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The skillful performance in Houston led Haider to hand-pick Jamieson to succeed him as Jersey president when Haider became chairman in 1965. Jamieson says that he was surprised. "I had never worked for the parent company," he recalls. "I came in over the heads of an awful lot of people." Just be fore his elevation, Jamieson was the most junior of nine Jersey vice presidents. "I guess you could say it's a tribute to the people who work with this company that they were willing to pick a foreigner to head it."
When Haider reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 1969, Jamieson took over as chairman, moving in 1972 into a huge, sparsely furnished office on the 51st floor of the Exxon Building in mid-Manhattan. Jamieson, who earned $401,666 in salary plus $195,000 in bonus last year, smoothly delegates authority. "In a big organization like this," he says, "you've got to push decision making to as low a level as possible and get it done. There is a fine line between pushing too far and not far enough." Says one Exxon insider of Jamieson's style of leadership: "It's an unusual thing when he breaks in with a decision in a management committee meeting. If there's strong disagreement, he asks, 'Do we have to decide today?' Members of the committee take this as an implied order to resolve their differences and come back the next day with a recommendation." —Last year Jamieson spent 116 days on the road, visiting Exxon operations at home and abroad. "On my latest trip I slept in eight beds in eight nights," he says. During weekends and on vacations, he carves out time for his favorite pastimes: golf, quail hunting, salmon fishing-and gardening with his wife, Ethel May, at their rambling house in Mamaroneck, N.Y.
There is a new strain on Jamieson's time: answering Exxon's critics with what he calls "our own version of Project Candor." He concedes that the industry's public image is bad: "The friction point we've got at the service stations is god-awful." But he also gives feisty defenses of company policy. Speaking to the Detroit Economic Club, he said of the oil industry's critics: "Being angry with the oil companies or the Government is more satisfying than being upset at economics or politics or the way nature doles out its resources." He manages, however, to keep a-sense of humor. In Detroit, one questioner asked him if "considering all that has happened, would it not have been better to retain the name Humble?" Ken Jamieson reared back and laughed.