Upending the legacy begun by his great-grandfather Samuel Curtis (S.C.) Johnson when he founded the company in 1886, Johnson chose to divide control of the business’ operating companies among three of his children. A fourth would oversee the family foundation. Johnson may have been hoping to avoid the clashes that punctuated his upbringing: When his grandfather died in 1928 without a will, his father, Herbert Fisk Jr., wrestled with his sister for control of the firm for a decade.

In 2000, Sam Johnson become chairman emeritus of SC Johnson, the cleaning products company, clearing the way for his children to assume high-level management of the family businesses. Today, two years after his death, his legacy represents a case study of not only how a family can successfully plan for business succession, but also how one can transition a company from concentrated leadership to control by consensus.

TOP VIEW: For four generations, the Johnson family companies were led by a strong patriarch. Now the fifth generation is taking a more cooperative approach. However, one heir, Helen Johnson-Leipold, is emerging as the glue that holds together this new team. Late chairman Sam Johnson's progressive business succession plan seems to be working, but with few successful models to follow, the family faces immense challenges, both internally and within their various businesses. These will surely test Johnson-Leipold's abilities in years to come.

A prime mover in the Johnson family’s culture of collaboration is Helen Johnson-Leipold. At 49, she serves as chairman and CEO of Johnson Outdoors, chairman of Johnson Financial Group and is a director of the family’s two other enterprises, SC Johnson and JohnsonDiversey. She also heads the family office, helping manage her family’s estimated $7.5 billion in assets, and is pivotal in its charitable work as chairman of the Johnson Foundation and a trustee of the SC Johnson Fund.

The business press is always rife with family business blowups. But Johnson-Leipold and her family are committed to avoiding this fate. With so few successful models to follow, they are creating their own. “This is a very unusual family in terms of their ability to get along,” says François de Visscher, president of an eponymous family business consulting firm and a fourth-generation family firm shareholder.

Last May, Johnson-Leipold and her mother, Gene, accepted an award from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management for “special contributions to family business,” on behalf of the Johnsons. How does Johnson-Leipold explain their success? “As long as we keep in our heads what’s best for the companies and family, there’s no argument,” she says.

Sam Johnson planted the seeds of family business harmony long ago, knowing his children would inherit a company vastly different than the one he did. (His tenure saw revenues grow 40-fold.) He initially engaged all four children in the family’s charitable work through the Samuel C. Johnson Family Foundation (now headed by his daughter Winnie Johnson-Marquart) so they would learn how to make cooperative decisions. He created four separate companies and changed the corporate structure by introducing outside presidents or CEOs to run them together with family members, who were chairmen. He also formed the Family Business Council, comprised of his children, their mother and three advisors, to help guide and oversee all the companies. There is no chairman; decisions are made by consensus.

The family has also launched an internship program for the sixth generation to introduce them more formally to the Johnson Family Enterprise. Winnie’s children are already participating because they live in Virginia, and, unlike their Wisconsin cousins, may not benefit from picking up family business knowledge by the osmosis of proximity.

But the true test of Johnson’s succession plan may be yet to come as the family addresses new challenges. Three of the four family businesses depend heavily on commodities; petroleum, for example, remains a chief ingredient in everything from bottles to kayaks. Johnson Financial Group, reportedly posting double-digit growth for the last decade, has its own difficulties as a privately held bank in an industry experiencing rapid consolidation. The industrial products business, JohnsonDiversey, may be hampered by its highly leveraged balance sheet, one of the factors prompting Standard & Poor’s to downgrade its long-term debt to single-B in April.

Their overriding challenge, however, may be living up to the successes—both in business and in their communities—achieved by their predecessors, against whom investors, employees and consumers will judge their leadership. “It’s not easy because these very successful individuals have long shadows, and they have long shadows both in their families as well as in their company,” says Ivan Lansberg, a senior partner with consulting firm Lansberg, Gersick & Associates in New Haven, Conn.

Sleepless in Racine
Spend time with Johnson-Leipold and it becomes evident that she is indeed her father’s daughter. She manages to squeeze in time for events ranging from her youngest son’s basketball practice to a speech at a local Johnson Bank by sleeping only a few hours a night, as Sam Johnson did. The second of the four siblings, she grew up within five miles of SC Johnson’s headquarters, dubbed the “Wax Building,” and her grandfather H.F.’s stunning home, Wingspread, both designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Today she lives down the road from her parents’ house in a large brick contemporary home she built with her husband, Craig Leipold, on the shore of Lake Michigan.

“As long as we keep in our heads what’s best for the companies and family, there’s no argument,” she says.

When she is in Racine, mornings  begin at 4:30 am with weight training. Two hours of tennis at the indoor courts down the road follow. Slim and athletic, dressed in black and white gym shorts, she whacks balls in warm-up drills. During a game with her coach, the ball flies from the center of her racquet with a satisfying pop. At Cornell University, she played number 1 in her junior and senior years; in 1974, her team went undefeated and won the New York state championship. She still puts everything into her game. On this morning, she serves one ball with such gusto that she lands flat on her back.

Neither Sam nor Gene Johnson forced the children into the family business. After graduating from Cornell—as did her siblings, parents and grandfather—Johnson-Leipold craved her own experience. She joined the Chicago office of Foote, Cone & Belding, the advertising and marketing firm that also handled part of the SC Johnson account. Johnson-Leipold began in a training program, never identifying herself or asking for special treatment, according to Mark Pacchini, a friend who worked alongside her and still works on the Johnson account. She spent eight years there until she grew frustrated at not being able to make decisions. The turning point came during a never-ending shoot for a Sara Lee croissant ad. Johnson-Leipold believed they had the shot and wanted to move on. Her client disagreed. At midnight, she called her father. “I said, ‘Dad I need a job,’” she remembers. “He said, ‘Come on up.’”

She had already spent time at the companies. She worked briefly as a teller at the bank her father started. In the Wax Building, she points out the desk she used as an intern, testing new products. A ride to the third floor in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed wire elevator her father aptly called the “bird cage” leads to a shelf filled with Johnson products—a timeline of wax canisters and polishers.

While Johnson-Leipold appreciates the past, she does not feel bound by it. When she became chairman and CEO of Johnson Outdoors seven years ago, she recommended that the board sell Johnson Reels, a fishing line her father was attached to both because he was an avid angler and it was the first sporting goods company he had purchased. Johnson-Leipold considered it a low-margin business with limited growth potential that failed to meet the longstanding company requirement that it rank first or second in its category. “The first thing I did was sell Dad’s favorite company,” she recalls with a laugh. “But he was good and he listened.”

Johnson-Leipold credits her father with including the family in conversations about his succession plan. This preparation effectively enabled the Johnson heirs to choose the areas in which they wanted to work, which may have helped Johnson avoid having to make painful decisions, Johnson-Leipold says. (See “Siblings and Leaders,” page 62.) One daughter opted out of the business end. Johnson-Marquart worked in the family business in a communications role at one point, but was given the freedom to decline a management position. “He was always a communicator, and said that he wanted us to be our own people and encouraged us to bring something different,” Johnson-Leipold says.

GENE AND Sam Johnson stand with their children, Helen Johnson-Leipold (left), Winnie Johnson-Marquart, Curt Johnson and Fisk Johnson, shortly before Sam’s death in 2004.

While the Johnson family leadership continues to evolve (Helen’s brother H. Fisk Johnson, took over as CEO of SC Johnson only 18 months ago when William Perez left to take over at Nike; Fisk was previously chairman), Johnson-Leipold’s longtime friends and employees already speak of her as the “glue,” as one friend put it, holding the family together. John Fahey, president and CEO of the National Geographic Society and former chairman of Time Life, got to know Johnson-Leipold and her father during his roughly six years as a director of Johnson Outdoors. She shares many of her father’s best qualities: natural leadership skills, a love for the business, value for her employees and a mix of strategic intelligence and common sense, he says. “It seems that she has taken on many of the roles that her father had as the head of the family,” he adds.

Sam Johnson remains a presence. Johnson-Leipold quotes him in conversation and speeches. The family still screens a film he made, Through His Words, and displays a collection of nature photographs—Through His Eyes—that he took on travels with Gene around the globe, from Antarctica to Wisconsin. The 160 shots made their way to a cocktail reception at the Johnson Bank in Kenosha, Wis., in April, drawing a crowd of nearly 100 of the bank’s private clients. They ate shrimp and sipped wine, looking at images, including an Indian tiger and local girls trekking in Nepal. The popular favorite? A shot of Sam with a fish he caught in Wisconsin.

Floating Ideas
Meanwhile, Johnson-Leipold continues to reshape the family businesses by selling noncore brands such as Jack Wolfskin and focusing on bringing new ideas to market for the remaining ones. “It’s the challenge of change: knowing what to change and what not to change,” she says.

SIBLINGS AND LEADERS Fisk Johnson Chairman, CEO: SC Johnson Helen Johnson-Leipold Chairman, CEO: Johnson Outdoors Chairman: Johnson Financial Group Board of directors: SC Johnson and JohnsonDiversey Chairman: Johnson Foundation Trustee: SC Johnson Fund Chairman: Johnson Keland Management (family office) Curt Johnson Chairman: JohnsonDiversey Board of directors: Johnson Financial Group Winnie Johnson-Marquart President: Johnson Family Foundation Board of directors: Johnson Financial Trustee: Johnson Foundation

Bound for Nashville on a private jet packed with her family and friends, Johnson-Leipold displays the cooperative spirit her father encouraged. Her 13-year-old son, Connor Leipold, wows her with a new kayak designed with a unique hovercraft lift that he spotted in Popular Science. Mark Leopold, a family friend and group vice president of Johnson Outdoors’ watercraft division, agrees. “This could be huge,” he says, and plans to explore its patent history. Connor suggests he watch an online video of the boat in motion. Gene wonders how it fares in shallow water.

Much of the reshaping work has already taken place at Johnson Outdoors, which reported annual sales of $380 million in 2005 and has 23 facilities worldwide. The company today enjoys some direct returns on these changes; Johnson-Leipold’s goal is to grow revenue to $500 million over the next few years. Nearly every line features new products. In April, Johnson Outdoors won two government contracts for military tents, totaling $5.5 million. It has engineered a new rapid-deploy system tent, a 500-square-foot military tent that fits in the back of a Humvee and unfolds in minutes. New products represent 40 percent of revenues in the watercraft division, driven by demand for new fishing kayaks and lighter boats that appeal to aging baby boomers and women. So far, however, these improvements have not registered substantial profits—the company reported $4.2 million net income in the second quarter—or moved its stock price, which continues to hover in the range of $18 per share.

But this spring marked the first time the company introduced new products in time for an entire season, while enjoying a deep well of other new products in the pipeline. Johnson-Leipold is counting on these innovations to help Johnson Outdoors attain elusive growth in a market that traditionally exhibits little natural expansion. At a meeting with employees of Minn Kota, which manufactures electric trolling motors and accessories for fishing, she summarizes the company’s strategy: “We’re the innovator,” she points out, “and we will create our own growth.”  

Elizabeth Harris is a staff writer for Worth.

Photograph of Helen Johnson-Leipold by John Nienhuis.

Additional Information
The Johnson Business History