Assets: Led Vancouver Airport Authority human resources division during high-tension days as YVR management switched from a federal government operation to a stand-alone corporation
Yield: Under Berg’s watch, the annual passenger count at YVR has nearly doubled to 17 million, and it recently won best airport in North America at 2011’s World Airport Awards
Despite growing up by Canada’s largest air force base in Cold Lake, Alberta, doing a stint as an air cadet, having a pilot brother and sisters married to air force men, it took Larry Berg two earlier careers before he considered running an airport.
Berg now heads the Vancouver Airport Authority (VAA) as its president and CEO. The VAA this year celebrated Vancouver International Airport’s (YVR) 80th anniversary and won North America’s best airport category at the 2011 World Airport Awards.
Berg points to his experiences prior to running the VAA as key to helping him develop the skills that have contributed to the airport’s success.
With a bachelor of education from the University of Alberta, Berg taught high-school social sciences in Edmonton for four years before deciding to pursue a business career.
“My line is when I taught them all I knew, I quit,” he said with his characteristic dry wit.
Berg completed a master of science in business from the University of Oregon and worked as a personnel supervisor for a potash mine in Saskatchewan. He then landed the job that would hone the key skills he’d need for his VAA success: a labour relations role with Edmonton-based coal mining company Luscar Ltd.
It was the mid-1970s – a time of rapid expansion for coal companies. Berg said Luscar was selling metallurgical coal to Japan’s steel industry and thermo coal to Canadian provincial utilities to fuel power plants. It was also a heavily unionized corporation. The combination, Berg said, created a tense labour relations climate at Luscar.
“We were frequently starting new mines up, acquiring operations and in some cases, when the markets were difficult, downsizing operations as well. You were in a pretty hot kitchen at times.”
Berg added that the labour disputes and protracted strikes of that era taught him a lot about building a common culture and creating a shared vision between management and staff.
Achieving that, he said, involved a lot of time spent at remote mine sites from northern Alberta to northern B.C., working to bridge the gap between management and employees.
“You had to get out of the balcony and down on the dance floor and actually interact with people.”
Berg said his work at Luscar also taught him the value of running an efficient corporation, because the industry’s competitiveness and vulnerability to chronic commodity price volatility meant that only the best-run companies survived.
Inefficiency, he said, could be devastating.
“It could mean for any individual mine that you’re going into the community and telling the folks, ‘You know, there’s going to be 100 less of you people here next month than there are this month because we just lost a whole bunch of sales and there’s no work. You get that drilled into you in the mining business, so you realize that a) you don’t overstaff your people and b) you make sure that your costs are as low as you can make them and still maintain a high-quality product.”
Over Berg’s 17 years with Luscar, his job expanded to include administrative and corporate service responsibilities that led to his taking on the role of vice-president of human resources and administration.
In 1992, as the VAA prepared to assume YVR’s management from Transport Canada, Berg was headhunted for the position of vice-president of human resources.
He knew the HR part of the job well, but at VAA the position came with the unique challenges of turning a government bureaucracy into a stand-alone corporation – a change not all employees were keen on. Berg said an influx of outsiders, including him, increased employee misgivings.
“I was showing up from a coal mine in Alberta; that strikes fear into the hearts of people,” he quipped.
But Berg proved a great fit for the job, according to former Canadian foreign affairs minister David Emerson, who at the time was the VAA’s president and CEO.
Emerson described Berg as having a very dry sense of humour, good horse sense about people and “understated Prairie grit.”
“And he’s unflappable – he’s not a guy who gets overly excited, and he takes pressure well,” Emerson said. “He’s very stable and calm in the world of labour negotiations and, particularly in the early days of the airport authority, his skill sets were really invaluable.”
Helping build up the new organization from scratch, Berg said, involved “endless” meetings going over vision, mission, the corporation’s values and defining what success would look like.
But Berg said while it took five years for the dust to settle on the transition, the VAA transformed the airport’s culture in a way that has proved as significant as YVR’s bricks-and-mortar expansions and its near doubling of passenger volumes between 1992 and today.
“We had to shift the culture to being more entrepreneurial, focused on the best-quality, lowest-cost service product that we’re offering,” he said. “It’s really in the DNA of people here now; they really want to create a first-class corporation and airport.”
Berg, whose role expanded until he finally took on the president and CEO title in 1998, said he’s not resting on his laurels.
“Every good manager has to be somewhat dissatisfied with the effectiveness, the quality, the timeliness of the product or service he’s offering,” he said.
“If not, he becomes complacent. Whether it’s cellphones, golf clubs or passenger services at airports, you have to be absolutely bitten by that chronic dissatisfaction that things can be better.”
Berg said he’ll continue to lead the airport in its long-established mission to be one of the leading gateways linking Asia and North America.
A key focus now, he said is turning YVR into North America’s best connecting airport – a plan that involves a large capital project to expedite clearance processes and baggage movement.
Taking stock of his years leading the VAA, Berg credits the “outstanding” team he works with for the job he loves.
“It has been and is a wonderful role,” he said. “If there’s a better role than this one here in this town, I haven’t yet seen it.”