John Shields was one of the greats. He was the CEO of Trader Joe’s from 1988 to 2001, and for about a year of that stretch I worked directly for him, the only time in my whole career that I reported straight to the CEO of a large company. I have nothing negative to say about the man, and I can rarely say that about anyone in that kind of position.
Working for John was a breath of fresh air, and I learned a great deal from him. When he left, I was sad to see him go.
The company I joined
I joined Trader Joe’s in 1994. John Shields was already CEO by then, and the company was younger and smaller than the national name people know today. Our headquarters was in South Pasadena at the time, before it later moved to Monrovia. The whole place had a different feel back then, more intimate, still figuring out how big it was going to become.
When I started, I worked for Fred Morsheimer. Fred reported to Mike Parker, who was the president, and Mike reported to the CEO, John Shields. That was the chain above me. John ran the company, and he ran it well. He’d come over from a long, senior career at Macy’s, and he’d been brought in to expand Trader Joe’s in a serious way. He took a small California chain and grew it into a national company doing well over a billion dollars in sales.
He succeeded at exactly what he was hired to do, and then some.
As a person, John kept to himself. I wouldn’t call him shy, but he was reserved, and like just about every other CEO I’ve ever encountered, he generally stayed away from us technical people. That made what happened next all the more memorable.
The bodyguards
One of the stranger days I remember started when I came into work and found a couple of bodyguards standing next to John Shields. It turned out someone had made a bomb threat against him or the company. I never learned much about it, and there wasn’t a lot of scuttlebutt around the office either. That was unusual in itself. The armed guards watched over the CEO for a day, and then they were gone. Whatever it was, it cleared up quickly.
But it was a strange and slightly unsettling thing to witness, those guards standing watch over the man who ran our company, and then everything going back to normal as if nothing had happened.
Working for the CEO
Then Fred Morsheimer left Trader Joe’s, and suddenly I was working for John Shields directly. I did that for about a year, until my new boss, Tom English, came on board. That year taught me what a great leader looks like up close.
John had a sense of humor, very droll, and a nice personality, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it unless you talked with him at length.
He kept that side of himself reserved. What mattered to me as someone working under him was that he gave you all the rope you needed to do your job. He trusted you. He extended real freedom, and he backed it up with real respect.
The moment that crystallized it for me came when I wanted to buy a very large computer system. It was the kind of purchase that probably never would have been approved under the old way of doing things, and I went to him nervous about even asking. He asked me what it cost. Then he looked me in the eye and told me my job wasn’t to worry about what it cost. My job was to worry about whether it would work and whether we needed it.
I said yes, we needed it, and it would work. He said, good, then you’re approved. Just like that. That was the moment I felt he respected me, as a person and as a technician who knew what he was doing.
He had a way of reading people, too. Another time I went to him to ask for a new hire, another person on my team. He asked the usual questions. Did I believe in it? Did I have all the data? And he caught something in my tone of voice, some hesitation I probably didn’t even know I was showing. He told me he didn’t think I was ready yet and sent me off to do more research. So I did.
A few weeks later I came back and told him I needed to hire this person, and here’s exactly why. He said, okay, approved. Simple. He didn’t like a lot of procedures and bureaucracy. You just got your job done, and he let you.
There was one thing John preached constantly, and he made sure every one of us knew it.
He had a sign over his desk that said your lack of planning isn’t my emergency, and he took it seriously. If we hadn’t planned ahead, that wasn’t his problem to solve at the last minute. It sounds harsh written down, but in practice it was fair.
It pushed all of us to think ahead, to anticipate what we’d need before we needed it, and to come to him with a plan instead of a panic. That lesson stuck with me long after I left Trader Joe’s.
In the room with him
What surprised people who didn’t deal with John closely was how sharp he was on the technical side. We’d have meetings with him about things like satellite communications, which were a big deal at the time, and T1 and T3 lines, the communication links we were using to make the stores talk to the main office. This was before the internet as we know it now.
We were building the systems that connected a growing national chain together, and John would sit and listen attentively, and then ask exactly the right questions. He clearly understood what we were talking about. He wasn’t a finance guy pretending to follow along. He got it. Having him in those meetings was great, because he engaged with the substance instead of just the budget.
That was the heart of how he worked with me. As he put it once, he was the finance guy and I was the technical guy, and he respected the line between the two. He didn’t try to do my job. He made sure I could do it.
One of the greats
John Shields died on October 31, 2014, at the age of 82, after a long illness. You could tell, near the end of his time at Trader Joe’s, that he was beginning to get sick before he left. I was really sad to see him go even then, because he was such a good person and such a good leader, and I knew the company was losing something that would be hard to replace.
I have nothing but a good feeling about John Shields.
He gave me freedom, backed my judgment, read me honestly, and treated me as a professional who knew his craft. In a career full of bosses, he ranks among the best I ever had, and he was the only CEO I ever worked for directly. I’m glad I had the experience, and I’m grateful for everything I learned from him. Rest in peace, John. You were one of the greats, and I was lucky to work for you.
