Don should do whatever makes him happiest.
Don Walker bows out
— FRANK STRONACH ON HIS PROTEGÉ, DONALD WALKER, WHO IS RETIRING FROM MAGNA AFTER 15 YEARS AS CEO,
Frank Stronach was fresh off a game of tennis when he met a young, whip-smart, entrepreneurially- spirited mechanical engineer named Donald Walker, who had a host of jobs at General Motors Co. as well as a plan to convince the founder of Magna International Inc. to invest in a company he hoped to start.
Stronach sat listening to the young man, or, truth be told, half- listening, since he had other ideas in mind for Walker on that day in 1987, and wound up offering him a job at Magna instead.
“Don asked me to invest in this company he wanted to start,” Stronach recalled. “I said, ‘ Sure, I will invest, but I want to invest in you. Come and work with me.’”
Walker, on Tuesday morning, offered a slightly revised version of Stronach’s account of their initial meeting, explaining how the pair actually met twice before he accepted the counter- pitch. At the time, Walker imagined himself sticking around Magna for six months, and learning everything he could about the supplier side of the auto- parts industry, before striking out on his own with his big idea.
“As it ends up, 33 years later, and I am still here,” said Walker, Magna’s chief executive officer, who is also Stronach’s former son-in-law and the father of two of his grandchildren.
The two men remain close, and they try to get together for lunch every couple months. This week, however, a phone call would have to suffice, since Walker had some urgent news to share with someone he considers a “mentor.”
It seems even smart young whips grow older, and so it is with 64-year-old Walker, who announced he is retiring at the end of the year after being CEO or co- CEO for 15 years in his second stint at the company ( he was also CEO between 1994 and 2001).
His successor, Seetarama (Swamy) Kotagiri, has been a Magna employee for 21 years, and will shift from the president’s chair to the top job he was earmarked for about 18 months ago.
“Swamy is the right person,” Walker said, adding that a huge component of succession planning revolves around timing, and that Kotagiri hits all the marks: he is highly motivated, hungry, has lots of ideas, lots of energy and a long road ahead. “It’s more that Swamy is ready,” Walker said.
The company Kotagiri will be running come the new year has 152,000 employees, 346 manufacturing operations and a footprint in 27 countries. As the world’s third- largest automotive supplier, Magna makes everything from seats and car bodies to drive trains and high-tech side mirrors.
Walker remembers that Magna’s shares traded for a bit more than two bucks in the late 1980s. Today, they trade for around $70. A company that once did a billion dollars in sales annually now routinely does $40 billion.
But what Walker is most proud of is preserving the work culture Stronach built around the place: Magna should operate as a decentralized enterprise; innovation and entrepreneurship are to be encouraged; and employees should share in the profits.
“When you hire people who think of it as their own business, they work at it, rather than just having a job and working for somebody else,” he said.
As for Stronach, Magna bought him out for a whopping $ 870 million in 2010. Now he does whatever he wants, and is currently working on an electric car project. His retirement advice for his former son- inlaw: “Don should do whatever makes him happiest.”
Walker has plenty of ideas on that front, and he isn’t planning to join any boards like many retired executives do anytime soon. His big passion project is something he refers to as the Future Prosperity of Canada.
The Canada we love, Walker said, is in direct competition with China, which does not mess around. China wants to be a dominant global force.
Canada, on the other hand, runs election cycle to election cycle. Politicians come and politicians go, and the big picture — planning for the next 20 years, instead of the next two — gets lost or ignored altogether.
“I am not going to get into politics, but maybe I can influence policy,” Walker said. “We can be doing better than what we do with advanced preventative health care, with education, with intelligent immigration, with tax policy.”
Among them: attending more electronic dance music concerts. Walker and Belinda Stronach’s son, Frank, was, in his younger years, groomed for a career at Magna. But then he started moonlighting as a DJ while at university. Now he tours the world, and his father couldn’t be prouder.
“His stage name is Frank Walker,” Walker said. “He was going to be doing 17 shows in Vegas this year, and so I was planning to go out and see some, but that got shut down.”