National Post

THE CEO AFTERLIFE

From coffee boss to ‘rookie novelist,’ former Nabob head finds his purpose

- By Peter Kuitenbrou­wer

What do you do when you climb the corporate ladder and then ge t kicked from the top? Many chief executives face this challenge. Some find a new job. Some join boards or run for public office. Some become consultant­s. And one spent years writing a potboiler about a Yugoslav pilot in the Second World War betrayed by his girlfriend, shot down over the Adriatic Sea and jailed in a U.S. POW camp full of homicidal Nazis.

For John Richard Bell it was a bizarre change in career direction. Yet it all worked out in the end. Sort of.

Last month, a U.S. publishing house released Mr. Bell’s first book. It is not his war thriller novel, The Circumstan­tial Enemy. Rather it is a business book, Do Less Better: The Power of Strategic Sacrifice in a Complex World (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014).

“At least I am a published author,” Mr. Bell, 69, says from West Vancouver, where he lives with his wife, Jasmin. “At least they know that I’ve been published and I can write.”

Mr. Bell immigrated to Toronto from the United Kingdom at age four. He landed his first job at Bristol Myers, selling Bufferin, Ban deodorant and Javex in the west part of greater Toronto, all the way north to Owen Sound.

“Go into the drugstore, see what they had on the shelf, and take an order,” he recalls. He climbed the advertisin­g and marketing ladder, and eventually became marketing director at Nabob Foods in Vancouver.

Nabob, when Mr. Bell arrived, had too many brands, and lost money. The management team focused on coffee. More than 300 workers lost their jobs. The move succeeded: Nabob became the top coffee brand in Canada.

“Few people have the will to make an ugly choice that leads you to an advantage,” says Hugo Powell, who nurtured Mr. Bell at Nabob and later ran Labatt Brewing Co. and Interbrew.

After 10 years at Nabob Foods Ltd., in 1987 he became chief executive, a job he held until Jacobs Suchard, the company’s Swiss parent, sold Nabob to Kraft in 1994 — for “much more than” $100 million, according to Mr. Bell.

“They took care of me,” he recalls. “A big payout is kinda like your annual bonus. You feel good for about a day or two. The golden parachute was nice, but the passion and the purpose was suddenly gone.”

Mr. Bell became a consultant. He helped big brands, including Maple Leaf Foods Inc., Starbucks Corp. and Campbell’s Soup Co. But ennui set in.

“It wasn’t as much a sense of purpose as being a CEO,” he says. “The quintessen­tial CEO has all the support systems. And sud- denly there is this emptiness because they define themselves by their job.”

Mr. Bell took a time-honoured route to ease the pain: he started a blog. The CEO Afterlife gained

Few people have the will to make an ugly choice that leads you to an advantage

a cult following. Forbes and Fortune reprinted his words.

Of leaving the executive suite he writes, “I felt an ominous and inexplicab­le separation from the world. I had not nurtured my soul with the passion associated with the corner office.”

To regain his sense of purpose, Mr. Bell turned to another form of writing. During his years as a consultant, on airplanes and in hotel rooms he wrote the story of his father-in-law, who piloted a Luftwaffe bomber over the Soviet Union in 1941. “The seeds of passion had begun to germinate in me,” he writes. He decided to write a novel.

“I started from zero,” he recalls. “I spent a year in the West Vancouver Memorial Library, reading about plot and character and dialogue. Every character has gotta have a different style of dialogue. For an uneducated person, I am going to have to use slang.”

Concentrat­ion and focus are in Mr. Bell’s DNA. “He has this tenacity and unshakable confidence in his capabiliti­es,” says his oldest friend, Joe Morin, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin. He notes that Mr. Bell recently won two gold medals at pickleball, a variation on tennis played with a wiffle ball.

Still, for Mr. Bell, writing comes first these days. A Vancouver friend, Geoff Danzig, notes, “I’ve watched him impale his guts on the typewriter.”

Eventually, Mr. Bell wrote 200,000 words. An author he met through his blog connected him to Eric Nelson, a New York literary agent. Mr. Bell sent him the manuscript for the novel.

“It was very, very long,” Mr. Nelson recalls. “We talked about how to focus it.” Mr. Nelson then told Mr. Bell that, while he knew little about fiction, he had sold four business books in six months. So Mr. Bell pitched him a business book, originally titled

Kill Your Darlings. They settled on Do Less Better. “He writes very well,” Mr. Nelson says of Mr. Bell. “Editors got back to me and asked, ‘ Who did he hire to ghostwrite this?’ One wonders whether spending years on this long, character-driven novel didn’t teach him how to be a better writer in a way that made the non-fiction book so good.”

Even so, today Mr. Bell plugs ahead with his novel. He had to take some of his own business advice, to do less better: the third editor he paid to read his novel asked him, “Would this book suffer if you started at Chapter 12?” He has cut The Circumstan­tial

Enemy down to 104,000 words. Mr. Bell is not prepared to kill any more of the darlings in his pulp fiction debut. He wants to leave in his hero’s dalliances with his prison camp commander’s randy wife, his undergroun­d bookie operation, and the conniving girlfriend who bears the pilot an unexpected child. Even as he remains optimistic about this project, he is philosophi­cal.

“The challenge of trying to get historical fiction published is incredibly invigorati­ng to me, even though my odds aren’t great ’ cause I’m a rookie novelist at 69.”

 ?? BEN NELMS for National Post ?? Former chief executive of Nabob, John Bell, has spent much time in his West Vancouver home cutting
words out of a work of fiction after the success of his business book, Do Less Better.
BEN NELMS for National Post Former chief executive of Nabob, John Bell, has spent much time in his West Vancouver home cutting words out of a work of fiction after the success of his business book, Do Less Better.

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