Michael Kranda -- Manager's Talents Tapped In Politics, Law, Biotechnology
- Name: Michael Kranda
- Age 36
- Position: Chief operating officer and executive vice president of Immunex Corp.; president of Immunex Manufacturing.
- Quote: ``The political experience for me was very enlightening.''
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Let's get one thing straight: Michael Kranda is not a lawyer.
At age 36, he's chief operating officer and executive vice president of Immunex Corp., president of Immunex's manufacturing subsidiary and he has an MBA. But no matter what his friends and family think, a lawyer he's not.
``Even my mother still thinks that I am an attorney,'' jokes the affable Kranda, who dresses suspiciously like . . . well, a lawyer.
That may be habit. Kranda spent six years managing the region's largest public law office as chief of staff for King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng. Before that, Kranda ran Maleng's first successful political campaign for that office.
The story of how Kranda ended up running a major law office with no law degree (or management experience) is no less interesting, however, than the tale of how he rose to the top of one of the nation's most promising biotechnology companies without a background in biology. In fact, the two experiences are interrelated.
Kranda describes himself as ``definitely home grown.'' Born in North Seattle, he attended Shorecrest High School and the University of Washington. If there are deviations from his ``fairly typical middle class'' childhood, they seem to be political in nature.
His parents were John F. Kennedy Democrats. His father was with Frederick & Nelson for many years, his mother, a homemaker. The second of five children, Michael Kranda gained political consciousness at the tail end of the Vietnam era. He attended the UW during the politically convulsive early '70s. He remembers marching with other students in May Day protests against the invasion of Cambodia and getting chased around the Seafirst Building by police.
And yet, Kranda emerged a young Republican.
``I just didn't quite understand how going up those escalators in the Seafirst Building would accomplish anything,'' Kranda says. ``Somehow, it didn't quite represent the enemy to me. I had a hard time understanding things that day, as I rode home on the bus.
``I wanted to get involved,'' he says, ``but it didn't seem that us charging groups of police on horses, or us simply going in that bank and having them chase us around in there and club us, was really doing anything. So I wasn't persuaded to go that way.''
As he neared graduation from the University of Washington in 1976, Kranda says, he ``was absolutely muddled as to what to do.'' He won an internship with Price Waterhouse & Co. in accounting, but resigned on his first day on the job after sitting in a cubical adding up columns of numbers on a 10-key adding machine.
``I got through the morning doing this, and then I went to the personnel guy with whom I'd had five interviews to get this stupid job and I told him that I couldn't do it,'' says Kranda. ``I quit. When I got back to school everybody said: ``You've ruined your life.''
``And when you're that age you say `pishaw, there's no way.' But there's this little thing in the back going `maybe you did ruin your life.' ''
In 1976, one of his professors introduced him to Maleng, who took an instant, ``intuitive'' liking to Kranda.
Maleng immediately plugged the young graduate into the local Republican political circuit, where Kranda worked in rapid succession for John Spellman in his 1976 campaign for governor against Dixie Lee Ray; then for Maleng's boss, prosecutor Chris Bayley; and finally, for Maleng's first campaign for prosecutor.
``Here was somebody, a recent graduate from the University of Washington, with very little experience in politics,'' says Maleng, of meeting Kranda back in the mid-70s, ``and yet I was so impressed with him, that I asked him to be my campaign manager. It was the best decision I made.''
``Michael is one of those unique people who can identify what the critical issue or decision is,'' explains Maleng, ``and then focus in on that decisive factor or issue, the one that will drive an election or drive a major business type of project.''
Says Kranda: ``The political experience for me was very enlightening. It opened my eyes to a lot of things that I had not been exposed to in the past.''
He became an advance man in the Spellman campaign, and traveled the state meeting movers and shakers.
``It was a perfect situation. I was 21 years old. The way you do advance work is you quickly get in, size up the situation, figure out who's in control, go to them, get them to do what you want to help the candidate,'' Kranda says.
``I met all the people who run Washington state,'' he says. ``You see that they don't live in castles. They don't have any particular jump on the world. That was very helpful for me. It basically opened my eyes and let me see that this can be done, these people are nice people, normal people. It really helped me raise my sights about what could be done. Plus, I very much liked the people that were there.
``The people that I'd met, Spellman, Bayley, Pritchard, Maleng, these are pretty decent people. As it went on and I got to know George Bush and I worked on his campaign and met him. Again, real people.''
Kranda's Republican values were setting firm. Some of his Democratic peers and even family members were appalled in an amused way.
``All of my friends would look at me in 1978 and say ``What are you doing here? You're in the wrong party,'' laughs Kranda, who acknowledges admiration for Nixon.
``I still can't help but read Nixon books and respect the guy's intellect. I don't forgive him for what he did to the office and to the public in terms of the way that he exercised the power,'' Kranda says.
While still working for Maleng part time, Kranda went back to school and earned an MBA degree from the University of Washington.
When he graduated with his master's degree in business administrationin December 1984, Kranda again began looking for a new career. After trips to New York, seeking a job with various investment bankers, Kranda found himself back in Seattle. One of his political contacts suggested he talk with Immunex founder Stephen Duzan, to gain insight into the workings of investment bankers and venture capitalists.
Like Maleng, Duzan took a quick liking to Kranda and offered him a job.
``I have a lot of admiration for successful young people who spend some time running political campaigns,'' says Duzan, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Immunex Corp. ``If they are good they learn to think on their feet, to make good decisions quickly, not to agonize over them. Because campaigns are very short, compressed time frames. They have to deal with those issues very rapidly.
That was part of the reason, Duzan says, that he hired Kranda.
``When I hired him, my assumption was that he could be innovative and flexible and move quickly on things and get things done,'' says Duzan. ``I didn't know at the time, although I had hopes, that he would mature into a guy who could run whole segments of the company.''
Duzan set Kranda upon a pile a small projects that needed tending in the rapidly growing company.
``Michael was absorbing and taking on these projects so fast in the early stages and getting things done with them so quickly that I decided to throw him the entire manufacturing-plant development project as a way to keep him out of my office for a couple of hours,'' says Duzan.
Kranda took charge. By mid-1988, he had been named chief operating officer, executive vice president of Immunex and president of Immunex's manufacturing subsidiary, Immunex Manufacturing Corp.
He played a key role in a series of complex transactions completed by Immunex last year, which resulted in the re-acquisition by Immunex of the rights to several biotech cancer-fighting drugs which it had developed but licensed away. The deals put Immunex on a fast track to sell its own products in 1991 instead of 1995. Kranda was instrumental in the company's decision to invest $30 million to build its manufacturing facility in the Canyon Park Business Center near Bothell.
Maleng is not surprised by the success of the young man in whom he placed enormous trust nearly 15 years ago. Maleng describes Kranda as ``one of the best and the brightest in what I consider the new leadership in business, which is different than it was 10 years or 20 years ago. Not only do you have to have all the traditional business skills, but you have increasingly got to be able to operate in a public environment.''
Kranda, says Maleng, can handle that assignment.
Profile appears weekly in the Business Monday section of The Seattle Times.