Read Online Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar - Free Book Online Page B

Kansas City consumers were buying 20 percent more cookies.
    Nabisco was getting clobbered. But Johnson, as always, remained upbeat and confident. There were problems with soft cookies nobody had yet focused on, he assured Nabisco’s worried directors. He told them how he had eaten some of the competitors’ cookies late one morning, then gone off to lunch depressed because they tasted so good. When he returned later, he found the remaining cookies stale.
    “Well, how stale were they?” a director asked.
    “Ever try biting into a hockey puck?” Johnson replied. Everyone roared. The Pope was already a board favorite.
    At first all Johnson could do to retaliate was to cram more chips into Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies. In the meantime, he used the wartime footing as an excuse to rid the company’s top echelons of its remaining Nabisco veterans. “Look,” he told Schaeberle, “the guys that got you in trouble aren’t going to get you out of it.” Schaeberle, as always, agreed. Peter Rogers was brought in to head the war effort, while Carbonell flogged the R&D people to develop Nabisco’s own soft cookie.
    By mid-1983, Nabisco was ready to counterattack. With the introduction of its own soft cookie entry, Almost Home, it joined the battle for Kansas City. “It was a holocaust,” Johnson would later recall. “P&G would coupon one dollar, we’d coupon a dollar fifty. Bodies flying all over the place.” Johnson didn’t care what the coupons cost. He didn’t care what overtime his salesman put in for. Nabisco was going to take back those shelves.
    In the end Johnson and Nabisco lost the struggle for Kansas City. But they won the war. The two newcomers didn’t have the mass production and distribution systems in place to quickly go national. Once Nabisco had a product, it established impenetrable beachheads in city after city before the competition could arrive. By 1984, the cookie wars were all but over.
    As the smoke cleared, Johnson emerged triumphant, both inside and outside Nabisco. As far as Schaeberle and the board were concerned, he could do no wrong. That year Schaeberle rewarded Johnson by ceding him the title of chief executive. Nabisco’s huge new research center was about to be unveiled, and Johnson, in a spasm of flattery, repaid the favor by naming it the Robert M. Schaeberle Technology Center. Schaeberle was moved. The Merry Men thought it was a brilliant way to put Schaeberle out to pasture. A man who had his name on a building, they reasoned, might as well be dead.
    After only a decade in New York, Johnson had achieved the pinnacle of success: CEO of one of America’s great food companies. He was a new breed of chief executive for a new age of American business. The old-timers at Standard Brands had seen themselves as corporate stewards. “Your company is the ship,” they would say, “the chief executive is only the captain.” That steady-as-she-goes ethos was fine for men scarred by the 1930s and scared to make waves. But Johnson, like many of his peers, hadn’t lived through a Depression, hadn’t fought a world war, and wasn’t about to acknowledge limits. He was no old-style team player but a Broadway Joe or Reggie Jax, an iconoclastic superstar, a cool, television-age man loyal to little but his own whims.
    To outsiders, he was the same old backslapping Ross. In his early fifties, he was tall and slim and wore his silvery hair boyishly long. The only hint of Canada was in his voice: he said “bean” instead of “been,” sprinkled his jokes with the British “bloody,” and occasionally ended a sentence with “eh?”
    But even as he assumed Nabisco’s throne, Johnson seemed to lose interest in running it. Glitz now fascinated him far more than Ritz. If they weren’t off with Gifford and a girlfriend, the Johnsons were on a Mediterranean vacation with Jim Robinson of American Express and his wife Linda, then an up-and-coming Wall Street public relations expert.