Nolan D. Archibald

The Chicago Bulls invited Nolan Archibald to try out in 1969 and again in 1970, and the Pittsburgh Pipers of the American Basketball Association offered him a contract that second year. He chose a Harvard MBA instead, finishing in 1970. It was not an obvious call. At Dixie State College in St. George, Utah, he had been an All-American who took the team to the national junior college finals in Hutchinson, Kansas, and more than 50 universities recruited him. At Weber State under coach Dick Motta he was all-conference, Scholar Athlete of the Year in 1968, one of fifteen Division I players out of 4,000 named Academic All-American, and a starter on the school's first NCAA tournament team. He graduated cum laude. In 1993 the National Association of Basketball Coaches put him on its Silver Anniversary NCAA All-American team alongside Elvin Hayes, the only Weber State player ever so honored.

The business apprenticeship ran through Beatrice, the Chicago conglomerate, where he ended up running consumer durables: Stiffel lamps, Samsonite luggage, Aristokraft kitchen cabinets. Black & Decker hired him as president and chief operating officer in September 1985 and made him chief executive in March 1986. At 42 he was the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

The defining decision came in 1989, and Wikipedia's editors call it near disastrous, which is about right. Archibald outbid rivals for Emhart Corporation, a maker of fasteners and industrial hardware, at $2.8 billion, and paid for it with borrowed money. Black & Decker, a Towson, Maryland company founded in September 1910, was suddenly carrying debt it could service only if something new sold very well. That something turned out to be DeWalt. Black & Decker had owned the DeWalt name since 1960, when it bought the radial-arm saw maker, and in 1992 it relaunched the brand as a line of yellow professional power tools aimed at contractors who would not be seen with a homeowner's drill. The profits from that launch covered the Emhart debt, and DeWalt went on to become the largest professional and industrial power tool brand in the world; by 2012 power tools were three-quarters of the company's revenue. The pattern, a bet that looks reckless until the product arrives, earned Archibald the American Marketing Association's Edison Achievement Award for marketing and product innovation, a place among Business Week's top six managers in the United States, and a spot on Fortune's list of the ten most wanted executives, none of which the record dates. He stayed 24 years, the last chief executive Black & Decker ever had. By the time the Stanley merger closed he was the second longest-serving CEO among the thousand largest U.S. companies not controlled by a founding family, a statistic that says as much about board patience in Towson as about him. Nobody outside the company has published a full accounting of the Emhart years, and the Wikipedia entry cites a governance case study with a title too colorful to repeat without reading it, which I could not. The safe summary: a $2.8 billion mistake, a $1 billion brand, and two decades of the board deciding the second cancelled the first.

Stanley Works and Black & Decker announced their combination on November 3, 2009. It was an all-stock deal, 1.275 Stanley shares for each Black & Decker share, a 22.1 percent premium on the October 30 close and an enterprise value of about $4.5 billion. Former Stanley holders would own 50.5 percent of the merged company, former Black & Decker holders 49.5 percent. The pro forma revenue was $8.4 billion (2009 estimate), the promised cost savings $350 million a year by the third year, with $400 million of one-time integration costs and a target of $1 billion in free cash flow in year three.

John Lundgren of Stanley became president and chief executive of Stanley Black & Decker. Archibald became executive chairman for three years. He gave up $20.5 million in severance that would have been due to him for losing the CEO job in a change of control and took instead a $1.5 million salary, a bonus of up to $1.9 million a year, stock awards, and a cost-synergy bonus of up to $45 million if the merger savings hit their targets. The Baltimore Sun reported the arrangement in November 2009 alongside a $35.5 million pension and a $15.7 million supplemental retirement balance, and in March 2012 reported his 2011 compensation at $64.4 million, $44.1 million of it pension payouts, with the $45 million payout scheduled for 2013. Towson's 250 corporate staff were the people most likely to lose their jobs in the combination. Archibald's line on the announcement call: "I am very pleased to be part of this historic combination."

Youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 at 42; second longest-serving by 2010.

The directorships are the long-tenure kind. Twenty-four years on the board of Brunswick Corporation, 17 at Lockheed Martin, where he was lead director, lead director for many years at Huntsman Corporation, plus ITT and the Johns Hopkins University trustees. He served on the board of the Associates of the Harvard Business School and on the board of the NCAA's coaches' association, the same body that put him on its anniversary team.

About the Latter-day Saint side of his life the public record is thin. He sits on BYU's Presidents Leadership Council and the Marriott School's National Advisory Council, and the Church News profiled him on April 28, 2007, but that profile is not online in a form I could check and Wikipedia says nothing about a mission or congregational service. If you want to know whether the faith shaped the way he ran a tool company for 24 years, nobody has published the interview.