(FORTUNE Magazine) – When Ross Johnson, then running Nabisco Brands, was arranging the 1985 sale of his company to RJ Reynolds Industries, he thought about the reasons to go ahead: RJR was a good place for Nabisco managers; $5 billion was a good deal for Nabisco shareholders. A year later he was CEO of the merged RJR Nabisco and pondering another problem: ''How the hell am I going to pay off the $5 billion?'' The answer was to divest nearly everything RJR had bought -- except Nabisco of course. In the process Johnson, 55, put another notch in a reputation as a handy guy with a balance sheet or a razor. He dismantled RJR's 1,000-man corporate operation in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and sent the survivors to Atlanta. For old tobacco hands, it was as if the Vatican moved from Rome to, say, Edinburgh, Scotland. Says Johnson, unrepentant: ''Winston-Salem is a wonderful place to live, but it is not a place for a head office.'' It did not help that Ross has an image as a slick city boy from up north. A 15-year resident of metropolitan New York, he is known to pal around with sports luminaries like Bobby Orr or Frank Gifford. Along with being a shaker, Johnson is quite literally a mover. He has residences in five places and a schedule that puts him in three of them each week. He keeps clothes everywhere to save time packing. His wife, Laurie, prefers Atlanta. Two grown sons catch him on the fly. An ''aboot'' in conversation gives away Johnson's roots, which are farther north than New York. He was raised in Winnipeg and has an MBA from the University of Toronto. He began his career at GE Canada, had a fling at retailing, and joined Standard Brands Ltd. in 1971. There Johnson demonstrated an ability to analyze a market and apply the resources necessary to dominate it or get out. That ability persists: Today RJR Nabisco is either No. 1 or No. 2 in most food products it sells. RJR's is not the first culture Johnson has reshaped. As CEO of Standard Brands, he put some life into a dried-up packaged-goods company, partly by shaking the dead branches out of the tree. His success attracted a rich suitor in the form of Nabisco. At Nabisco he aroused management and boosted earnings until the company attracted an even richer suitor in the form of RJR. Johnson's bold moves in restructuring RJR underscored a trait -- the ability to act quickly and decisively -- that in some circles is seen as hip-shooting. That's a rap he doesn't think is fair. ''You don't need a lot of time to decide that the corporate structure doesn't seem to be working. The easiest thing is to sit and do nothing, and you can do it at a corporation of our size and not see too much effect, but your successors will sure inherit that world.''