Canadian Pacific Railway CP
The three reasons
- 1
CP has the worst operating ratio of any Class I railroad while closest peer CN has the best
- 2
Under Fred Green, CP delivered -18% total return while rail peers returned +22% to +93%
- 3
Hunter Harrison transformed CN into best-in-class and can do the same at CP
Primary demands
- Replace CEO Fred Green with Hunter Harrison
- Elect Pershing Square's Nominees for Management Change slate to the board
- Drive operating ratio to industry-leading levels in line with CN
KPIs cited
Pattern membership
Where this document fits across the library's 12 rhetorical / structural patterns.
Notable slides (10)
Notes
Iconic Ackman proxy-fight deck — the 'Nominees for Management Change' presentation dated Feb 6 2012, the follow-up to the Jan 2012 thesis deck. Famous for the CP-vs-CN peer-gap construction (operating ratio, EBIT margin, ROIC, cash margin all charted against CN), the 'Five Years of Promises' section that quotes Fred Green verbatim from 2005 through 2011 to expose broken promises, the 'Buy High, Sell Low' capital-allocation indictment, and the binary 'Fred Green vs. Hunter Harrison' framing on page 7. Sparse-but-deliberate layout (lots of whitespace, green/red color coding for hero/villain) is a textbook contrarian slide-craft specimen. Sum-of-parts not used — the argument is operational alpha vs. peer, not break-up value. Campaign outcome: Ackman won — Harrison installed as CEO in May 2012; CP stock roughly tripled over the following years.