“All you have to do is smell. Things just start jumping out at you.”

Managers, he frequently repeated, do things right—while leaders do the right thing. “My mandate in these jobs has never been to be Mr. Popularity.”

“I mean this guy’s a general. He’s like Patton,” Ackman said. “And running a railroad is like running an army, right?” Harrison had made the same reference about Bill Thompson, his mentor.

Nobody can bullshit him,” said Hargrove in 2017. “Not the management, not the union, not the workers.” Harrison knew their jobs. That gave him credibility in the field, but it also created angst among employees.

The flip side of the railroad genius was dismissiveness and distaste for corporate protocol. Harrison had little patience for boards. Put simply, they were a pain, a waste of time and money. They didn’t increase shareholder value or improve the operating ratio (OR), the key metric for a railroad that’s constantly scrutinized by investors.

He didn’t necessarily want the smartest people in the world, he wanted the hardest working people in the world. “Y’all take the technology and give me the good worker and I’ll beat you to death,” he told them.

Thompson asked him how much time he spent developing people. “About 10 percent of my time,” Harrison said. “You’ve got it all backwards. You should be spending 80 percent of your time coaching and teaching and 20 percent on all the other stuff. If you spend your time developing people, you won’t have to be running everywhere.”

When asked, however, if competitors would up their game and perhaps try to copy what he was doing, he said they could buy the books he’d written at CN. “[They’re each] on eBay for a thousand dollars,” he cracked,

An extra store of energy is one of the defining characteristics of the CEO. They can go fourteen hours a day, seven days a week for months on end, with calendars that would induce anxiety attacks in the rest of us.