Is Heinz Chief Really Thinking About a Successor?

William R. Johnson, the president, CEO, and chairman of HJ Heinz, plans to stick around for a while – maybe 20 more years – but he’s already thinking about succession plans.

“Clearly,” he said during a conference call with analysts on Thursday, “when you’ve been in a job as long as I have [and] you have a board … it’s a very topical governance issue. We are very focused on what happens when I retire 15 or 20 years from now. And that’s about as precise as you’re going to get out of me.”

Precise enough, sure: He’s not quite 60, he may not retire until he’s 80, but he’s “very focused” on choosing a successor.

It’s hard to tell from a transcript, but it’s possible he was kidding, I guess. Johnson, a Heinz employee since 1982, is known as a tough-as-nails, but smart, cost-cutter, and that attribute is serving him well in the current climate. He’s probably not going anywhere soon.

Johnson was able to work with the like-minded activist investor Nelson Peltz, who bulled his way into getting a couple of board seats at Heinz last year through his ownership of Trian Capital Management. At first, Johnson was taken aback when Peltz wanted even more cost cuts than Johnson was making, and when he dissed Johnson’s plans for growth and his marketing strategy. But since then, the two have grown closer, and Johnson has even credited Peltz with helping the company gain focus.

At the same time, Johnson makes sure to say that many of the good things that have happened at Heinz are due to initiatives he had implemented before Peltz came along. Johnson opened up about all this in a long article last March in Chief Executive magazine.

In any case, if Johnson is able to keep racking up great results, he probably won’t have to focus too much on picking his successor, who, after all, might still be in high school.