Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Tyler Johnston

THE DREYER’S GRAND ICE CREAM ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interviews conducted by

Victor Geraci

in 2011

Copyright © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or

well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and

the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded

interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a

well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical

record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed

by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative

materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in

other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not

intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account,

offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply

involved, and irreplaceable.

*********************************

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The

Regents of the University of California and Tyler Johnston, October 26, 2011.

The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights

in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft

Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from

this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long

as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The

Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of

California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online

at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Tyler Johnston “The Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream Oral History Project”

conducted by Victor Geraci, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft

Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2013.

Table of Contents—Tyler Johnston

Interview #1 February 15, 2011

[Audio File 1] 1

Family and educational background—UC Davis, UC Berkeley—Jazz and other

interests, and “people skills”—Junior executive training program at Macy’s—

Retailing, merchandising, consumer analysis—Promotion at Macy’s—

Northwestern MBA program.

[Audio File 2] 19

Northwestern, cont’d.—Training in marketing—Internship at Jewel—Wife

Melanie and her career—General Mills—Brand management position at Kraft—

Melanie’s work at Leo Burnett—“The mayonnaise business,” snackable cheese,

satirizing corporate absurdities—fun.

Interview #2 February 25, 2011

[Audio File 3] 38

From Kraft to Dreyer’s—Meeting Rick Cronk—Team work at Dreyer’s—

Meeting Gray Rogers—Accepting position as VP of marketing at Dreyer’s—

Excitement, people, challenges—Initiation—Marketing and planning for the long

term—Personal relationships and success at Dreyer’s—The Grooves as good

business—Entering the New York market—Centralization and de-

centralization—The Grooves in action.

[Audio File 4] 56

Building brand management side of Dreyer’s—New product development—Ben

& Jerry’s—“Hiring smart”—Explosive growth at Dreyer’s—Regulations—

Failure of some new products—Regional markets: Atlanta, Chicago—

Unilever/Nestlé—Changing strategy—Creative PR and advertising campaigns.

[Audio File 5] 76

Mergers and acquisitions in the grocery business—Regional plants—Celebrating

success—Mother of All Parties, Hoopla—Ben & Jerry’s—Creative brand

marketing—Godzilla and Starbucks and other partnerships—Promotion of

Dreyer’s—Going public—Research and development, new products, Dreamery

and the super premium business.

[Audio File 6] 93

Unilever/Nestlé, Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Haägen-Dasz, and Dreyer’s—Making a

deal—FTC regulations—Complexities of a joint venture—Repositioning—“An

amazing ride”—Career trajectories of Dreyer’s management team—Corporate

values—Values in practice—Failing forward—And trust: “Kind of magical.”

[End of Interview]

1

Interview #1 February 15, 2011

[Begin Audio File 1]

01-00:00:12

Geraci: I am Vic Geraci, food and wine historian from the University of California

Berkeley’s Regional Oral History Office. Today’s date is Tuesday, February

15, 2011 and seated with me is Tyler Johnston. Mr. Johnston served as the

executive vice president of marketing for Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream. First of

all, thank you for doing this. This is—

01-00:00:30

Johnston: Absolutely.

01-00:00:30

Geraci: —becoming part of our project. Let’s go ahead and start with your family,

your birth, your parents, growing up, a little bit about the background about

you, your education, and then from there we’ll move into your professional

career. So I’ll just let you begin.

01-00:00:47

Johnston: All right.

01-00:00:47

Geraci: Begin at the beginning.

01-00:00:48

Johnston: Begin at the beginning. Well, I’m a native of Northern California and I’m

probably squarely in the middle of the middle class baby boom in Northern

California. So I was born in Oakland in 1953, but my family at that time lived

in Walnut Creek and that’s where I grew up. So I grew up in Walnut Creek at

a time when there were walnut trees, there was a creek as opposed to shopping

centers and banks. It was a town of maybe 20,000 people. Some parents

commuted by Greyhound bus into San Francisco because BART was not built

at that time. My dad was from Vancouver and had been in a few businesses,

but generally in the selling side of businesses. Largely in insurance and then

real estate and then for many, many years was a real estate agent and broker.

Again, at a time when California real estate in those days meant a post-war

building of tract homes out in the suburbs, so he was often out at

developments.

01-00:02:12

Geraci: Well, that’s the East Bay over the hill was really starting to develop.

01-00:02:17

Johnston: Right, right. [telephone ringing] I forgot there was a phone in this room. My

mom is from Kansas and she came from a fascinating sort of family with a lot

of pioneer history of wagon trains out to Kansas. Her dad was a country

lawyer who became the attorney general who at one time had a promising

political career back around the FDR time. My mom had four sisters. My

mom studied in Kansas at the University of Kansas but then had a bug for the

2

television and radio business and so she drove out here with a friend to

Hollywood way back to sort of get into the radio business if they could. She

was one of the early women in the radio business. Not as an on-air talent but

as stage manager and producer and that sort of thing.

01-00:03:34

Geraci: That makes her a little bit of a feminist at this point.

01-00:03:38

Johnston: Yeah.

01-00:03:38

Geraci: For that era and that time, to strike out on her own like that for a profession,

that’s—

01-00:03:44

Johnston: Almost all the sisters were that way. Her other sister, who is my aunt, who is

still alive, was even more so that way. Just for two minutes. She came out to

Mills College, then started as a journalist. Was the first female sports

journalist over in San Francisco. Then developed an affinity for photography

and auto racing and became an auto race driver and a journalist and is still

writing. I just saw her this weekend at the auto show in Chicago. She’s eighty-

two and she still writes for AutoWeek and flies around the world to try out

new cars. So there was certainly that bug in the family. My mom had all of

that but I often think she went down the road more traveled, in that once she

met my dad she got married and I think those early aspirations of the radio

career sort of faded, at least temporarily. She channeled them back later after

my brother and I were born. There’s two of us. I have an older brother. My

mom worked for a while just in department stores and things like that, but

then she got her teaching credential and became a very successful teacher,

predominantly in middle school out in Walnut Creek. While she taught lots of

subjects, leadership and English, her main love was drama and she was a

drama teacher, a director. A director at the civic arts theater early on. One of

the founders of the young repertory company out there. So theater and drama

are also a theme—

01-00:05:32

Geraci: A very big part.

01-00:05:33

Johnston: —that kind of run in my past. I have one brother. We’re very different, as

siblings often are.

01-00:05:42

Geraci: What’s his name?

01-00:05:43

Johnston: Robert.

3

01-00:05:43

Geraci: Robert.

01-00:05:44

Johnston: He’s a chemical engineer. Very quantitative. That’s one of the main

differences right there. And he still lives out in San Ramon Valley. And my

upbringing was very straight ahead. That’s what I mean by being right in the

center of the baby boom. We weren’t well off but we weren’t poor. We had a

lot of family vacations but they meant camping on Mount Diablo, not

traveling around the world.

01-00:06:20

Geraci: This is the typical 1950s middle class white picket fence family story.

01-00:06:25

Johnston: Exactly. Harvesting walnuts for the summer job and the like. And so I went

through grade school and intermediate school, as it was called then, and high

school all in Walnut Creek. I was pretty much a good student. My mom was a

very strong force in our life. She was a teacher and she was going to have kids

who studied.

01-00:06:55

Geraci: Especially a middle school teacher.

01-00:06:56

Johnston: Either qualitative or quantitative, regardless of skill set, we studied hard. So I

had good grades through school. Both my brother and I picked up music early

on. Played trombone. Started in about the fourth grade. Was picked for

trombone probably the way everybody got their instruments back then. You

stood in line and the band director looked at you and decided what you were

going to be. So maybe I had one arm longer than the other or something. I was

still short at that time, so I don’t know. But I ended up playing trombone. So

music was a big part of my education. I was always playing in groups, on our

bands and select groups around the Bay area and things like that. I also

dabbled in theater a bit. Enough to sort of win awards at high school as far

as—sort of fine arts awards and things like that. But my major interest was

music and then just trying to get decent grades.

I went through high school at an interesting time. I graduated in 1971 so I was

catching the tail end of the sixties and, of course, a whole lot was happening,

particularly through the tunnel, as one would say, in Berkeley. And a lot of

my teachers were Berkeley, lived in Berkeley, my high school teachers. And

so when there would be something at the Cal campus, tear gassing or the like,

they would come to school, out to the suburb, and be quite wound up about

what was going on. And so while I went through a suburban experience

around that time of the late sixties, I was always proud to say that the Grateful

Dead played at my high school and that only cost three dollars. We had

some—

4

01-00:08:57

Geraci: Now, that’s amazing.

01-00:09:00

Johnston: And I joined their fan club and they never sent me a darn thing. And so I

never became a Deadhead. It’s the early marketer, I guess. But that was kind

of an interesting time because there was a lot of turmoil and a lot of classes, in

particular, were interesting. I had a teacher in eighth grade, an English teacher

in eighth grade, that was so frustrated with what was going on at high school

in terms of English—this will make sense in a second—that he said, “If you

guys—” His bribe was, “If you study hard in this class in eighth grade and you

really put your mind to it, this will be the last time you have to really study

hard in English.” Now, that’s a nice incentive when you’re in eighth grade, so

I studied pretty hard in eighth grade. And I saw what he meant when I got to

high school. When I got to high school, our English curriculum was elective

and you had about ten classes you could choose; film and study hall. Only one

of them really pertained to sitting down and reading books and writing about

them. I took one class which was film. The teacher had taken all the furniture

out of the—all the desks out of the room and put in couches. Of course, this

teacher lived in Berkeley. And we watched films and then it segued into doing

improv comedy. So I got A’s in English in high school for doing improv

comedy, which is later why, when I got to college, I had to take what was

called bonehead English because I basically had a four-year hiatus of English.

But anyway, that’s a little bit of the high school experience.

It was always assumed I would go to college and it was largely assumed I’d

go to somewhere in the University of California system. My folks really made

enough money to not necessarily qualify for a lot of scholarship money but

not enough to really afford a private university. And at that time, almost

everybody I knew, you either aimed for one of the Cal campuses or you went

to one of the state colleges, as they were known. My brother went to UC

Davis. [telephone ringing] Sorry about the phone. And I visited him quite a

bit. Liked that a lot. So that was my first choice when it came down to

applying. Berkeley was not anywhere on the screen for me because most

parents in the suburbs were saying, “Please don’t go to Berkeley or Santa

Barbara,” because they were blowing up banks. But I got into Davis and I

went. And that’s where I went in 1971.

Not knowing what I would major in, thinking I would be pre-something, law

or maybe medicine. My brother was more science oriented so I thought,

“Well, I’ll take some of the science classes to head down the path.” And so

then college for me was sort of like being in this long hallway where you try a

doorway and then if it opened and no one yelled at you, you kind of went

through it academically. If it didn’t open or you opened it and someone yelled

at you, you said, “Well, maybe that’s not for me.”

01-00:12:26

Geraci: I’ll close this door.

5

01-00:12:27

Johnston: That was chemistry. So the chemistry door was a little tough for me to open.

Calculus somewhat. And I just kept trying different things. I said, “Well, I

guess I’m not going to be pre-med after all,” and started taking different

classes. I was always somebody who wanted to take a diversity of things

though. College for me was great. I really enjoyed it. I remember walking,

when I first got to Davis, walking into my very first lecture which was

chemistry 1A in the largest hall at Davis, which was 200 students. Coming up

the steps with a huge smile on my face and an upper classmen coming out of

the lecture hall from the previous class. He looked at me. He says, “What are

you smiling about?” [laughter]

01-00:13:16

Geraci: [laughter] Get real.

01-00:13:19

Johnston: That was my first day. I was like, “Oh. This looks like it’s going to be pretty

fun.” So I did try a lot of things but I quickly sort of shifted from the sciences

more toward—I took an economics class that I really liked. I took some

history classes that I really liked and I started developing a little bit of an

affinity over time at Davis for more of the social sciences, psychology and

economics. However, as I looked at UC Davis in those days, it didn’t have

any degree [in business]. If you wanted to major in business, you could piece

together a degree in agricultural economics. But I wasn’t really big on

agricultural economics. So while I had a blast, I loved UC Davis. I had great

friends, great roommates that are still close friends today. I played a lot of

jazz, of course, up there, and loved living there. I looked at it and said, “I can’t

really stay here because I’m not finding the precise major.” I guess as a slight

aside on that— I thought for a while about majoring in the arts. My mom

pretty much talked me out of it. Again, she’s a pretty strong force and she had

seen enough masters in fine arts over the years unemployed.

01-00:14:58

Geraci: Or underemployed.

01-00:15:00

Johnston: Or underemployed is probably a better way to say it. So she kind of pointed

me a different direction on that. But nonetheless, I kept music as a big part of

what I was doing. But coming into my sophomore year, I got very involved.

Oh, yeah, I was very involved in lots of stuff. I was asked to join one of the

parts of the student government that ran the program that brought speakers to

the school. All sorts of different kinds of speakers. The Speakers Forum it was

called, and it was run by a guy who was in my dorm, a year older than I, and

he wanted me to join and then he wanted me to take it over from him later.

And that was fascinating, because I’m pretty young and I’m meeting Jane

Goodall and Ralph Abernathy. I have a great story about coming down here to

pick up Ralph Nader and drive him up from Berkeley in a car that didn’t have

seatbelts. [laughter]

6

01-00:15:58

Geraci: [laughter]

01-00:15:59

Johnston: It was a university car. Oh, god. That was one of my more fun experiences.

And, of course, Ralph Nader never slept a full night. He would just catnap. So

you’d be talking to him on the drive up and then turn around and find out he

was asleep in the car. And he’d just grab ten minutes every now and then. But

I met all sorts of nationally renowned folks. So I was very involved in the

school. It was very fun. But didn’t see a degree there for me. Most of my

buddies and roommates were either going toward medicine or engineering.

They were all happy in their academic track. So I looked around and saw that

Berkeley had a business program. At that time it was a separate business

school at Berkeley. It wasn’t the Haas School but it was just a separate

business school. In those says, it was easy to transfer around the Cal

campuses. But for the business school at Berkeley you did have to apply. So it

wasn’t just go put your name in the box and transfer campuses. You did have

to fill out an application. So I decided now is the time to do that. I should get a

degree in something that is closer—

01-00:17:16

Geraci: It’s like your junior year?

01-00:17:18

Johnston: Yeah, for my junior year. So I picked everything up and moved to Berkeley.

Knew just a couple of people there. And came in therefore as a junior into the

business program, which was new. And then, of course, I think what I brought

with me as my way of getting settled was music again. I joined the Jazz

Ensembles program there, which was very active. It was a student run

program. Really good jazz program which I’m, as a tangent, still involved

with today. And hit it pretty hard. I decided at that point that I ought to focus

on this. I wouldn’t say I just became a total bookworm but I took it pretty

seriously. I wanted to do well. I didn’t know what I wanted to go do but I was

starting to get a sense of kind of what are some of the things I like to do. I

liked the world of business. I liked the marketing classes a lot. And in my

other life, in the jazz program, I became very involved. I was asked to be the

personnel director for this giant jazz festival that they were having for the first

time. So it meant organizing 120 jazz musicians to do work, which was—

01-00:18:42

Geraci: [laughter] That’s herding cats.

01-00:18:43

Johnston: Yes, that’s herding cats. That ended up being on my application to business

school as an achievement later on. And I eventually, the next year, became

president of the Jazz Ensembles program. And so I started to realize I like

being around people. I like the complexity of that and sort of the chaos of that

and over here academically I was studying business, and liking the marketing

element of that. But the nice part about the Cal program at that time was you

7

could get a business degree but it was still very much a bachelor science and

liberal arts. So a lot of encouragement to take natural science classes, geology,

psychology, sociology. I was still trying to take kind of a broad—

01-00:19:34

Geraci: Still a traditional liberal arts student.

01-00:19:35

Johnston: Yeah, yeah. With an emphasis, clearly. I graduated with a degree in business

but when I look at that whole four years it was kind of a broad cut of a liberal

arts degree and a fair amount of artistic stuff around the edges, with music

being kind of a theme all the way through it. Music organizations.

And so that takes me up to 1975 and I graduated in four years and started off

then in the real world of, okay, now I need to work for a living. I bring this up

because now I have a college senior son and I’m thinking back on what I was

going through at that time. But one of the things my parents did, just to come

back to them. My dad continued to sell real estate and early on got a job as the

realtor at Rossmoor, the retirement community over at Walnut Creek. And my

parents were reasonably young at that time but they sort of fell in love with it.

He was working out there selling places. And so by the time I graduated, in

fact the year I graduated, they sold our family home and moved to Rossmoor.

So I thought it was a very clever way of blowing up the bridge to prevent—

01-00:20:53

Geraci: [laughter]

01-00:20:56

Johnston: They said, “You guys can come visit but you’re not allowed to live there. It’s

not us. It’s Ross—”

01-00:21:05

Geraci: It’s the rules.

01-00:21:06

Johnston: It’s the rules. [laughter] Here’s a guest pass. So there’s never any question that

it was time to—I got to go do something. It was never even a question of

returning home. It was all about, “Okay, time to move on.” I started to just do

interviews and my interviews—in those days there were interviews on college

campuses at Cal. You’re in a temporary building. It was built after World War

II and was still considered temporary. You go to the placement office. And so

I interviewed in almost anything that looked friendly toward marketing or

sales but I think back on it now and they were pretty goofy. Dean Witter in

stock sales. Oil companies were big to come by for sales. And then retailers.

And two retailers came. Emporium, a department store, and then Macy’s

department stores. And they had a training program and it caught my eye. And

I will also say I wasn’t looking outside of whatever the on campus interviews

were. I wasn’t networking with people. Those were all more modern tools.

And I interviewed with Macy’s and got to the second interview and kind of

8

liked what I heard, as crazy as that sounds. I never thought I would go into the

retailing business or anything around the apparel business.

In fact, my mom would crack up because when she was in the department

store business, or anytime she ever took me to a department store, I would

instantly start to yawn and yawn the entire time. And it would just be a family

joke. I would go down to buy some new jeans or something and there I am

yawning. And she says, “And you’re going to go work at a department store?

You’ll be sleeping on the job the whole time.” So that was kind of funny but I

think she was actually pleased I was employable.

And so the interview was pretty intense, because they were interviewing for a

class of people. They wanted to hire about thirty kids.

01-00:23:35

Geraci: So they had like a leadership training program.

01-00:23:36

Johnston: Yeah, yeah. I think it was called the management training program and you

would come in as a junior executive. I later learned what junior executive

meant. You’d go through some combined training with your class and then

you’d start through this rotation of assignments. The idea would be you’d be a

trainee for a while and then you’d become a department sales manager

somewhere in a store and then you’d get into the buying office and move

down the merchandising track. And if you kept on, then you’d go back into

store management and back and forth. And I don’t know how much I thought

through. It was a job opportunity. It felt good in that it was, okay, high pace,

lot of people, marketing related and kind of fun and had a creative aspect to it.

And they were going to pay me something.

01-00:24:38

Geraci: [laughter] There’s the big one right there. They were going to pay me.

01-00:24:42

Johnston: The offer letter was $7,600. But you get an employee discount and you’re a

junior executive.

01-00:24:57

Geraci: A great title.

01-00:24:59

Johnston: Yes. Excuse me, it was $7,800. I have the letter in this drawer over here. And

then they sent a second letter and said, “Good news. We’ve increased the

salary to $8,400 a year.” By the time I started out of school, they had changed

that. There’s one part in the middle of college I didn’t go into. Can I do that

briefly?

01-00:25:28

Geraci: Please do. Please do.

9

01-00:25:29

Johnston: I forgot about it. Because I did have some business experience in my

summers. I was a camp counselor for one summer. But my college roommate,

the first guy I met when I went to Davis, was a very unusual guy. He looked

like a hippie but he was an Eagle Scout out of Monterey. Guy named Tony

Stearns. Had a beard out to here and was already losing his hair and rode a

sting ray bicycle around Davis. If you can imagine that look.

01-00:25:58

Geraci: Whole image.

01-00:25:58

Johnston: And we became best friends. We were put together as roommates. We became

best friends. He had a business. He was always a business person but he had a

business making handcrafted leather goods. Belts, purses, back in the day.

And he’d go to fairs around the country and sell these things. So I ended up

starting to work with him in that business while I was in college. One of the

best summer jobs I ever had, he and his brother and I toured the country in a

van for eight weeks and we spent one night in a hotel. That was the night

Nixon resigned actually.

01-00:26:37

Geraci: You wanted to watch some TV.

01-00:26:39

Johnston: Wanted to watch TV and have a real good shower. And we spent eight weeks

going across the country to three major state fairs and setting up for two

weeks. Usually it was the Hari Krishnas next to us and the Mormons selling

lemonade on the other side. We’d be there with our hippie belts and purses.

And his brother had a beard and no hair and he had a beard. And we all wore

jeans and blue work shirts and then we started joking with people that we

were actually on a work release program from prison. It was the most fun but

it was a fantastic business experience because it really was the retailing

business. Quite literally, set up shop, sell, see what works, what doesn’t work.

I know it sounds goofy but—

01-00:27:29

Geraci: You were learning to interact with the people—

01-00:27:28

Johnston: Yeah. And how you merchandise.

01-00:27:29

Geraci: —at the ground level.

01-00:27:31

Johnston: And how you price stuff, how you make a profit, and a whole lot of

interaction. You think about a massive fair like the Allentown, Pennsylvania

state fair at Allentown. You see America in those two weeks. Anyway, so it

was a fantastic experience. So I did have elements of those kinds of business

10

experiences, as well, because Tony was constantly in business my first two

years I lived with him and then we’ve remained friends to this day.

So fast forward back to the retailing business. I took a break but I was broke

after college. I didn’t pay for anything in college. My parents said, “We will

pay for college.” So I didn’t work. I had a lot of off the dole kind of work that

I was doing on behalf of different programs, the jazz program and stuff, but I

didn’t have to work, which was really a blessing and I’ve actually modeled

that. But they also made it clear that that was it. College is what they could

afford and if you want to do something beyond that, you’re on your own.

So I needed to start work right away. So I graduated in June of ’75 and started

at Macy’s in August of that year and jumped full speed and headfirst into the

wacky world of retailing, which I look back on and even at the time I really

enjoyed. I learned a lot. And it was crazy. It was sixty hour weeks easily. As a

junior executive, what that meant was you weren’t union and they could work

you as long as they wanted to. And the employee discount was very cool,

except it took that $8,400 a year that you were making and very quickly you

found out that you were spending it on crock pots and designer suits that were

in your department and you couldn’t pass up the deal because it was on sale

and you got 20 percent off. So I was probably better dressed than most of my

friends and had a better kitchen but I wasn’t really saving any money. And I

was working all the time.

Fun group of people. Crazy. Twenty-five, thirty people, very competitive, all

trying to position themselves. So I learned a lot about, okay, the body politic

that goes on. And very high paced. An interesting business in that there were

good bosses and there were some really crappy bosses. There were seat of the

pants merchants that were mysterious, many of whom became senior

executives, and then basically their approach was because I went through all

that crap, you have to go through all that crap. So you’re starting here and

you’re going to work your way up that same ladder. I don’t care how smart

you are or where you came from.

01-00:30:54

Geraci: If I had to do it, you have to do it.

01-00:30:56

Johnston: Right. And then there were some executives there that were different, that

came in that were either just really pleasant people in the buying office or, in

one case, and I’ll get to this one guy, an MBA who had come in and was

trying to bring a little more of an intellectual approach to some of the stuff

that was going on. But great training. You take a few classes, the next thing

you know you’re ringing on a register in San Francisco downstairs in the

middle of a sale and you barely know how to run the register and everybody’s

watching you to see whether you can swim and how you interact with people.

And people generally are upset when they’re in department stores. This was

11

long before Nordstrom made it cool to be positive in terms of customer

service. So just wild stories. It was the late seventies. Disco was going crazy

in San Francisco. Cocaine was in the workplace. People were sleeping with

their bosses in the buying office as a way to get—it was like, oh, my god, this

is crazy.

01-00:32:15

Geraci: From this middle-class boy from—

01-00:32:17

Johnston: Yeah. A long way from—

01-00:32:16

Geraci: —Walnut Creek.

01-00:32:18

Johnston: —the walnut tree. And I wasn’t yawning either. I was only yawning because I

was exhausted. But very quickly I got placed, which was good. I had some

good feedback. I remember one woman who was a peer in the group came to

me and she said, “You’re going to do great in this because you care about

people.” And I was like, “Well, that’s interesting,” because we were just

friends going through the program together. So somehow I was exhibiting

some affinity for working with people. I got placed very quickly in a

department job to run a men’s department in San Leandro at Bay Fair. Newly

remodeled store, so the eyes of the chain were looking at—and Macy’s

California at that time was a rock and roll division. It was the success story in

Macy’s, believe it or not. This goes back so far. But the guy who had turned it

around was now the head of Macy’s New York, but what he did in California

was the footprint for transforming Macy’s across the country. So it had a lot

of cachet in the business. So I got placed early and it was great. Everybody

said, “You got to get a job in the downtown store because that’s where you

can be seen,” because all the buying offices were in the store.” They weren’t

in an office, they were in the store. They were all hidden behind the

stockrooms and stuff, these little rabbit warrens of cubicles and people

screaming on the phone to vendors in New York early in the morning. It was

just “insane.” You don’t want to go to a branch store because you’ll be

forgotten.

Well, so the job comes up. They say, “We want you to go to Bay Fair. It’s

kind of brand new. New department, new store. Just recently remodeled. It’s

about to have its debut with all the executives coming there.” And I wasn’t

going to say no. So within a month of starting I was now a manager. Great

experience. You come in and here’s your team, and your team ranges from

teenagers and part-time people to guys over here selling men’s suits who have

seen twenty guys like me come and go, and they could give a crap that I’m the

new—

12

01-00:34:32

Geraci: You’re just the new raw meat that’s just going to—

01-00:34:33

Johnston: New guy, and, “What are you going to teach me. I’ve been selling suits for—”

And so as my first experience at trying to pull a team together, if I think back

about it, and great lessons. Some very positive, things that worked, some

things you look back on and go, “Boy, that was really stupid. I have to do that

differently.” In fighting with the store management, assistant manager of the

store who didn’t like the managers, so you quickly became like the kid who

was in between fighting parents. Lots of interesting experiences.

01-00:35:13

Geraci: This is a good trial and error education.

01-00:35:13

Johnston: Yeah. So my first breakout was I started to make observations about what was

going on. The buying office is pretty far away. I’m in this branch store. And

there’s just stuff that’s really strange. I have a few shoe department, and I

never have the right assortment. Never. Because they’re in San Francisco,

they’re marking in a book, “Send two dozen of these to these stores,” and

that’s about as sophisticated as it was. So I decided, “I got to tell them that we

need to do this differently.” So I wrote a report and I decided to use my

limited marketing knowledge from Cal and I said, “I’m going to study my

consumer.” I wrote this report. I think I still have a copy of this thing. And it

was called The Bay Fair Men’s Shoe Consumer. I typed it up and it was about

five pages of here’s who I think is in this store and here’s our assortment and

why it doesn’t work and here’s what I think we need. I tried to write it in

whatever I had learned about business writing and with an executive summary

and a few of those things. And I typed it up and I sent it over to the buying

office. Well, this apparently had never been done before. I didn’t send it to the

president of the company. I sent it to the buying office, and the buyer loved it

and just said, “This is fantastic. I wish all of our managers—“ there were only

twelve stores at that time—“would do this.” And he sent it to the director of

stores, of all of the stores, who is this guy named Clark Stone, who people

used to call Clark Rock. And everybody feared him. And so he either called

me up or sent me a letter about it. I was like, “Wow. I guess you can sort of

make a difference.” The funny part of the thing was, of the write-up, was in

there I talk about we have a rather “elderly,” and I put in parentheses, “45 and

up,” closed parenthesis, consumer here. And, of course, they all had massive

amounts of fun with this because every executive in the company was, of

course, in that category.

01-00:37:36

Geraci: Was elderly.

01-00:37:36

Johnston: Yeah. So they picked on me a little bit for that. We did well. I think we did

well because we were a new store and newly remodeled but I became one of

13

the sales manager of the year kind of things and got to go to a big award

dinner at Trader Vic’s with the president of Macy’s. So I’m now six months

out of college and kind of liking this. I have some authority. I’m away from

the mother ship, so I have flexibility. People are listening if you think about

things a little different than they’ve been thought about before and I kind of

liked it. I think I did that for about a year, which was about the typical term or

maybe a little less than the typical term. And every department has a manager

and many of those managers were coming out of the class. Some of them were

not doing well and I could hear what they were doing or how they were doing

it. So I just observed how does fit really work. Not trying to be political but

just trying to see where some people would trip up.

Anyway, I got promoted to the next step of the training, which was now to

come back to the buying office and be an assistant buyer. Still a junior

executive. I got a decent raise, so I’m probably now making $10,000 a year

and still buying again. This is a good time.

01-00:39:22

Geraci: So you’re well dressed.

01-00:39:23

Johnston: It was a good time to have me as a friend or if you were getting married

because I could always give a pretty good gift because of my store discount.

Lots of crock pots. I went into the buying office for, believe it or not, table

linens and I had this delightful buyer. So she’s in a different zone. She’s not

crazy like a lot of the apparel people screaming thinking that you win through

intimidation. She’s, in fact, a very pleasant woman with great taste and very

calm and a perfect teacher for me to come in to the buying office because—

and the domestics group was a tight group headed by a guy named Larry

Graeber, who was a fantastic boss. He was much more of a seat of the pants

merchant but he was a very positive people person. He was tough but he

would encourage his team. So the group was really tight. It was largely all

women. In fact, most of my bosses in my career, up until Dreyer’s, were

women. But this buyer I had was great and she took me under her wing. I

learned a lot from her because she had a calm approach to this and I saw that

that actually really worked instead of the sort of—

01-00:40:46

Geraci: The sky is falling.

01-00:40:47

Johnston: Yeah, hair on fire kind of thing that goes on. And I literally mean it. When it

went on, we were all in cubicles and you heard everything. So when

somebody’s screaming at somebody you heard it all day long. So probably

like a female version of the trading desk at Lehman Brothers or something.

But it was really a good experience and it was a cool little business. What I

learned there was you first go, “I don’t know anything about table linens. I’m

14

not sure I really want to learn a lot about table linens,” but you take it as a

business.

01-00:41:27

Geraci: But that was a good time for those type of goods. Williams Sonoma is really

starting to come out at this point. Americans are—with consumable income,

their disposable income, they’re making decisions to go up.

01-00:41:43

Johnston: To upgrade. Absolutely. That was going on and Macy’s had redesigned a lot

of the store toward that. So the development of The Celler as the place for

housewares, that was going gangbuster because it’s the first time housewares

got out of Sears and became kind of cool. The same thing was going on on the

domestics floors. A lot of the designers, the fabric designers, the Marimekkos

of the world, were realizing that—and the big mills in Carolina, were realizing

that there was a lot of money in value added scrap, in a way. You could bring

a designer orientation to what had just been a fabric business. And towels. The

other thing I learned there. The towel business. This sounds so fundamental,

but it was easy—it’s Merchandising 101. The towel area had been redesigned

at Macy’s and it was the first time somebody did vertical merchandising, of

putting a towel wall all the way up. And so they stacked merchandise halfway

up and then have a Styrofoam element that would go all the way to the ceiling

where you could tuck one towel up so it looked like you had merchandise

going floor to almost ceiling. So you had these walls of color. I started to learn

all—some of those basics at merchandising. Full racks. You need to have the

full presentation. Nobody wants the last thing. You always have to neaten it

up or fill it up. How to suggestion sell? How do you accessorize? How do you

put things together so you sell three instead of one? It’s so fundamental but

that’s what I got to learn. That was my education daily. And I remember when

I got to that store, somebody—oh, back when I was a trainee, one of the

domestic buyers had me for a day and she says, “I want you to reorganize

this.” These were all a bunch of glassware and bowls and vases in this atrium

setup. I started to put it together. She walks down an hour later and she goes,

“You’ve got it.” I said, “I have what?” She goes. “I can tell. You’ve got it.”

And that didn’t help me because it was mysterious.

01-00:43:48

Geraci: I didn’t know what I had.

01-00:43:50

Johnston: I don’t know what I did. I sort of did it in a way I thought made sense. But

that was what some of the teaching was. You had it or you didn’t. And then I

had this buyer I was working with who could really nurture that and give me

more of a method toward it. So it was very cool. And you’re right. We were

selling quite a bit. The department was doing well. So I had a great year. That

was a little less than a year, as well. And then as these things go, I got

certainly a decent evaluation and I moved to my next job in the buying office,

which was to be a senior assistant buyer or associate buyer in boys clothing,

15

young men’s clothing. And then I fall in with this young MBA, a Harvard

MBA named Sam Leask, whose family had been in the department store

business for years in Santa Cruz and had some small stores. And Sam was one

of the first experiments with hiring an MBA. There were maybe three of them

there. So Sam was a merchant. Came up in through the family business but he

had a great head on this shoulder. He’s out of Harvard and he’s bringing an

analytical approach to what otherwise was still checkmarks in books kind of

stuff. Computers were nowhere. There were people doing inventory control by

checking little books. They sat on the other side of the Styrofoam wall from

you and you handed things to them. It’s amazing. But Sam very calm. He’s

going to bring an analytical approach to boys clothing. The boss, a woman

named Rose Marie, a very elegant, talented, seat-of-the pants merchant again.

So I had both situations where I had a good nurturing environment but a sort

of spiritual leader above that, if you will, in merchandising. The children’s

group was pretty tight and we were doing pretty well. And Sam was, “Okay,

it’s time for you to have some stuff of your own.” And so he really carved off

responsibility for me.” I had another funny—I won’t go through that story.

01-00:46:20

Geraci: No, go ahead. [laughter]

01-00:46:24

Johnston: No. Okay, I’ll stay where I am. Sam, and he said, “I want you to—I’m going

to give you a piece of—“we had classes of goods. He gave me outerwear. So

now it’s young men’s size eight to twenty. I was helping him buy suits. And,

frankly, we sold a lot of those suits to adults in San Francisco because a lot of

the population in the city was smaller sized and you could have a Yves Saint

Laurent suit in boys size twenty, which was about a thirty-eight men’s size for

about half the price that the same suit would be in size forty in the—

01-00:47:00

Geraci: In the men’s.

01-00:47:02

Johnston: —men’s department. So shoppers figured that stuff out. So we were doing

really well in the sort of goofy designer stuff, which sounds—but he gave me

outerwear. Outerwear at that point had been jackets. Big, big jackets. Big,

dumb jackets that I wore when I grew up in Walnut Creek. But I had been

living in Berkeley and hanging out with outdoors oriented people and my

roommate, Tony, I told you a lot about, we used to do other stuff other than

just the leather stuff. We’d do spelunking and mountain climbing and river

rafting. I forgot about all that side. I did a bunch of that. And so I got

responsibility for this and I had seen that—I always thought that one of the

best things for California was a vest. Was basically down vests, because we

all wore them when we were camping. They were quite functional and perfect

for California climate because it keeps you warm but you can stay active. But

they were all kind of walking around in Michelin tires at that time, especially

in the boys stuff. So I decided I’d work with the manufacturer and let’s

16

develop a line and make a huge marketing push against vests for boys, for

kids. It was great. And Sam gave me the whole thing. And, of course,

everything in retailing is on a drop dead timing. Depending on the department,

you have from two to four seasons per year that you’re getting ready for. It’s

always a crisis. You’re either too early or too late with everything and you got

to get your markdowns timed correctly, of course. At that time we had also

been dealing with outerwear at a time when California was in a drought. I had

a great lesson there, because we took the huge markdown on all of our

clothing one year, one season, because it hadn’t rained at all and it was so

warm and stores were filled with jackets. We took the march of death

markdowns and about a week later it’s pouring rain. It made me never want to

be a farmer.

01-00:49:15

Geraci: And you had no stock left?

01-00:49:16

Johnston: We had no stock left. We got rid of it all. But anyway, Sam gave me the

responsibility. I got to build out the down vest program and it was very

successful. We put little chevron stripes on things so it had some color with

down vests. They sold out crazy. So I got to go to the show and actually work

with the vendor, negotiate the deal, work on the pricing, work on the design. I

certainly had a coach but he was pretty hands-off. So that’s Sam. He’s a great

guy. I’m still in touch with him today. He’s now doing development work for

the San Francisco opera.

And the group was tight. I remember this because we had some funny habits

and Sam always tells this story. We’d always have lunch together. I’d always

go upstairs to the cafeteria at Macy’s on the top floor, which is now the

Cheesecake Factory. And I’d always order the chef’s plate, the diet plate,

because it was a whole plate of cold cuts and they gave you bread and you

could put potato salad on it. And everybody in the group thought this was the

funniest thing in the world, that I would order the diet plate and then pile it

with food. And so to bring that all around, at my going away party, at a nice

restaurant, they actually brought in the diet plate from—because I had that

quirky little habit.

But I started to just raise the idea of, I don’t know, maybe, “I like this but I

don’t know if I want to do this forever.” It’s analytically not very satisfying.

I’m learning and all of that but it’s still so much a seat of the pants business.

And maybe I was reflecting on if you write one report about your consumer

you stand out as being a forward thinker. I feel like I need a little more

stimulation. I wasn’t sure what that was. There were people leaving at that

point, leaving the training program because you get picked off by the vendors

on the other side. They really wanted to hire the—but I didn’t want to just go

sell. So Sam said, “Have you ever thought about business school?” And I said,

“Yeah, a little bit. I don’t know much about it.” And he goes, “I know you like

17

marketing.” I said, “Yeah, I do like marketing.” And he started to talk to me

about business school generally and what he learned at Harvard and what it

was like.

On the other side of my life, one of my Berkeley roommates, who was a year

younger than me, had himself discovered economics. I’m not sure what he

wanted to do for a living. He went off to business school at Northwestern. So I

kind of started talking on both sides of this. And Sam said, “Well,

Northwestern—The guru of marketing in the world is on the faculty at

Northwestern. His name is Phil Kotler and he’s written the book that we all

studied in Harvard on marketing.” I said, “Really?” So he got me thinking

about maybe business school. Maybe just to go have a hiatus for a couple of

years and come back to the retailing business. But he wasn’t selling me on

that. He was just interested in me personally, which was—

01-00:52:51

Geraci: He was just helping you with your options.

01-00:52:55

Johnston: Yeah, yeah. So that conversation developed further and he brought in or I

brought in some material on Northwestern and I looked in the back and

looked up a little bit about the faculty and I looked at where people were

being placed when they came out of business school and all those companies

looked kind of interesting. This whole fuzzy area called brand management.

And it sounded a little bit like what I’d been doing. Small groups of people

centered around a business, responsibility early, but it had much more

theoretical and analytical rigor around it relative to just the merchant class.

And meanwhile my buddy’s back at Northwestern and he’s loving it, even

though he’s not really going toward marketing. And I don’t really recall a

moment I said, “I’m going to go do this,” but obviously I came to that point of

view. I said, “I think I’m going to apply,” and talked it through with Sam. He

thought that was great. And I started to go to work on that, to look at business

schools. So I applied to Northwestern because of that background. I applied to

Berkeley, although I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Berkeley because I had

gone there as an undergrad. I applied to UCLA. I wasn’t sure what I was

going to do or how I was going to pay for it because my parents were very

clear. I had done well. I was now making twelve, thirteen thousand dollars a

year. But I had some savings bonds, maybe, and that’s about it. Maybe a

couple hundred, a few hundred dollars in the bank. So it was pretty daunting

to look at but I just figured, and my buddy Chris who was at Northwestern just

said, “You get loans. You’ll figure it out.”

01-00:54:51

Geraci: Now, you were about twenty-five at this point?

01-00:54:52

Johnston: Yeah. I’m twenty-five. Yes, I’m twenty-five. Twenty-four probably when I’m

doing the application. So I went to work on it and so now in that time of

18

retailing when I’m working sixty hours a week, and that never quit—at one

point I ended up getting mononucleosis in the midst of the retailing thing and

kept coming into work and I finally had somebody physically say, “You got to

get out of this building. You can’t even walk up the stairs.” But you never

wanted to miss it because it had that kind of vibe. But now I would come

home and study for the GMATs. I was never good at tests. I had okay SATs,

enough to get into Davis, but I knew that would be the toughest part. I started

to develop who would I go to for recommendations and, of course, Sam was

one of them, who had worked with me and had an MBA. I went back to this

very important mentor I’ve left totally out of this story, I shouldn’t have, who

was the head of the UC Jazz Ensembles. I worked with him directly only for

two years but he became a lifelong kind of mentor. His name was David

Tucker and he put me into the leadership roles of the Jazz Ensemble and he

was just a great coach as far as running that organization. So he was a letter of

recommendation. One of my mom’s friends from Kansas dad it turns out was

one of the early deans of the Harvard Business School. So she had me come

out to Rossmoor and go spend an hour with him. So I put a little tie on and

went over there and talked about why I wanted to go to business school and he

wrote a letter of recommendation for me. So those were good. I had good

work credentials and I had a lot of involvement in stuff. And my GMAT

scores were okay.

So turns out my buddy Chris is on the admissions committee, because they

had students on the admissions committee, and he sees my application come

in. So he gives me the, “We got your application. It’s great. Everything looks

good, but you might want to think about taking the GMATs one more time.”

01-00:57:07

Geraci: You might want to get those scores up.

01-00:57:08

Johnston: Yeah, so I did. I went down and isolated myself, again studied, and moved

them thirty points or something. I think it was more. It was just enough or

whatever. So I got into Northwestern. I got into UCLA. I did not get into

Berkeley, which was kind of interesting, but I’ve sort of written that off as—I

always knew that at business schools they didn’t really want to have too many

people go from the undergrad program into the grad program. But on the other

hand, who knows?

01-00:57:37

Geraci: No, there’s that feeling of intellectual incest almost.

01-00:57:40

Johnston: Yeah.

01-00:57:41

Geraci: You want your students to move to different places.

19

01-00:57:43

Johnston: Yeah. And this is at a time when business schools are developing two year—

two years is the minimum work experience required. Let’s get people in there

who aren’t just—who have real work experience. So they were clearly looking

for diversity. I went down to visit UCLA. It was a good business school, had a

good program in marketing. But I went down there and it was, I don’t know,

let’s just say it was a winter month. I’m not precisely sure. And it was a

stunningly beautiful day and I’m walking around the UCLA campus and

everybody’s out on the lawn reading their books and it’s beautiful people out

on the lawn on a beautiful day and I looked at it and I said, “I can’t come

here.”

01-00:58:26

Geraci: It’s Southern California.

01-00:58:26

Johnston: I’m doing this to get myself ahead and to study and to focus. I know that when

I study I couldn’t study in my apartment. I had to go to the library. I know I

needed a cubicle. It was just my nature. I tend to be rather broadly distracted

with a lot of different things. I can’t do that. And furthermore, my buddy back

in Chicago, he said, “It’s great. It’s a great program.” And so I told my

parents. I said, “I’m going to graduate school.” As part of the application I got

enough student loans. I got it all on loans basically. I had some two percent

loans and some eight percent loans. And at that time it was $8,400 a year in

tuition, which was a lot given that I had come through Cal. But everybody

said, “Ah, you just get the loans and starting salaries coming out. You’re

coming in making $13,000 a year, you’ll come out at an average salary of

twenty-five, twenty-six thousand and so it doesn’t take too long to pay off the

loans.” And it just all kind of, “Yeah, I’m ready for this challenge.” And Sam

was ecstatic when I got into Northwestern, which is now called Kellogg. But

he was thrilled. And they threw me a big party. They gave me a little

keychain, which I still have today, that says, “California’s Best” on it, partly

because the division was Macy’s California but also because we would always

all get together and talk about how California was great. So anyway, I have

now spent three years at Macy’s. I was in three different jobs there.

01-01:00:12

Geraci: We’re at a perfect point to stop, just finishing with the Macy’s there.

01-01:00:15

Johnston: Great, okay.

[End Audio File 1]

[Begin Audio File 2]

02-00:00:00

Geraci: Gotcha, okay. This is Vic Geraci. Today’s date is Tuesday, February 15, 2011.

Seated with me is Tyler Johnston. This is interview number one, tape number

20

two. When we left off we were talking about business school. Let’s try this

again.

02-00:00:16

Johnston: Okay. So I left the Macy’s career after three years and three different—three

different positions. Packed everything in my rundown Toyota Corona,

everything I owned, and drove back to Chicago to start business school. I

think it’s probably time to put this thing out in the open, which is as I thought

about it, I’ve been motivated a lot of my life by essentially—not necessarily

an abundance of confidence, but kind of the other side of that. A wonder of

whether I could make it or not. So I think everything I’ve joined, unlike

maybe lots of captains of industry who might project that they were ready to

conquer everything, almost everything I’ve joined I’ve had many moments of,

“I’m not sure I’m going to be able to cut this.” And that was true in college

and that was true in the transfer to Berkeley. It was absolutely true at Macy’s.

And frankly, it was true all the way through my career. So that’s how I was

feeling when I was driving across the country. I’m going into an environment

where there’s now going to be a whole lot of smart people with good

experience in a high—and I was presuming a highly competitive environment,

and I hope I can cut it. That’s honestly what I felt. The fact that I had a

roommate back there that was thriving in the program helped a bit. But a fair

amount of anxiety. But that’s always been more motivating than demotivating.

It’s never gotten me to the point of not giving it a shot. It’s more probably that

I’m going to work really hard at it.

02-00:02:19

Geraci: But isn’t that a normal or a natural thing?

02-00:02:22

Johnston: I’ve met people who certainly project a different approach, who aren’t as

maybe—who certainly appear to be, “Hey, I’m going to go take that on and I

can do it. I’m positive I can do it.” And that certainly is a path to success. I

think it’s put me in a situation where I tended to work harder. It becomes self-

fulfilling in that the concern about am I going to succeed or not gets you into

an environment of saying, “I’m going to work that much harder at it.” So I

studied a lot in school. I worked hard at it. I took it pretty seriously. So I think

maybe it’s more natural but it certainly has been a thread throughout

everything I’ve taken on. There’s times it can really get in the way because

there’s times you need to walk in a room without that in your head so that you

don’t trip yourself up, in a way.

02-00:03:21

Geraci: Right.

02-00:03:22

Johnston: And I think I got pretty decent at that over time. Board presentations and

things like that, or presentations in front of 500 people. I would always project

21

that I was quite calm, even though probably prior to I was quite, quite

nervous.

So packed everything in the car, drove across, rang up my buddy. I said,

“Let’s go get a beer.” And he said, “Well, you’re in Evanston now. We have

to go to a restaurant because you have to buy three dollars worth of food in

order to have alcohol.” That was something I didn’t research at that time.

02-00:03:57

Geraci: [laughter] That can get expensive every time you want a beer.

02-00:04:03

Johnston: Yeah. Oh, god. So that’s Evanston. It’s different today, but that was Evanston

back then. Because I was from out of state, I was staying in this dorm. The

school did not have enough housing for the business school, so they had an

arrangement with a women’s—well, it wasn’t a women’s. It was called the

National College of Education, which is also in Evanston. They had a dorm

that they insisted be segregated women and men, but they only had—they had

80 percent of their student body were women, so they could never fill the

men’s side of the dorm and they’d rent out the third floor of this dorm to

business school students. I only bring that up because I’m now out on my

own. I’m away from college, I’ve lived in my own apartment for three years.

I’ve been working on my own. And now I go back into a dorm environment in

a Midwestern college, basically, with rules that we’re going to inspect the

rooms and there’s no alcohol allowed. You can’t go over to the women’s side

of the dorm and you’re kind of saying, “What?” But that created, again, a nice

little community of all of us from out of state who had the same reaction of,

“You’ve got to be kidding?” because they’ve all been off working and living.

02-00:05:19

Geraci: And especially for a business school.

02-00:05:20

Johnston: Right.

02-00:05:21

Geraci: You have to have a few years experience as part of your résumé.

02-00:05:24

Johnston: Right, right. So it was a bit of a paradox as to where we were living. But I

walked into the program for the first—this wasn’t quite the chemistry thing in

college but I was—walked in in my bellbottom Levi or jeans, some kind of

jeans, and my KNBR t-shirt and the admissions director said, “You must be

Tyler,” because I think they’d admitted maybe four people from California,

and by process of elimination we stood out. And my wife tells me the story of

still seeing me dressed that way. So I was insisting I was going to dress as a

Californian even though I was now in Evanston, the land of button down

collars and crew neck sweaters and khaki pants.

22

But I jumped into the program. It’s a two year full-time program. Because of

my undergraduate degree in business, I could pass out of a couple of classes,

of the introductory marketing classes. I didn’t elect to do that in many cases,

because I had a feeling that whatever I was about to go through was—maybe

it was good remedial and it was going to be at a much higher level. And I just

fell into it. The program was intense. Very, very stimulating and a great group

of people. Today, just to reflect on it, I do a lot of recruiting for Kellogg. I’m

on many boards back there. But quite honestly, if I was in trouble and needed

to call, I had the chance to call ten people, six or seven of them would be

classmates of mine from that experience who I’ve stayed close friends with,

and the others would be from Dreyer’s. So that would be my bail me out call

list.

02-00:07:23

Geraci: Yeah, help.

02-00:07:26

Johnston: Again, it is highly stimulating because you’re immediately in a class with

sixty people in your section and now everybody wants to do well and you see

all sorts of behavior. You see the kids who are naturally just really bright who

maybe don’t have to work that hard at it. You see the ones who want to sit in

the front row. I was probably more of a back row, back third of the

auditorium, but then once I got in the rhythm of it, I’m going to raise my hand

and start asking questions.

In passing out of the introductory class, I jumped into a second year class in

marketing, a class generally reserved for second year students. My advisor at

the time was the professor that taught this class. It was an advertising class.

He talked through my background and he let me into the class. So as a first

year student, first quarter—yeah, first quarter, maybe second quarter—I’m

taking advertising. Today he’s still a long-time friend of mine, I teach and I

lecture and give ice cream cases in his classes. But a fantastic experience

because now I was in with kind of the big kids right away and I started to see

that I had, in fact—the experience I had at Macy’s, plus my interest in the

subject matter put me in reasonably good shape to compete, in a sense of

competing on ideas.

Northwestern is built on group work, what differentiates it. The school

experience is that almost from the time you get there you’re in teams and

small groups and your grade is the group grade, regardless of the class. That

could often be an accounting class or a finance class. Certainly true in

marketing. Secondly, it was a real strong marketing department. Almost

everybody that was there was tops in their field. This is thirty years ago now.

And it was gaining the reputation of being the thought leader in the country

relative to marketing. So fantastic experience. Sort of in the crucible and

working hard with a lot of students.

23

You very quickly start to get into what do you want to do for a living? Kind of

what do you want to do coming out the other end. I wanted to go there to put

the clutch in a little bit and think about do I want to go back to the retailing

business or is there something else? What is this brand management thing?

And I started to think that’s probably where I wanted to head. At that time,

Kellogg was putting most of the market—most of the majors were in

marketing, the majority of the school. The top of the list of majors would be

marketing majors and the majority of those folks were going into brand

management. You very quickly learned that you need not only to go to

graduate school, you need to go to post-graduate school. Post-graduate school

is get a job with General Foods, Proctor & Gamble, General Mills, maybe

Frito Lay, and go to one of those kind of academy companies to learn brand

management.

But I had other interests that developed. I really liked advertising. I liked

studying it, thinking about it. I liked the creative aspect of it. I hadn’t given up

on the retailing business, but my major thrust in that first year was immerse

myself, try to visit—hit as many presentations as possible from companies,

and naturally start to build some really, really great friendships. That group

work, though, teaches you, if you didn’t know it coming in, immediately

about, again, human behavior, sociology, under pressure in a work

environment. It models what business is all about. You very quickly learn that

you don’t have to bring all the skills to the table. You learn that you want

diversity around the table of ideas. You learn that you’ve got to deliver. You

have people depending on you to get it done. And through trial and error you

have fit issues that work well and fit issues that just like, hey, I just can’t work

with that person very well, which is a fantastic repeated pattern for two years

that sets you up.

02-00:12:17

Geraci: It’s simulated real life.

02-00:12:19

Johnston: It’s simulated real life in business, and particularly in the marketing business

where you’re constantly working in teams and working through others or with

others. And I found that my retailing experience was pretty good. I could raise

my hand and speak with some authority about what I’d been doing. One of the

other professors there, who was probably the toughest professor in the school,

in marketing, taught a class in channels of distribution, which in effect was

retail environment. He and I hit it off pretty well because I came out of

retailing.

I got through the first quarter. I remember going to the O’Hare airport and

meeting up with some classmates, we’re all going home, it’s my first time

home, and thinking I got through it. My grades were okay. Certainly okay

enough. I struggled a little bit in accounting. That won’t surprise anybody.

Struggled a bit in statistics but on the other hand, the strategy classes and the

24

advertising class and those were falling into. Those seemed to be in my

wheelhouse, so to speak. But more importantly, in December I said, “I’m

going to make it through this.”

And so I came back in January that first year and really ramped up and just

had a great experience overall, leading into the summer where everybody gets

paranoid about internships even then. Today it’s worse. You have to land a

summer job. So I’m thinking I want to go into brand management, I think. I

look at this field and I say, “These are big diversified consumer products

companies.” You work in teams and the promise is that you’ll be the center of

the hub of the wheel. You’ll be the brand manager and packaging and

advertising. You’re work on all the slices of the pie. I have fun with that

today. I’m actually going to give a speech to alumni of Kellogg in a chief

marketing officers series in a few weeks and I’ve titled it, Who Told You You

were Going to be the Hub of the Wheel, because I think later you learn that

that metaphor is semi-accurate. But it looked really fun. Although the

companies, none of them were in the West Coast. Clorox was out here but the

big ones—I want to go to the big one. I want to get in post-graduate work at

one of the prime marketing houses. So once again, regardless of what

paranoia, I was going to set the goal of that’s where I wanted to go, even

though it meant I’m not coming home probably.

But in the summer, General Mills, as an example, which will hire ten Kellogg

graduates into their class at the end of two years, is going to have one

internship. So then I go, “I got to have that internship,” because if you get that

internship, and if you do well, you get a job offer right then and then you’re

set for your second year because you start from—so all of this starts to build

up. Well, the reality is I didn’t get that. I wanted to get it and I interviewed

hard for it and I did reasonably well in the interview. But no, I didn’t get that

one job.

But it turns out retailing companies were very interested in me, not

surprisingly, because now I have three years in retailing. And a grocery store

chain in Chicago named Jewel were hiring lots of MBAs, had good

connections with the university, and they had some internships. And I did get

that. So that meant I was staying in Chicago for the summer, which ended up

being a blast because to go through the winter you need to celebrate in the

summer. I realized that this is fantastic. This is just another layer of learning.

I’m going to work at a retailer in food. If I want to go into brand management,

that’s their customer. So that experience is going to be valuable. But in and of

itself it was pretty interesting.

I had a fantastic summer experience. Of course, I have just been really lucky

with some of the bosses, many of the bosses that I’ve had. So I was paired

with this guy who had gone to the night program at Northwestern. He was an

up and coming razor sharp guy in the merchandising group and he had this

project for me to work on. And the project dealt with inventory in the stores

25

and it meant I was going to be out in the stores three days a week and in the

office two days a week. So out in the stores meant I have one of my great

moments of, again, being thrown into some difficult situations because of that.

Because you came out from the corporate office and I remember walking in. I

was going to go into one of this guy’s stores. They had these sort of

lieutenants who managed groups of stores and they were all real tough

merchants in the food business. They’re constantly having vendors coming

into stores.

But I remember meeting with this guy and going out to meet him and I wore a

long sleeve shirt. Went out and had my meeting and he looks at me and he

goes, “Let me just tell you, you don’t wear long sleeve shirts when you’re out

in the stores. We all wear short sleeve shirts.” Because that was the policy in

the grocery. It’s white, short sleeved shirts. This is late seventies in the

grocery business. This guy was tough. His name is Phil Brice. Somehow in

that conversation—it started really ugly—we found a common place and I

found I could kind of tame him. He ended up being a real good pal. I liked

those guys, those sort of salty, tough guys who maybe have seen a hundred of

you come along and you try to figure out how to work with them.

So I had those experiences out in the stores. It got me all around Chicago,

which was cool, because I had to go to stores everywhere in the tough—

02-00:18:42

Geraci: So you learned the city?

02-00:18:44

Johnston: Tough parts of the south side and some of the north side. I could see the

segmentation that was going on. I could see the differences in the business.

But mainly I’d come back and have my mentor guy working with me. And

this all would lead up to a presentation to the senior management. And, of

course, they’re looking for people to come into their training program, so

you’re going to meetings, you’re meeting the executives and you do have a

meeting with the president of the company. So I had a meeting with the then

president of Jewel. I remember getting ready for that. I guess somewhere

along the line I learned how to ask decent questions. I had a lunch meeting

with him and I asked him what the difference was between a great manager

and a great leader. I guess I just hit a zone of a subject matter that he had been

thinking a lot about. He pulled out a book that he had been reading on the

subject. He said, “That’s a fantastic question,” and he went in to a twenty

minute answer. And then I came back down to cubicle and then the next day

that books shows up signed by the president of the company with, “I just

really enjoyed the conversation,” blah, blah, blah. The secretary of the

department goes, “Boy, it’s not every day people get books from the president

around here.” So it was a fantastic experience and the guy I’m working with,

Greg Josefowicz later in life becomes the head of Jewel. So the joke at

Dreyer’s for many years was that I was connected with one grocer, who

26

happened to be a key customer, and there happens to be an interesting story

about what happened in Chicago where I called on that relationship. But I was

very fortunate. Greg went on. He was an extremely bright guy. But I was a

kid—

02-00:20:43

Geraci: Do you remember what the book was?

02-00:20:44

Johnston: —working with him. No. It wasn’t one of the standard leadership books. It

wasn’t like a Bennis or one of those. I don’t remember the title of it now.

Actually, I should have it somewhere.

So a good summer experience and at the end of that summer Jewel gave me a

job offer, and a very good one. So I ended up kind of walking back into the

second year of business school with an offer, which was a very calming thing.

I wasn’t sure I was going to take it because I wasn’t sure that was the program

that I wanted to go through. But what it did is it said, “You ought to interview

also maybe back in the retailing business and not just reject it out of hand

based on your prior experience.”

So the second year is almost all about you get to take a lot of classes in your

major, but you’re also heavily involved in recruiting. And I interviewed

broadly in brand management, which was still my major orientation, with

General Mills as my top three [places] where I wanted to go. They were

diversified as a company. They were informal. I remember that. Proctor &

Gamble was still very formal. General Mills, you called everybody by their

first name and you took your coats off in the meetings. Those cues said it’s a

more informal environment, even though it’s still a big formal company. I

interviewed in retailing. Short circuited. I got involved in a bunch of stuff, too,

at school, case competitions, and worked on a case project, a case competition

for General Motors in marketing. We got to meet all the chairmen of General

Motors and go up to the executive dining room in Detroit, pitch our

advertising ideas. So a lot of fun and very stimulating. I ended up with offers

in retailing from Jewel, from Target stores up in Minneapolis, from Levi

Strauss back out here in San Francisco and then in brand management quite a

few: Frito Lay, McNeil Consumer Products, which is the Tylenol part of

Johnson & Johnson. I had a fantastic recruiting experience with them in that

the vice president or chairman of McNeil at that time, named Ralph Larsen,

just liked me. When I told him I wasn’t going to join them, flew out

personally to take Melanie and I out to dinner at the top of the Hancock

Building in Chicago to try to change my mind. Ralph Larsen went on to be the

CEO of Johnson & Johnson. And he was a really quality guy. So fun contacts

along the way. There’s a couple others in there I’m forgetting, but I had an

offer from General Mills.

27

An important part of the story. I met my wife, Melanie, I met her at the end of

my first year of business school. She was in the graduate program of

journalism at Northwestern. So we started to date at the end of the summer,

middle of summer, and then throughout my second year. So then my

recruiting view suddenly needed to change from one career to two and that

was a real hot topic at that time, of dual careers and how does one manage—

02-00:24:48

Geraci: How do you manage those?

02-00:24:49

Johnston: Yeah. There were people at companies that we knew that were living in

different cities, because that was kind of popular at the time to try to solve it

that way. There were many couples being formed in business school who

suddenly had that in the mix, and I did, as well. She is just starting a career,

getting into the copy-writing—wanting to get into the copy-writing side of

advertising and Chicago is a beautiful place for that. And I’m sort of saying,

“General Mills is my top opportunity and it’s really where I want to go,” in

Minneapolis.

So I had several offers. I had six or seven offers, which is obviously a

fantastic place to be, and to be able to evaluate all of that. And what became

most difficult was the dual career. What do I do? So I did interview in

Chicago, not only with Jewel but I also interviewed in advertising and I had

an offer from Needham, Harper & Steers in advertising, which went on to be

today DDB Needham and Omnicom is now the company. But I did it initially

because I did like advertising. I wasn’t sure that’s where I wanted to go. I

wanted a bigger part of the pie. I wanted to be the hub of the big wheel, not

just a slice of the pie. But I also thought I needed a Chicago option. As we got

into the decisionmaking, and I remember at General Mills I got that offer and

I was just elated, but it became much more difficult to weigh that and to think

about going to Minneapolis because the advertising business there was way

underdeveloped and it wasn’t going to be a place Melanie was necessarily

happy about going.

So put that all into the mix and go through it. I made a decision and the

decision was to stay in Chicago and go to advertising. I made that decision

and immediately obviously had all of the buyer’s remorse on that, which

Melanie, of course, was with me all the steps of the way on that decision.

While she was momentarily happy about that, she could see the

disappointment. I remember General Mills just being somewhat shocked

because I for so long cultivated them.

02-00:27:26

Geraci: This had been your goal for so long.

28

02-00:27:29

Johnston: Yeah, yeah. So the only time in my career that ever happened but it did

happen and Melanie basically, within a matter of a couple of weeks, said,

“You’re miserable with this thing,” and she offered to call the guy at General

Mills who was one of the division managers who is the key recruiting guy and

say I was miserable with this decision and if he changed his mind would that

still be there? And they said, “Yes.” Interestingly, the agency, Needham, that I

had chosen to join, who was shocked when I said yes, was a General Mills

agency. So that got a little interesting. But I called them back up and I said I

changed my mind. The reality is they were disappointed. They sort of shared

that they were surprised that I made the call initially and they were very

gracious about it, partially because they had to be because I was now going to

go become a client of theirs in Minneapolis. So it was tough, for all of the

planning and all of the thinking about it. Obviously things come into the mix

that are very different and change the priorities.

So we rewired it and I said yes to General Mills. It all happened probably

within two or three weeks but it was certainly frowned upon, obviously, by

the