Jim Fish and the education of a 2 a.m. executive

Jim Fish’s father-in-law had a suggestion for the finance executive heading into operations: go to the crew meetings. Fish discovered a small complication. Some began at two or three in the morning. His father-in-law, a union pipe fitter from St. Louis, considered this excellent news. Attend the earliest one, he advised. The people on that shift would notice if their manager preferred the more civilized hour.

Fish took the advice. In his telling, weekly visits and truck ride-alongs became a habit during seven and a half years in the field. A meeting before dawn offered an education with few of the conveniences generally associated with executive development. The syllabus was a route to run.

The story helps explain the accountant who became chief executive of WM in November 2016. It also provides a useful way to assess the next part of his career: running a company that champions its employees while investing in technology that reduces the need for some jobs. The early shift made listening a practice. The bigger decisions would test what he had heard.

An accountant leaves the office

Fish was raised in Austin, Texas. He earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting at Arizona State University and an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago. His professional beginnings were at KPMG Peat Marwick. Finance and revenue-management jobs at America West Airlines, Trans World Airlines and Westex followed. Before garbage trucks, there were aircraft and freight.

He joined WM in 2001. His jobs there would encompass financial planning, price management and responsibility for operations in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the Eastern Group. The map matters. This was a career spent moving between the corporate view and the places where the service actually happened.

Garbage collection resists abstraction. A route may look tidy in a presentation and prove awkward on a street. A customer experiences the business through a pickup, a missed pickup or an answer to a question. For a finance executive, time in operations supplies the people and physical circumstances behind a line item. The spreadsheet gets considerably more crowded.

Fish became CFO in 2012, president in July 2016 and CEO that November. He inherited a business with momentum under David Steiner. His early public comments were measured: retain pricing discipline, keep attention on service and make better use of the information the company already possessed. He sounded like someone looking for the next improvement rather than a ceremonial bonfire of his predecessor’s furniture.

The route is also a data problem

In early 2017, Fish pointed to routing, equipment maintenance and pricing as places where data could improve decisions. He described 4,800 commercial routes a day, constantly changing. Even a basic restriction, such as when a truck can enter a school zone, complicates the calculation. Better routing had to accommodate both the customer and the cost of reaching that customer.

This was technology with a practical job description. The point was to make the service work better. A beautifully designed system that sent a truck to the wrong place would have offered limited consolation to anybody waiting for it.

By 2019, he was talking about remote operation of landfill equipment and discussions around autonomous vehicles. He acknowledged the danger of spending heavily on a technology that left the company worse off competitively. Curiosity needed an accountant beside it. Fish’s account of innovation included looking outside the business for ideas, while recognizing that promising technology still had to survive the economics of real operations.

The people-first promise gets a tuition bill

Fish’s public explanation of leadership returns repeatedly to employees. The phrase becomes more interesting when money attaches to it. In May 2021, WM announced Your Tomorrow, an education and upskilling program developed with Guild. At launch, nearly 36,000 full-time US employees could access more than 170 fully funded programs. The company also announced plans to extend the offering to eligible dependents.

The current program includes select tuition-funded options for eligible employees, spouses and dependents aged 18 to 26. Its catalog spans degrees, certificates and other routes into further education. Eligibility and program choice matter; a broad promise still needs rules that work for individual families.

The business logic is plain enough. A company reliant on drivers, technicians and other workers has reason to make a career more attractive. The personal calculation can be larger than one employee’s next promotion. A spouse’s qualification or a child’s studies may enter the decision about where to work. A benefit can reach the kitchen table in ways a corporate values poster seldom manages.

“Personally, I am driven to make WM a great place to work for all.”

Jim Fish, message to employees

His account of giving also begins close to home. Asked about WM’s hurricane relief in 2017, Fish credited his mother’s habit of helping people without seeking attention. During that first year as CEO, the company donated $3 million for Hurricane Harvey relief and $1 million after Hurricane Irma. It also sent its company plane with supplies to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Those were particular responses to particular events. They make his talk about employees and communities easier to examine. There was a decision, a resource committed and a recipient. The language had something solid beneath it.

Then the machines arrive

Automation makes the employee argument harder. WM has described reducing its reliance on certain roles by using technology and allowing vacancies to go unfilled when workers leave. In an early-2025 earnings discussion, John Morris said the company had reduced approximately 2,600 roles, or the need to refill them, through natural attrition. He identified recycling facilities and residential collection as important areas for further automation.

The mechanism matters. Leaving a vacancy unfilled produces a different immediate experience from dismissing the person doing the job. It still changes the shape of the workforce. A company can have fewer openings in one kind of work even as it wants employees to develop skills for another.

Education benefits and automation therefore belong in the same account of Fish’s leadership. Both concern what an employee’s future might look like. Their coexistence does not settle every question about opportunity, progression or the work left behind. It does give a reader something more substantial to consider than a choice between admiring machines and admiring people.

The operational test is demanding: does a new system improve the service, what happens to the jobs around it, and can workers see a credible next step? Fish’s early habit of going into the field offers a sensible place to ask. An answer delivered from the cab of a truck may contain details that never reach a board presentation.

A recycling bin is a beginning

Fish has also challenged the way recycling success gets described. In 2018, he argued that moving more material into the recycling bin did not necessarily mean recovering more useful material. Contamination could leave the processor sending it to a landfill anyway. The household had performed the gesture; the system still had to deliver the result.

His argument was commercial as well as environmental. Recycling needed a functioning business model that could handle commodity-price fluctuations and produce material somebody wanted. A larger pile of unsuitable objects was an unimpressive achievement, however enthusiastically assembled.

That emphasis makes the later numbers interesting. In the first quarter of 2026, Fish reported that single-stream commodity pricing had fallen 27%, while recycling operating EBITDA rose 18% and processed volume rose 9%. He attributed the improvement to automation benefits, lower labor costs, better material quality and greater volume. These are company-reported measures for one quarter, rather than a verdict on every investment.

The figures capture the ambition: improve the process enough that a difficult commodity market need not dictate the entire outcome. For a former CFO, this is an environmental proposition expressed in a familiar dialect.

The landfill has a second product

Landfills present Fish with a different practical problem. They occupy finite space. In a 2021 discussion at Chicago Booth, he described a Houston landfill originally permitted in 1980 that had become surrounded by homes. Replacing a nearby site with one far outside a city changes the transport economics. Looking for alternatives has a business rationale before anybody writes a slogan.

Existing landfills also produce gas as waste decomposes. Capturing and processing it can create renewable natural gas, including fuel allocated to the company’s alternative-fuel fleet. Fish has described that connection between the landfill and the truck as a natural part of WM’s strategy. The circular route is appealing, though it remains an engineering and operating task rather than a literary flourish.

In April 2025, WM described a roughly $3 billion sustainability growth investment plan for 2022 through 2026, including new or upgraded recycling facilities and renewable natural gas projects. Those were planned investments and project targets, not a declaration that every facility had already opened. The distinction is useful. Concrete, equipment and commissioning schedules have their own opinions about deadlines.

A quieter ending to a very early start

The company shortened its brand to WM in 2022, reflecting a business reaching beyond its familiar waste-collection identity. The announcement used the Phoenix Open, a golf tournament where recycling, composting and other diversion arrangements become part of the event itself. Fish has discussed the tournament’s identity in interviews, including a February 2026 conversation with Jimmy Roberts. Golf supplies the audience; operations deals with what the audience leaves behind.

Now there is a handover ahead. On August 26, 2026, WM announced Fish’s plan to retire and leave its board. President John Morris is scheduled to become president and CEO on January 4, 2027. Fish remains CEO as of this profile’s publication, having relinquished the president title in May 2025.

His career invites attention to the distance between a stated priority and the choices that follow it. Employee education, unfilled vacancies, recycling equipment and gas plants all sit within that distance. Each makes the phrase “people first” more specific, and more open to examination.

The father-in-law’s advice holds up rather well. Find out when the work starts. Go there. Stay long enough to learn something. For all the capital and machinery involved, Fish’s first useful adjustment was to his alarm clock.