some labor relations negotiations, and I felt good about that position for about five years. But again, I wanted more experience and maybe more difficult assignments.

So I moved out to a glass bottle maker and also a plastic bottle maker company called Consumers Packaging as their director of labor relations. And that would have been a high three, very difficult position to do because they had been a strike-prone company. They had gone through a series of strikes, illegal strikes as well, and my job was to make sure there was no strikes. So for seven years, I was able to deal with the union so that there was not one strike that occurred. The company made record profits year after year after year. Also had a small staff, health and safety manager, a training manager, and a pension person. I stayed at Consumers Packaging for seven years and actually should have left earlier because I got very bored with the labor relations, felt that I wanted to do new things, it wasn't as complex as I wanted to do.

So I moved into a level four role VP of HR for English, a company that was bought by Whirlpool and that fitted my cognitive ability much better and did some very interesting work there. Did a Culture Revolution program, cleaned up the labor relations, and from there, I was promoted as VP Admin where they gave me responsibilities for IT, logistics, warehousing, project management, public relations, and had a lot of fun doing that position at English.

While I was at English, there was a global conference in Motro, Switzerland that Whirlpool put together, and they had brought in some very high-level consultants, and one of them was Dr. Elliot Jakes, and that's where I met him and that's where I had the opportunity to work with him at English. I then left English; I was age 45. I felt there could be more fun working for a Canadian-run corporate office. Whirlpool had bought Inglis, and they were integrating English into their North American business group, and it was just a feeling that you're always better working for a company that's owned in Canada.

So I moved to Southern Newspaper, a very large newspaper chain with over 45 newspapers, as VP of HR. That would have been a low stratum five positions and very difficult to work in newspapers because the product has to be made within one day. The labor unions, there's multiple unions in each newspaper. They gained rights over negotiations for the last 80, 90 years, and it's very difficult to work with them. A lot of my work was working with the VPs of HR within these large newspapers and coming up with strategies on labor relations and strategies for the people, the talent pool, and so forth. I was enjoying Southern, but the CEO that I worked with at English, where we had such great success in putting in Elliot Jake's Requisite organization. He then moved to Pittsburgh for Fisher Scientific, and he was running six companies within the Fisher Products Group. He asked me to move to Pittsburgh and join them.

My role there was to help these six companies grow profitably using Requisite organization. So my role was to go from company to company and help them to restructure. Some of those companies were not that profitable. And again, that was very interesting work. That would have been, I'd say high-level five because my boss was EVP, a level six EVP reporting to a level seven CEO chairman and quite interesting. But he had decided to move on to another role, another company. I just felt that I needed to get back to Canada.

So I joined Domtar, a very large global forest products company, pulp and paper company, as VP of HR. In that role, I was a level six and proceeded to put in Strategies, a culture revolutionary type program where we took almost every employee, we had 9000 employees through a five-day skunk work so that they can learn new ways of doing things. Towards the end of the one week, they had to learn process redesign and figured out a way to save $25,000 per person. My budget was about 25 million for this culture change, and the payback was 25 million. So it paid for itself through these process redesign. I then left my CEO, left the company, and so I left as well and went for short durations more on a contract basis. I worked for the chairman of an auto parts company with 28 plants in eight countries and quickly found out that the company was going bankrupt. And that was basically the end of my HR career. I decided to become a consultant. For the last ten years, I have been putting in strategic plans and then putting in the design, the talent, doing some change management. I've had some very great successes there where companies are growing 25% to 30% per annum once we put these programs in place.