Few executives can say they've grabbed the reins of a struggling company and turned it around. But Charles P. "Buzz" McCormick Jr. has done it -- twice -- with the company that bears his family name.

Not many, including McCormick himself, would have predicted this success. For starters, during a self-described "rebellious" period in his teens, McCormick vowed that he would do something other than work for the company his great-uncle had founded and his father had run.

That feeling was short-lived. But even when he decided to make McCormick & Co. his career, Buzz McCormick didn't expect to one day run the world's largest spice maker.

His big break came when the company, on McCormick's advice, bought a small California firm that made vitamin-pill bottles, and sent him to the West Coast to run it.

"I wasn't on a track to become either president or CEO," McCormick recalled recently at the company's headquarters in Sparks. "What changed things was the little company we bought in California. We turned it around and moved it and got it going and built a new plant, and -- I guess -- were perceived as having done a pretty good job. But if that hadn't happened, I never would have been president, no doubt in my mind. There's luck involved -- in life, in business, in sports, in everything."

On Wednesday, at the company's annual meeting in Hunt Valley, McCormick, who will be 71 in May, will retire for the second time Wednesday, using the company's annual meeting in Hunt Valley to pass the chairman's title to Robert J. Lawless, the company's president and chief executive officer.

In some ways, the transfer of the chairmanship is more symbolic than substantive: It's the CEO who runs the company day to day and who is the executive Wall Street watches and evaluates.

Lawless, analysts and McCormick say, has done a fine job since taking the CEO's post Jan. 1, 1997. Indeed, it's been his company. But it was McCormick who steered the firm through two tumultuous periods and probably ensured that it remained a Baltimore-area concern, analysts say.

"I think he's done a good job of seeing the company through a difficult time," said Jeff Metzger, a veteran food-industry analyst who is the publisher of Food World, a trade journal based in Columbia. "Buzz has always impressed us."

Of medium build, with grizzled sideburns, cheeks one could describe as rosy, a quick smile and hearty laugh, McCormick speaks in the accent of his hometown Baltimore. Once an ardent Colts football fan, he installed DirectTV at his Florida home so he could watch the Ravens.

"I just hope they do better," he said. "It's frustrating."

He's also an avid yachtsman, having raced sailboats in the Chesapeake Bay for 25 years before quitting when he hoisted anchor to move to California. In retirement, he intends to race again.

"He loves to win," said Jack W. Felton, McCormick & Co.'s retired vice president of communications. "When I first knew him, he was competitively racing sailboats in Annapolis -- and winning."

Butit is as McCormick & Co.'s turnaround king that he made his mark.

When McCormick was named president and CEO on Feb. 16, 1987, some outsiders weren't expecting the younger McCormick to match the legacies of the first two family members to run the company -- his great-uncle and company founder, Willoughby McCormick, and subsequently his father, Charles P. McCormick Sr.

Any skepticism was likely due to the many years it had been since a McCormick was charged with the company's daily business.

But when it came to Buzz McCormick, the skeptics were wrong.

Company history is a key to understanding the executive, since he clearly revels in his father's accomplishments and loves the strong corporate culture McCormick & Co. exudes even today. That history taught lessons.

From the stories about Willoughby McCormick, his great-nephew learned how not to treat people.

'Mr. Willoughby'

Referred to as "Mr. Willoughby" by some employees and the "Old Man" by others, he was a charitable, church-going man outside work.

But in the office, Willoughby McCormick, who started the company in 1889 at age 25, was like many company presidents of the time: autocratic, penurious and not well-versed in the art of human relations.

Several times a day, Willoughby McCormick would leave his office for a brisk trip through the plant to make sure production was moving; to dodge his ire, workers concocted signals -- banging on steam pipes or jangling the telephone -- to warn everyone that the Old Man was out and about.

Employees "worked so hard making him think we looked good" that "we just had to let down the rest of the day," an employee of the time wrote.

Buzz McCormick, who was only 4 when Willoughby died, remembers meeting him just once, in his great-uncle's apartment.

Charles P. McCormick Sr. was only 36 when he succeeded his Uncle Willoughby in 1932 -- amid the Great Depression -- after the founder's abrupt death on a trip to New York where he was hoping to raise money to help the foundering company. The firm was bleeding, production and morale were down, costs were up and an employee's work week approached 60 hours.

"There had been seven nephews in the company, in and out," Buzz McCormick said. "He had quit or been fired four times, I think, and come back every time. He respected his uncle for his business acumen, but he didn't respect him for the way he treated people."

The Old Man had slashed wages twice and was planning a third cut when he died. When Charles Sr. took the helm, he reversed course, boosting wages 10 percent and cutting the work week -- while telling workers that everyone had to work as a team to keep the company from failing.

Outsiders thought he was crazy and would bankrupt the company. But McCormick's common touch was the foundation for the sense of loyalty and history still seen among McCormick & Co. workers.

Consider, for example, the stone from its old Baltimore building now above the main doorway of its Sparks headquarters; it's inscribed "2 for 1."

The message: If workers think twice about the company and once for themselves, the company will think once for itself and twice for the workers.

Human relations pro

Charles Sr. proved a master at human relations, anticipating by decades currently embraced management techniques.

In the 1930s and 1940s, he established a form of participatory management by setting up "junior boards" of lower-level managers who engaged in problem-solving and made work-improvement suggestions. Corporate America didn't embrace worker participation until the management "revolution" of the '80s and '90s.

He made his views widely available by writing several books, including one titled, not surprisingly, "The Power of People." He served as chairman and president from November 1932 to December 1955, as chairman of the board until August 1969, and was chairman emeritus when he died in 1970.

Birth of a nickname

Charles P. McCormick Jr. owes the company for a lasting piece of his identity. When he was born in 1928, a nurse in the hospital christened him "Buzz" -- a joking reference to a McCormick & Co. product line called the "Bee" brand.

But the name stuck.

Today, even low-level workers address him as "Buzz," acknowledging his informality, said George V. McGowan, retired chairman of Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. and longtime McCormick & Co. board member.

Buzz McCormick says he remained close with his father even after his parents separated when he was about 13. The two saw one another at least twice a week, often on Saturdays, when Charles Sr. would take his son to a downtown health club run by a former boxer.

His dad would "teach me a little boxing, and how to take a cold shower when I got finished -- one day I was halfway out the door when they said, no, I had to take off my clothes and take a cold shower, and then we used to go to lunch," Buzz says, chuckling at the memory.

Employees say Buzz McCormick displays the same warmth his father was said to have; receptionists and secretaries comment on how "kind" or "sweet" the outgoing chairman is.

"One thing he tried to do was to instill the belief in people that his father had started," said Theodore F. Foti Jr., a retired director of marketing. "He worked very hard to carry that tradition through."

He's also regarded highly for his business acumen.

"I would say that Buzz is a very wise man," said McGowan, the board member. "He has continued -- in my estimation -- to exercise very sound judgment."

Even while living in Florida, McCormick remains an excellent resource for advice, said Lawless, the McCormick & Co. CEO.

Buzz McCormick attended a small school and grew up in Guilford "not feeling any different than anybody else." He worked some summers at the company, once in the "samples" department, mailing out teapots McCormick customers could buy. Another time he worked to make the "iron glue" the company sold at the time that was made from fish byproducts.

"It was a good glue, but it smelled," he said.

He graduated from Friends School and studied business administration at Johns Hopkins and Duke universities. But McCormick preferred the company to the classroom and left before graduating.

"The whole time (I was at school) I couldn't wait to get back to the company," he said.

In 1949, when the firm had $22 million in sales and was housed in one building downtown, he joined it full time. Last year, the company recorded sales of $1.88 billion.

McCormick spent some time in human resources, and moved on to product and brand management for spices and extracts, with an emphasis on developing new products. In those days, a grocery store shelf might have but 25 McCormick products on it. Today, the company makes thousands of products.

Through the years, he held a number of other posts, mostly involving product management or development.

Eventually, McCormick became a vice president in charge of corporate development, focusing chiefly on acquisitions.

In 1981, he encouraged the company to buy a California business called Setco Inc., which made plastic bottles. At the time, vitamins were sold mostly in glass bottles, but the industry was trying to shift over to plastic. When Setco's former owner, who had stayed on to run the business, had heart problems, McCormick went out to run it "temporarily." That lasted six years.

McCormick returned to Baltimore in 1987 to become president and CEO under Chairman Harry K. Wells, while Bailey A. Thomas was elevated to executive vice president and chief operating officer.

The two men had different backgrounds -- McCormick came up through the consumer business, while Thomas was a veteran of the industrial food-service business -- but they found they were kindred spirits and became a legendary team.

One of McCormick's first acts was to ask all his managers to drop him a note detailing one or two things that would make the company better. He selected about eight or 10 of the best ideas and kept them on his desk as reminders of what must be done.

Thomas and McCormick also looked at some of the struggling businesses and assigned the best managers to these problem children, which were aggressively fixed.

"I focused on these things and very little else," McCormick said. "If Bailey wasn't part of the team, I couldn't have gotten away with it."

Thomas also pulled off zany stunts that made McCormick howl.

Once, at a sales force gathering, Thomas came in dressed as Willoughby, and chastised the workers for all the "changes" -- profit sharing and company-paid health insurance.

(Today a quarter of the company's shares is held by an employee profit-sharing plan.) Then he slowly peeled off his costume, revealing a Batman outfit, and exhorted the troops to perform.

In a five-year stretch after Buzz McCormick rose to CEO and subsequently chairman, he and Thomas undertook a drastic restructuring plan that propelled McCormick & Co.'s shares skyward sixfold, with three stock splits -- a startling performance for a company in the slow-growth food industry.

At the time, the firm had a very successful real estate business. But that unit was a drag on the company's stock, both executives felt.

Their reasoning?

Wall Street couldn't decide what to make of the company. Food analysts viewed it as a spice company with a real estate business, while real estate analysts viewed it as a property company with a spice business, McCormick said.

Their fear was that, with a stock price at about half of what McCormick and Thomas thought it should be, a corporate raider could take over the company, sell off the real estate at the top-dollar prices of the day and end up with the spice-and-seasonings business at a bargain-basement cost.

Despite some urgings to sell the spice business and stay in real estate, McCormick and Thomas opted to stick with the company's roots. They sold the real estate arm to Rouse Co. for peak value, taking in about a half-billion dollars, shortly before the real estate market collapsed -- yet another example of the "luck" that McCormick says is needed.

A chunk of the proceeds were used to buy back stock -- a key ingredient of the fuel that caused McCormick & Co.'s shares to skyrocket.

The McCormick-Thomas duo was so dynamic, the friendship so obvious and the results so startling that this five-year period is still known within McCormick & Co. as "the Buzz and Bailey Show."

"Everything went right for us during those five years; I can't think of anything that didn't go right," McCormick said.

Said McGowan, the McCormick & Co. board member: "He made up his mind to divest [the company] of its real estate business, and then went ahead and did something about it. Time turned out to be in his favor. He exercised a bit of wisdom moving ahead with that plan."

McCormick stepped down from active management -- with the title of "chairman emeritus" -- in January 1993. But on July 14, 1994, with McCormick in Florida looking forward to a visit from Thomas, by now an intimate friend, the other half of "The Buzz and Bailey Show" died of a heart attack.

Like an old but crafty reliever summoned from the bullpen to save the game, Buzz McCormick was called back to become chairman again.

In the 18 months since he'd left, McCormick & Co.'s fortunes had gone from good to terrible. Several acquisitions flopped.

Worse, an industry upstart had launched a ruinous price war. The newcomer, Burns Philp & Co. of Australia, had sold its hardware business and used the money to snap up companies and product lines in McCormick & Co.'s spice-and-seasoning business. It was bidding for shelf space and market share.

"Burns Philp was carpet-bombing" the marketplace, said Food World's Metzger.

McCormick wanted the company's new CEO, H. Eugene Blattner, to tell Wall Street that McCormick & Co. intended to slash its prices to keep market share and that earnings would suffer as a result. Blattner, understandably, balked. Then Blattner began suffering from extreme fatigue due to heart problems, stepped down in October 1995, and McCormick subsequently donned the CEO's mantle once again.

Buzz delivered the bad news to Wall Street.

"I really came back to that premise that we were at war with our competitor and our first priority was to survive and win the war. And earnings per share, while still improving, would not be our first priority," he said.

After several years, McCormick & Co. won the price war, leaving Burns Philp nearly bankrupt.

"We never lost market share," McCormick said. "We're gaining market share today. In our consumer business -- our branded business -- we're really growing nicely."

McCormick in 1997 stepped out of the CEO role in favor of Lawless, an insider with crucial international experience. With him on the job, McCormick felt he could retreat to Florida, where he has been spending most of his time.

Lawless "is the perfect guy for us, in my opinion," McCormick said. "He's a real strategic thinker who's had exposure around the world I think he's the right leader for the future. He's done an excellent job."

Lawless, a friendly and competitive man who played senior-league hockey until he moved here from Canada, says McCormick has been an excellent colleague and teacher who's been available to bounce an idea off of or to consult with on a problem.

"He's been a wonderful mentor," Lawless said.

The future

As for the future, McCormick says he wants to get back into racing sailboats, something he did before he left for California to run the Setco bottle company. In his office, on one wall, is the framed cover of the March 1979 issue of Yachting magazine. The cover image: His sailboat, "Wham Bam," on its side with the sails in the water -- an embarrassing "knockdown" that McCormick finds amusing.

"We won a lot of races on the bay," he said, smiling.

He and his second wife, Jimi, are building a condo in Annapolis so that he can spend time here racing his newest boat, a 27-footer that's less demanding than the 36- to-38-footers he used to compete with. His younger son, Chris, who raced with him before, is mustering out the same crew that won so many races with Buzz on the bay.

There will be no more phone calls, no more board meetings and no McCormick atop the company's roster.

At least for now.

Another son, Charles "Chip" McCormick III, markets food products to the military for the company, while a half-brother, John, is working with McCormick & Co.'s joint venture in Japan.

Buzz McCormick says he doesn't know if another McCormick will ever head the company. But he left something behind: An eight-page letter to the board outlining the many lessons he learned during his years in the business.

"I'm just glad to have been a part of it," he said. "I feel very fortunate. I had a lot of luck, too."

Pub Date: 3/14/99