List & Company, Inc. traces its roots back to the spring of 1981, when attorneys representing the Union Pacific Railroad reached out to HBS first-year student Doug List, asking if he would be willing to appear as an expert witness before the Interstate Commerce Commission in support of the Union Pacific-Missouri Pacific-Western Pacific merger. A few weeks later, the trustee for the Boston and Maine Railroad cancelled the summer job offer Doug had received from B&M management, and Doug found himself a self-employed consultant for the summer. Opposition to the merger heated up, generated another project (analyzing how “home road” rules for returning empty cars would affect the economics of other railroads), and the UP operating department jumped on the opportunity to have Doug use off-the-shelf database software to build its first computer-compiled operating plan.

Eight years later, after stints with management consultancy McKinsey & Company and mega-railroad CSX, Doug returned to operating his own consultancy practice, incorporating List & Company in 1989. Consulting activities were reduced somewhat when he assumed the part-time role of General Manager of Railway Engineering Associates (REA), a railroad technology R&D firm founded by his father in the 1960′s. Throughout the 1990′s, the consulting practice supported clients both directly and through other leading firms, typically providing either broad CEO/general manager support or issue focused analysis on key decisions. During this period, Doug’s role at REA gradually;...

Early Background

Doug List grew up just south of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, very much in the shadows of Bethlehem Steel, Lehigh University, model railroads (some for fun, some to support his father’s research, some large enough you could actually ride them), Moravian culture, the Bethlehem Bach Choir, immigrant steel-workers, and a gargantuan 91-foot tall electric star that contains no fewer than 250 50-watt bulbs. Doug’s father worked in the Bethlehem Steel research center on top of the mountain south of town (since sold to Lehigh University) and Doug himself flew model rockets in Lehigh’s huge expansive open fields south of the mountain (since converted to a football stadium and the Philadelphia Eagles practice facility, among other things). Active in music (Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys, eleven years; school, district, regional, and national choruses, school and district bands, summers spent at music camps in the Poconos and Quebec) as well as science (co-founder of the Bethlehem YMCA model rocketry club, winner of a regional science fair in geology), he broke with family norms by playing the lead in the junior class play and paying soccer his senior year, where he was starting right fullback on a championship team.

In 1973, he entered the Civil Engineering Program at the University of Virginia as an Honor Award Scholar, were he was again active in choral music, eventually directing two acappella singing groups and serving as;...

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