M. Anthony Burns

In the days after Hurricane Andrew came ashore in August 1992, the chairman and chief executive of a Fortune 500 company was on a roof with a repair crew. M. Anthony Burns was bishop of a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Miami at the time, and the storm had flattened much of his neighborhood. The company response ran in parallel: Ryder opened the lobby of its headquarters to United Way, lent trucks to families moving to drier ground, let employees split their days between the office and the relief effort, and, with Burns's approval, put $2.5 million into rebuilding Miami-Dade County. The American Red Cross named him its Humanitarian of the Year for that work.

It is the one episode where the two halves of his career, the executive and the lay clergyman, show up in the same frame. Wikipedia lists his church roles as bishop, stake president and, more recently, area seventy in the Sixth Quorum of the Seventy, an unpaid regional position. It does not say how those roles shaped his management, and neither does anything else I could find, so this profile stops at what happened.

Burns came to Ryder in 1974 from Mobil, where he had been comptroller for North America. He was 31, with a B.S. from Brigham Young University (1964) and an MBA from Berkeley's Haas School (1965), and before BYU a baseball scholarship at Dixie State College in St. George, Utah, now Utah Tech University. Ryder was then a truck leasing and rental company with about 50,000 vehicles and 13,000 employees in three countries. Five years later he was president and chief operating officer. The CEO title came in January 1983 and the chairmanship in May 1985.

The succession was planned in the open. Swienton came from Burlington Northern Santa Fe in June 1999 as president and chief operating officer, took the CEO title on November 1, 2000, and the chairmanship at the May 3, 2002 annual meeting. Burns, 58 at the handover, said: "My decision to retire at this time is part of an organized plan I have been discussing with the board for several years."

The growth figures are the ones Ryder itself uses. Revenue went from $500 million when Burns arrived to more than $5 billion when he left; the 2001 figure was $5.01 billion, good for 333rd on the Fortune 500. The fleet grew from about 50,000 vehicles to more than 170,000 for commercial leasing and rental, headcount from 13,000 to 30,000, and the map from three countries to more than a dozen on four continents. The bigger change was in kind. Ryder had been a truck company since Jim Ryder put $35 down on a Model A Ford in 1933, and it had passed $1 billion in revenue in 1978, four years after Burns arrived. By the company's own timeline, Ryder Distribution Services ran North America's first large-scale just-in-time supply delivery system in 1987, and Full Service Lease revenue passed $1.5 billion in 1989. Logistics, running a customer's supply chain rather than renting it trucks, became the second business. The company also shed something: the one-way consumer rental operation that had made the Ryder name familiar to anyone who ever moved apartments. Wikipedia dates the sale to Questor Partners to 1996 and notes that Questor sold the business on to Budget Truck Rental in June 1998; Ryder's own history page puts the exit at 1998. Either way, the consumer trucks went so the company could concentrate on commercial customers, and the company Swienton inherited was a leasing and logistics firm, not a rental counter. Whether the strategy holds up is a question for Ryder's later chief executives. On Burns's numbers alone, revenue rose about tenfold over 28 years, and the company he retired from was in the business it is still in today, with roughly 240,000 vehicles, about 320 warehouses and 42,000 employees on its current website.

Outside Ryder he collected the board seats that come with running a Fortune 500 company for eighteen years: JPMorgan Chase, J.C. Penney and Stanley Black & Decker, chairing the audit committee at each, plus Pfizer and Huntsman Corporation. He co-chaired the Business Roundtable and its health and retirement task force, sat on the boards of the United Way of America, the American Red Cross and the Boy Scouts of America, and is an honorary trustee and former chairman of the National Urban League.

Seventeen years chairing one capital campaign. $415 million raised.

The Miami civic work outlasted the job. Burns chaired the capital campaign for the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts for 17 years; it raised $415 million, more than $1 million of it his own. While at Ryder he steered company money into the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital and the Ryder Center arena at the University of Miami, and kept the company as title sponsor of the Doral Ryder Open golf tournament for 16 years. His name is on the University of Miami's M. Anthony Burns Center for Advanced Supply Chain Management, on the Burns Arena at Utah Tech, and on an endowed teaching chair at Miami Dade College.

After 2002 he went back to the Utah mountains. Burns is managing owner and chairman of Red Ledges, a private golf community in Heber City, Utah, and has endowed scholarships at Utah Tech (more than 100 awarded so far), at Wasatch High School in Heber City and at Virgin Valley High School in Mesquite, Nevada, where he was born on November 1, 1942. He carried the Olympic torch in 2002. Financial World once named him CEO of the decade in transportation, freight and leasing, and three times CEO of the year in the same category, awards whose dates nobody seems to record.