Alan J. Krause: 'building a better world'.

• Author: Harrington, Susan
• Position: LEADERSHIP - Biography

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A year ago, Alan J. Krause was appointed president and chief executive officer of MWH Global, a multinational construction, management and engineering firm ranked internationally at the top of the wet infrastructure sector.

He's a remarkable man, a native Alaskan who hails from Mount McKinley National Park--or McKinley Park as it was called--well before the 1980 name-change to Denali National Park. He almost became a geologist. His journey from humble beginnings to leading the pack is an inspiring story.

His father came to Alaska in 1944 to work on the railroad, a strategic transportation link for the Army during World War II, and worked as a section agent at McKinley Park Station. His mother came from Minnesota one summer to Glacier Bay National Park, taking a trip up to McKinley Park, where she first me her husband-to-be. Krause's parents met, married and started their family all at McKinley Park.

The family lived upstairs in the apartment above the station house, though Krause was born in Anchorage at the old Providence Hospital in 1954.

As a child Krause lived up and down the Railbelt: McKinley, Curry--south of McKinley through Palmer, then Anchorage, where he graduated from Dimond High School, and recently attended his 40 year reunion. "It was a lot different then," he says. Having been completely rebuilt, the current building bears no resemblance to the high school Krause attended.

Krause went outside for college to earn a degree in geology and came home during the summers to work. He was halfway through school to be a geologist the summer of his junior year when something happened that changed the course of his life. "I came very close to having a short life," he says.

He'd been dropped off in the field by a helicopter and was alone in the Wrangell Mountains, taking stream samples for Cities Service Minerals Corp. when he was treed by three grizzly bears. He thought he would be dead within 10 minutes, but the helicopter showed up before then, rescuing him.

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"I immediately decided not to be a geologist," he says.

Change of Plans

Krause became a geotechnical engineer instead. He returned to school after the grizzly encounter, completed his Bachelor of Science in Geology, and finished up with a master's degree in geological engineering from the University of Nevada Mackay School of Mines. He later attended Harvard University and completed the Owner/ President Management Program at Harvard...