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Hal Kvisle is one of the unsung superstars of Canadian business. The intense, hard-working CEO of TransCanada Corp. not only oversees a North American natural gas pipeline network of almost 60,000 kilometres. Having taken over a company reeling from a wrenching merger in the late 1990s, he completed its turnaround and guided expansion in other capital-intensive businesses, from nuclear (a major interest in Ontario's Bruce Power) and LNG to wind power and gas storage. He talks about the leadership needed to run a company with a dizzying range of megaproject options.

The word on Hal Kvisle is he's smart, capable and direct, but he gets immersed in detail.

I am a bit of a glutton for detail. I dig into it a lot. But I also find that if you make it very clear to the rest of the TransCanada management team that the detail has to be there, sooner or later they become very good at delivering that detail in a very efficient way, and we're there now.

So are you pulling back a bit from the detail?

I just get into new details. You get different parts working perfectly and you move into detail somewhere else. It's just the way I run things and it works for me. The people who complain about me getting into the detail are sometimes those who don't want to come up with all the details.

Do you have management role models?

There are two sides to that question. One is what I call tight-ship management. That is, how do you make sure everything is managed really tightly and that unexpected things don't come up? In that area, I have many role models, too numerous to mention.

The other side is the visionary aspect, and how you generate new ideas and brilliant ways of pursuing things. There, the most notable example would be Jack Gallagher at Dome Petroleum.

But in Dome, the execution did not match the vision.

A little too much debt leverage. Other than the debt problem, Dome was a very well-run company and certainly moved forward on a number of technical fronts. Jack Gallagher was not a good example of a tight-ship manager, but others in Dome were.

It seems TransCanada fills every one of your waking hours. How do you keep from burning out?

My every waking hour is filled, but not entirely with TransCanada. I do other things. I spend as much time skiing in winter as I can. And I have a ranch property where I spend a lot of time. Fixing barbed wire seems to be my major job out there.

A lot of people in the oil patch own ranch property, but I don't see them getting their hands dirty.

I admit I could not make that ranch work without help from other people. But I do get not just dirty hands, but cut hands.

That's your background, isn't it?

I come from a rural area and my family has been farmers for 500 years — more in Norway than in Canada, where we are relative newcomers. Visiting those family places in Norway and seeing operations still in the family after 500 years is a neat thing.

You run a company that is very important to Canada's trade and prosperity. Have you thought about your role in history?

I do think about the longer-term role of TransCanada. It is a very important company in the Canadian context. It is what Dick Haskayne [the veteran Calgary executive and director] might call a Northern Tiger.

It's important to have TransCanada established from a financial perspective, so that it is going to be around a long time. So if you have your stock trading at a very high price-earnings ratio, nobody is going to take you over, and that's important.

My objective is not to find someone who will pay a 20-per-cent premium for the company, and to sell it off and be done with it. My objective would be to stabilize and secure TransCanada so it is as strong as it can be for the next 50 years.

But surely operating this gas pipeline system puts you up there with the builders of Canadian Pacific?

People who have gone before me deserve most of the credit for building up that major gas pipeline spine. While I've been with TransCanada, we've done things to actually branch out a bit.

For example, my team had the foresight to think about converting our smallest gas pipeline leaving Western Canada [the Keystone] into one of the largest crude oil pipeline systems leaving Western Canada.

We sat down and said, ‘Okay, gas flows are diminishing on the main line, our regulator can't necessarily solve all of our problems, people no longer sign up for long-term contracts. What are we going to do?' One thing we thought about was, ‘We've got to get more northern gas into the system.' But that's going to take a long time and so, in the meantime, what else can we do? Converting the smallest line to crude oil service was, I thought, an innovative answer.

My time at TransCanada will be more characterized by some diversification moves, and doing things on a large scale and not diversifying into a lot of little stuff.

How do you, as CEO, balance these competing projects?

When I joined, the company was pursuing many, many different investments and opportunities, and an awful lot were small-scale. They were coming to fruition a little sooner rather than later, but they were still very small, and not necessarily in businesses where the company has competitive advantage.

As we looked at what was available, we said, ‘First, let's focus on pipelines and power.' So the strategy has been: Let's get a lot more pots boiling in terms of future opportunities for the company, but let's get very smart about boiling those pots at very low cost. So we move forward with a whole lot of investment themes, but we don't necessarily drive every one of them home quickly.

So TransCanada is no longer just a pipeline company?

It's an energy infrastructure company. We already have more than a 20-per-cent market share of long-haul gas transmission in North America. It's pretty hard to see how you could double the size of that business when you are already at 20 per cent.

But if you look at power generation, we've built a business that is as big as our Canadian pipeline business. Yet it has only a 1-per-cent market share of North American power. So we could easily grow that business three or four times.

You could see TransCanada as predominantly a power gen company, along with a pipeline business — and that would be quite a change. I'm not predicting that is going to happen; it's not even what I want to see. We just want a whole range of opportunities available and to be able to pursue the best at any time. It might be LNG, gas storage, wind power, more nuclear, an Alaska pipeline, Keystone crude oil — all of these things.

That sounds pretty complex.

The key is to look at all our development opportunities as a portfolio and recognize at any given time you want to accelerate some of those opportunities and, as appropriate, slow down on others. You also need to take a very long-term view. I've learned a lot from looking at the very best energy companies in the world.

Any one in particular?

I think Exxon Mobil is peerless in terms of their ability to manage enormous capital programs and run their existing assets real well.

How about the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline, where you are a potential player — and the cost is now projected at $16.2-billion?

We don't really feel good about Mackenzie Valley because it's such an enormously challenging project and there has been so much money spent to go through a regulatory process that is exceedingly frustrating for everyone. I don't think anyone is happy with the way the project has unfolded. But it is what it is. I'm very confident that the pipeline will be built and in the current round that we won't have to kill the project and come back to it 20 years from now.

It's our view that the current regulatory process has added several billion dollars to the cost. We can't keep doing this to ourselves in Canada. We have to come up with better ways.

How much longer will you stay in this job?

I don't work to career plans and I don't have any ambition to do anything else in my career. So it's just a question of how long the activities and opportunities of TransCanada stay interesting to me. I guess at some point I'll go ranching.

BIOGRAPHY

Hal Kvisle

(Pronounced Quiz-lee)

Born: Oct. 20, 1952, Innisfail, Alta.

Education: Engineering degree, University of Alberta, 1975. MBA, University of Calgary, 1982

Career highlights:

1975: Joined Dome Petroleum Ltd., rising to finance manager.

1987-88: Played key role in Dome's sale to Amoco Canada.

1988: Went to Fletcher Challenge Energy, becoming chief operating officer for South and Central America and president of Canadian operations.

1999: Recruited as executive vice-president, trading and business development, for TransCanada

2001: Rose to TransCanada's president and CEO.