The Exchanges

Q decision making, patterns of good leadership, and also self-sabotage, the role of narratives in taking bold actions, and integrative thinking. You'll walk away from this conversation a better leader, decision maker, and have a more connected view of the world. It's time to listen and learn. You had an amazing mother growing up. What are some of the biggest lessons you learned from her and how did you learn them?

A Well, it's maybe just by osmosis. She, she was, uh, an awesome, awesome, uh, lady, but I think the most striking thing about, um, how I learned is, is she would answer almost no question. If you asked her a question, she would typically ask a question back. For example, if I'd asked her mom, you know, have you seen my I used to play with Tonka, those little metal Tonka trucks. Um, you know, have you seen my, you know, blue Tonka truck? And instead of her answering, she would say, well, Roger, what's the last time you are absolutely sure that you can remember holding it in your hand? Uh, and then that I think a whole lot about it and then she'd say, well, Why don't you go to where you were when you last can remember having held it in your hand? And sure enough, you know, it would, it would be there, but she didn't say check your bedroom or check this. She would always be a return, return fire with a, with a question. So she taught me that you kind of have to think your way out of things and, and you have the power to do that. And that may seem fairly simple, but as a four or five year old, it's a sort of a powerful lesson.

AI assessment note: “she taught me that you kind of have to think your way out of things”

Q And as the former dean of the Rotman school, you're, you're in a position to know that you, you oversaw some of the most significant changes there in a long time. Um, what would you say is wrong with sort of like business education specifically?

A Well, I, yeah, that one, unfortunately there's a big, big problem and, uh, uh, and it's that Business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business. I mean, that's, that's pretty bad, right? What they teach are finance. What they teach is marketing to teach us HR. And as the great, greatest management thinker of all time, Peter Drucker said, there are no marketing problems. There are no finance problems. There are no accounting problems. There are only business problems. And these are problems that sloppily span across a bunch of, uh, domains, uh, in business education has abdicated. It doesn't even try to, To, uh, to teach how you think across domains. And, and that's really problematic. And, and it's consistent with, with a lot of the huge problems, uh, in the world is thinking that you can decompose, uh, things into, into little pieces and, and somehow add them up together and they'll add up to the whole that you wish. Doesn't happen, and, and business education is, is a critical impediment to that, uh, as it currently stands.

AI assessment note: “Business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business.”

Q So is it right to say that part of teaching people to think better is trying to teach them that everything is connected to everything else in the world?

A Yes, it is. Uh, and, and, That's a more daunting task. So like, I understand why business education abdicates that. That's a, that's a more daunting, uh, task and things are less easy to prove, right? It's much easier to prove as, as you would well know, Shane, right? You've heard that all else being equal, this, the causes that, right? And, and you, and you, and you know, all those other things that you have to assume are equal or not. But if you do hold them all constant, then you can develop, uh, improve a causal relationship between two things. So it's sort of easier to write a paper, do a study, all of those things, if you take a narrow, narrow lens, but that's just not helpful to the world. And, and so, you know, I, I think business education, uh, draws in Lots of people who would have succeeded without it. Uh, they're the ones, that small percentage of people who can integrate, who just learned early on in their life, one way or another, long before they got to business school, how to think integratively. Uh, then they go to business school, then they go out and think integratively, despite what business, uh, school taught them, and then the business school said, see, like, we made that person, right? And, uh, and I just, I just don't think that's the That's the case.

AI assessment note: “Yes, it is. Uh, and, and, That's a more daunting task.”

Q always win. And then we have to deal with this sort of like timeline difference. If you're the CEO of a company, I mean, what's your average tenure? It's a couple of years, right? So you have to sort of like get in, do your thing and get out. And you're not thinking about it from a long-term point of view, but I'd love to hear your riff on this.

A Well, I mean, I, I can't do much better riff than you, right? I mean, I think your diagnosis is, is, uh, is bang on. And this is, this is why I think a great A CEO. And I've talked a lot. Uh, you probably know Paul Pullman. He's a, he's a friend of a friend of mine. He's always nice enough to say that I taught him a strategy when he used to be at Procter and Gamble. But we talk about it is that the part of the CEO's job is to create enough of that discretion. So that they can do those things, right? That, uh, that they know are going to be in the interest longterm, like in your case, building up some slack, you know, for the, for the bad times, uh, because if they don't build that up, they will be forced into the a hundred percent efficiency now, and that'll kill them sometime in the future. Now it may not kill them during the time their CEO, uh, but they won't have shown great stewardship for their organization. So So I think you're, I think you're right. And, and it's one of the challenges of the modern capital markets, right? Modern capital markets say, gimme, gimme, gimme, right? If you're not using some money, uh, you know, uh, buybacks, uh, shares or, or, or dividend, uh, back to me, lever your lever yourself up. So if you have a more efficient capital structure, all of all of those things are, are taking away that optimal amount of slack. That that CEO has to make decisi…

AI assessment note: “part of the CEO's job is to create enough of that discretion”

Q Coming back to sort of the leaders that you've worked with, we talked about common patterns of success. Are there common patterns of Failure or self-sabotage that you see repeated over and over again in otherwise smart and decent people?

A Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I mean, a lot of it has to do with this not being, not having a, uh, uh, sort of a deterministic enough view. So the failure mode I see probably more than anything else is Somebody who is what I think of as not strategic, right? Which is that, which is that they believe that they need to always keep all their options open, not make big choices, uh, and sort of see what, see what evolves and, and, and then just react to what evolves. Uh, that's probably, that's probably failure mode number, number one. If that's connected to, and I don't really like people, uh, that's a, that's a sure thing, right? That's a, that's a certain disaster. And if they're just not curious, uh, if somebody comes to them with disconfirming kind of data, they want to suppress it rather than, rather than absorb it and mine it for, for everything they can, uh, they can get. Interestingly enough, that tends to, you know, those two things tend to be linked. Like it is a big system, right? Which is you tend to like people if people are this repository of stuff You can't see.

AI assessment note: “the failure mode I see probably more than anything else is Somebody who is what I think of as not strategic”

Q How do you teach them? How would you teach me?

A I would just work with you. I think practices is absolutely the best. That's what I've gone to with the companies that I work with. I just say, Uh, Shane, what's, what's a choice that you think you're facing? And you say, oh, I really need to decide whether we're going to invest in this thing or that thing. Uh, I think good. Okay. And then I would just, I would just work you through, through a, uh, process the way I would, I would do it. Uh, and then, and you would learn by, uh, doing now I'd explain to you why, why are we doing this? Why, you know, you'd say, no, Roger, it's either this or this. And I'd say, No, it's not. Uh, that's not enough, uh, variety. I want variety. And if you can't come up with variety, that's no problem. Go ask 10 people in the organization and, and, uh, don't stop until you can come back with at least five, six, seven. That includes your, uh, two, but I want another three to, uh, three to five. All right. And, and I'd explain to you why. I'd say you don't have enough raw materials. I don't like either of your choices. Uh, and the reason you haven't paid a choice now is because neither of them are that good. If one of them was awesome, you'd have already made the choice. You wouldn't be asking me. So Shane, uh, we need more raw materials. So go, go get them. And then, then when you come back, I teach you how to play with the raw materials to make a be…

AI assessment note: “I would just work with you. I think practices is absolutely the best.”

Q the MBA is it was so siloed and you're given these models. Here's a finance model. Here's a strategy model. Here's a decision-making model. And we don't think of integrating those models. Can you sort of riff on that a little bit? And in terms of how that impacts education and the role of models Being maybe the best model we have at the time, but not the only model.

A I, the way I think about business education is that it's, it's, you know, I think visualize like one of those little red toolboxes, right? Did you carry it? You come in as a student with that empty and, and you get a bunch of tools, you get a hammer and you get pliers and you get to screwdriver and whatever put in your, in your, in your toolbox and you're taught to size up a problem. And ask the question, is this, is a hammer best for this? Is pliers best for this? Is a screwdriver best for this? Is a wrench best for this? And so it's this job of matching A bunch of narrow models to real world problems. And that's why MBAs unfortunately get, get, you know, uh, get criticized for being these sort of, you know, we had an MBA here and he did this silly thing and the silly thing, if you analyze w what way the person criticized, what the MBA did, it's typically falls into the category of they applied one narrow model to a broad, uh, a broad question. And I understand why they do it. That's what they're taught. That's literally what they're, they are taught. And, you know, you can recall this from your own MBA, you know, when you do a case study, uh, uh, the case has been written to illustrate a tool. Right? The answer comes from applying a given tool, like, and you, and, and we're made to think, oh, these are just general business situations. No, they're not. The, the, the writing o…

AI assessment note: “it's this job of matching A bunch of narrow models to real world problems.”

Q today seem like they have a bit of innovation and be like, they want to be the one to create the iPhone or go zero to one and just create new markets like Facebook or Google. And there's billions and billions of dollars being thrown at these problems in R and D and hiring and the results don't seem to be super effective. Do you have any thoughts on why?

A It gets back to what we talked about earlier, Shane, about science. Charles Sanders Peirce, who's one of the great American pragmatist philosophers with John Dewey and that, that, uh, uh, era and William James pointed out that no new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically. Now just think about that for a second. No new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically. Why? It's linked to what Aristotle said, right? You can't prove something new and different that hasn't happened yet, analytically. And most innovation processes in the world of big companies, right, insist on proof before doing something. This whole notion of like fintech and all this disruption by little, little technology firms is all kind of self-induced.

AI assessment note: “most innovation processes in the world of big companies, right, insist on proof”

Q Where should that start, that integrative sort of teaching, and what should it look like? You, you sound, you strike me as somebody who's thought about this a lot more than the average person.

A I think I have. And, and I've been taught things that I didn't, I for sure didn't expect or, or understand. So as, as you may, may know, I introduced this concept of integrative thinking. I wrote a book on it and introduced the concept of it to, uh, to business education, to the Rotman school. Uh, and I had a student, a wonderful student by the name of Ellie Avishai, uh, who came from an unusual background. Primary education. She was a school teacher before coming in, doing an MBA. She loved integrative thinking and said to me as she was graduating, Hey Roger, I think you can teach this to younger people than MBAs. And I said, okay, let's see. And we arranged through a, through a friendly, friendly person to test it out at an all girls high school called Branksome Hall. And it was spectacularly successful. And it was an eye-opener to me because these girls who were grade 10 girls, so they had definitively six fewer years of formal education, right? Grade, uh, 11, grade 12, four years of, of undergrad compared to our MBAs and our MBAs on average have about four and a half years of work experience. So they have 10 and a half less, yeah, fewer years of life experience and their ability to come up with integrative answers. Was a hundred percent as, as good as, uh, as the MBAs. And so I said, I said, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. What does this mean? You kind of, this means that tha…

AI assessment note: “I think you can teach this to younger people than MBAs.”

Q Well, luckily it all worked out, right? Like had it not worked out, I'm, I'm curious to see if he would have thrown you under the bus or sort of, uh, I guess only, only you would know that in him, but, uh.

A Yes. And I got to say Adel, Adel, who then went on to be a president of, uh, University of Waterloo is great man. And he didn't like, I had, I had my faith properly, properly placed. He followed through and it was hard. He got a lot of pushback. Are you doing a special deal? And dah, dah, dah, dah. And the thing that makes me happiest is, is, uh, then David Naylor, when he became a president of University of Toronto, he applied the Rotman system to the whole university. There's a better system for, for being able to plan for the longterm. So, so I, yes, I wanted to make sure Adel stood a hundred percent by me.

AI assessment note: “I had my faith properly, properly placed. He followed through and it was hard.”

Q Oh, that's so fascinating. Have you seen, I want to come back to that in a second. Have you seen a lot of changes in terms of the incoming students, like with these girls that you sort of went back to in grade 10 and you taught them integrative thinking, have they had like tangible or quantifiable sort of results that are different as a result?

A They, it's more anecdotal, but yeah, lots of them, lots of them You know, come back to us and tell us, tell us stories of what they, what they've done and what they've been, uh, up to, although, or they'll go back to their teachers and, and, and, and tell them. I mean, it is something I'm encouraging the, I think people to do is, is start collecting more data to show the, the effectiveness of it. We have some great stories. There's one of our absolutely fav teachers teaches grade three and four, and she was teaching grade three in a big school, right, that has a bunch of classes of, of each, and the grade four teacher, you know, came up, came up to her at, you know, at, at lunch and said, uh, you know, in the first week, uh, let me name a bunch of names, and you tell me, uh, whether they were in your section Of grade three, and she goes, you know, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and, and, uh, and our, and our teacher is like, well, how do you, how do, how do you know that? And, uh, and the, the grade four teacher just says, they're like, they behave completely differently. They ask a different set of questions. Uh, you know, they do this, this, this, this, and, and our teacher was sort of like, you know, that's good, but she was a hundred percent accurate without, without, without knowing she was a hundred percent accurate in identifying, uh, our, our teachers, uh, Uh, graduates. And then…

AI assessment note: “it's more anecdotal, but yeah, lots of them, lots of them”

Q to come to strategy in a second, but just before we leave integrative thinking here, are there limitations to this idea? I mean, it sounds very, um, novel to be faced with a hard choice with trade-offs and come up with an option that sort of like mixes the This either or thinking and where do you see this falling apart and where do you see it really under applied?

A Well, I see it under applied in the world in general, right? Uh, I guess is, is, uh, uh, is my view. Lots of people just ask me, you know, about limitations and should you do this all the time and the like? And I say, listen, if the choice is, is between kind of lying on the beach or getting kicked in the groin, You don't need to use integrative thinking. I'll take lying on a beach, right? But it's when, it's when you feel like, oh, I, I, I hate, I hate the fact that I have to, that I apparently have to choose here. So you don't love either option, either choice, and, and you, and that's the time. That's, that's when a little light should go off in your head and say, ah, stop, don't choose, because you don't like, uh, either. But I mean, I use it, All the time. I mean, I'm feeling all cheery these days about Tennis Canada, uh, because, uh, this Monday in the rankings, the, the men's rankings in this case, in this case, we're doing well on the women's side too, but in the men's ranking, Canada had three players in the top 20. Interesting fact is that this is the first time in Canadian history that we had the most Players in the top 20. We were tied with Russia. Russia's got three. We've got three. US, Spain, all these other powerhouses, uh, uh, have, have fewer. Before, 2005, when we put in place the Tennis Canada strategy that's resulted in this, we had zero in history. What wa…

AI assessment note: “But I mean, I use it, All the time. I mean, I'm feeling all cheery”