by John Furlong
I knew the board was meeting that morning to ratify the decision. There was a possibility that the whole thing could still have gone sideways, especially in light of Dick’s rant. But I got a call just after noon asking me to come down to the office. Once there, I was told by Mike Phelps, in the presence of Jack, that I was the new CEO and a news conference was going to be held almost immediately to make the decision public. There was no discussion about a contract. I didn’t even know what the job paid.
The next thing I knew I was walking into a room full of reporters and television cameras being introduced as the CEO and being presented with a sign that said “VANCOUVER 2010—EMPLOYEE NO. 1.”
It was difficult to be upbeat and euphoric, or for that matter even a good sport, given the events of the previous 24 hours, but I tried my best. At one point a reporter asked how much I would be getting paid, and I said I honestly didn’t know. At this point Mike said to everyone: “We already told them it’s $300,000 a year.” So I said, “Well, I guess there you have it.”
It wasn’t a classy way of dealing with the matter, but at this point I just wanted to move on, put the drama of the selection process behind me and start getting to work in earnest, with a new mandate.
I learned later that Dick was one of those on the board who had been holding out for the other candidate, as were France Chrétien Desmarais (the prime minister’s daughter) and Patrick Jarvis and possibly one other. I knew the fact I wasn’t bilingual bothered France and a few others a lot. My Gaelic did not count, I guess. And I couldn’t help feeling that there was some Central Canada bias at work. But I didn’t have time to obsess over what was done. As a result of the delay in selecting a CEO we had lost some ground.
Dick phoned the same day, referring to himself as Darth Vader, and left a message explaining what he had done and promising his support now that we had a decision. He said he hoped to one day eat his words. When we finally talked, I told Dick I accepted his story and said we needed to meet to clear the air. Within a week I was in his Montreal office letting him know what I thought of his attack. I told Dick what bothered me the most about it was the fact he really knew nothing about me and yet he had made assumptions about my character and ability. His suggestion that the premier had pushed for me was too much to take when I had always held the position that I would win the job on merit or not at all.
Around this time, I sat down with my family to explain what this assignment meant. It was going to require an enormous sacrifice for everyone: it would eat up massive volumes of time, and I was not going to be around much. It was going to be tough on my close relationships, no question. The highs and lows would surely be severe. Everyone was supportive and very encouraging. My children recognized that this was an assignment of a lifetime, that Dad was about to do something important for the country.
My proud mom, Maureen, and dad, Jack, on one of my quieter days.
Following Mom’s orders at Christmastime in Clonmel, Ireland.
Prime Minister Trudeau and me at the launch of the Northern BC Winter Games in Prince George, 1978.
The VANOC executive committee: (back left to right) John McLaughlin, Ken Bagshaw, Terry Wright, Dan Doyle, Cathy Priestner Allinger, David Guscott, me; (front) Ward Chapin, Donna Wilson, Dorothy Byrne, Dave Cobb.
Sumi making new friends. The official mascot of the Paralympics was beloved by children around the world.
Governor General Michaëlle Jean signs VANOC posters.
On the floor of the United Nations, reading into the record the 2010 Olympic Truce resolution calling on all warring nations to cease fighting during the Games.
Actress Maria Nafpliotou ignites our flame from sun rays in Olympia, Greece.
Carrying the Olympic flame from the field of the Panathenian Stadium in Athens, heading for Victoria.
The Calgary Islamic School welcomes the torch.
Aboriginals across Canada welcome the torch into their communities.
Proud parents from north to south cheered their athletes on.
Jack called the next day and suggested we spend a few days in Palm Desert, California, to talk about where we went from here. He thought I looked exhausted and might benefit from a few days in the sun, away from the daily calls from the media. So we went south in a small plane he chartered. I told Jack over those days that it was important that the people on the transition team who had been doing Olympic-related work since Prague knew where they stood, what roles they may or may not play in the organization in the future. I was determined not to make any personnel decisions quickly that I might regret later on. I was more preoccupied with mapping out how the organization might be structured so that it could cope with anything thrown at it. I had a few visits from key players on the bid who had, in their own way, advised me that if they were not given senior assignments of the kind they felt qualified for they would move on.
One of those people was Terry Wright, who had done a lot of the key planning work for us during the bid phase. On the surface, Terry would have had the first right of refusal to be VANOC’s chief operating officer, a job he coveted. But I wasn’t prepared to make that appointment so early in the process—besides, there were no operations to be chief operating officer of. I wanted to put together an executive team and then wait and see if the COO emerged from that group. The position didn’t have to be filled until much closer to the beginning of the Games in any event.
Terry wasn’t happy. At one point he said he was going to leave. I think Terry thought I didn’t have confidence in him. It was nothing of the sort. He was eventually going to be given an important area of responsibility: services and Games operations. I told him he needed to understand I was going to build a great organization with great people and he was going to be one of them. But Terry was pretty insistent that he was going to pack it in.
“Before you do I want you to go home and have a conversation with your wife,” I told him. “You live in Victoria, you have young kids, this is the biggest project you have tackled in your life and you’re thinking of walking away from it? I don’t want you a year from now looking back and regretting this decision, especially given you had so much to do with our success. And we need you. So you go home and sit down with your wife and tell her: ‘I’ve been offered this very senior, high-profile, executive vice-president position. I’ll be first among equals, side by side with a team of passionate Canadian stars, involved in every key decision in the organization, and I can come home on weekends, and I will get extra financial support to go back and forth.’”
I knew what would happen if he did. Terry’s wife, Monique, had a way of getting to Terry—they were best of friends. After the weekend, Terry walked into my office wearing a sheepish grin.
“Count me in,” he said.
I was happy to have his signature and his fearless commitment.
Over the next couple of months I spent countless hours with Kyle Mitchell trying to find the right people to fill out the executive team. I told Kyle that ultimately I wanted to have a team of seven to nine executives, each one capable of managing a large, diverse portfolio, each one enthralled with our vision for the Games, each one ready to hit the ground running, each one madly in love with Canada. I envisioned an organization that was, on almost every level, pretty flat. No silos and no walls to interfere with building the kind of teamwork we would need. I wanted my vice-president of marketing to be fully cognizant of what was going on with construction. I wanted my vice-president of construction to be able to ask penetrating questions about marketing issues or HR.
By the time the Games arrived, almost every person on the executive was capable of doing anyone else’s job. That is what I had imagined and hoped for from the outset.
While I hoped that every member of the executive we chose at the beginning would stay the course and have a major impact on the organization, in retrospect it was probably a bit naïve to think every person we picked would succeed. After all, we were asking them to sign up for something that had never
been attempted before—in scope, anyway—and to figure out how to become loyal teammates in a high-stress organization. I think for Kyle it was one of the most challenging assignments he’d ever had, especially with my insistence that we find people of sterling character who could stare down fear; to me that was the number one asset a candidate had to have. Finding such people is not as easy as it sounds. Normally you’d say to a search firm, “I need a guy to dig holes. He needs to be strong, over 250 pounds and needs to have a shovel.” I was looking for skill, sure, but the core strength needed to be something far less tangible.
I felt we should be looking at Canada’s best companies for the kind of executive members we needed at VANOC. We talked about looking at non-traditional candidates, people who had drive, determination, integrity and spirit that stood out. Sleepers ready to show off their stuff.
One of the people I had my eye on was Dave Cobb, COO of the Vancouver Canucks. I had first met Dave during the bid phase when he helped out with our presentation to the evaluation commission on GM Place, the prospective site of men’s and women’s hockey. I was immediately impressed with his unflinching, confident, gungho attitude and crackling intelligence. He was to me what I was not. He had stepped in front of the commission with little time to prepare and given a stellar performance about what a superb venue GM Place would be for Olympic hockey.
When Kyle and I started talking about the qualities we needed in a marketing executive, Dave’s name was the first that popped to mind. But honestly, I thought our chances of prying Dave away from the Canucks were minimal. The Canucks were the biggest thing in Vancouver, and Dave, who grew up in the shadow of the arena where the Canucks once played, had always dreamed of one day working for the organization. Now he was basically running the operation.
Luckily for us the Canucks were going through a period of upheaval. Brian Burke had been let go since I met him after Prague, and there were questions about the direction in which Seattle-based owner John McCaw and his right-hand-man, Stan McCammon, were taking the team. So the door was open a nudge. Dave had maple syrup running through his veins, so I thought I would sprinkle a little Olympic dust on him. I had hoped the opportunity to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime event such as the Olympics would capture his imagination. He could not resist and agreed to join the team. It was a huge announcement for the organization, one that caught the attention of the local business community and helped put us on the map. A few more like him and we could take on anything, I thought.
Over the coming months we assembled our team. For the most part, we picked wisely. Most of those we selected for the executive ended up staying until the end. Unfortunately, there were a few people who did not make it. Jeff Chan, our first vice-president of human resources, was gone in a year. But that opened up the door for Donna Wilson, whom we nabbed from Vancity credit union— which was regularly named one of the top companies to work for in the country. Cathy Priestner Allinger, the speed skating medallist, became vice-president, sport. Cathy had loads of Olympic experience and sports savvy at the executive level and had been discussed in some circles as a potential CEO candidate. She oozed calmness. I thought the sport world would celebrate her appointment and it did.
Ken Bagshaw was secured as our general counsel, a crowning role in an impressive law career; Ward Chapin was in charge of technology and systems, a role with zero tolerance for failure of any kind. We found Ward in France, and I went to Paris to interview him and sign him up. We recruited Steve Matheson from Dominion Construction to head up venue development. Steve is a wonderful guy with impeccable values and a solid track record. Unfortunately, as painful as it was, I would eventually have to replace him too.
The only other change we had to make was our chief financial officer, Rex McLennan. We hired Rex in 2005, and he would stay with us 18 months. The fit was not the best. I was looking for someone who wanted to be in on the ground floor, who was a great teacher and who would help promote the idea throughout the organization that we had to be careful with every dime we spent. We replaced Rex with John McLaughlin, who had been our comptroller almost from the beginning but initially did not seem ready for such a heavy burden. Now he was.
One of the fonder memories from my early days as CEO was renting the Capitol 6 theatre in Vancouver and assembling all members of our transition team one afternoon to watch the movie Miracle. It was the story of the 1980 United States men’s Olympic hockey team that won a gold medal against all odds. I thought there was so much for our group to take from the movie, not the least of which was the message it sent about the power of teamwork. The American coach, Herb Brooks, epitomized leadership and I closely studied the motivational tactics he used to select and get his team ready for its epic showdown with the Russians.
I found the movie extremely moving and deeply inspiring. It was a rags-to-riches story about a group of very human, dynamic but in many ways flawed individuals assembled from college teams. They embraced a collective dream to do something many thought was impossible. After the movie, I remember having a conversation with the group about what they had just seen and how this hockey team’s story was, in some ways, a metaphor for the compelling challenges we would face.
I told everyone that day that if they wanted to be on such a team they could stay and be part of this journey we were embarking on.
But if they felt they couldn’t make such a commitment, could not pour their hearts and souls into this project for a sustained period of time, then they should probably not show up the next day. More than anything, I wanted them all to understand what I was asking them to sign up for. I told them that they were going to be asked time and again to do things they were not going to think were possible. But I also said the sum of the parts of our team could, on any given day, overcome so many obstacles and challenges that at first blush would seem too formidable to scale.
I told them that afternoon that if we didn’t bring the Olympic spirit to the front door of every home in Canada, if we didn’t share this experience with every Canadian family, every Canadian child, then we would have failed. And although on the surface our work might look to others like an Olympic success, it would, in fact, be a tragic Canadian failure and we would always know this. This was not about constructing venues and providing jobs and sparking tourism, but about doing something profoundly human for our country and showing the world what could be achieved when the people of a nation come together to do a great thing.
I was not naïve enough to think everyone bought what I was saying and that everyone necessarily agreed with me. At least not yet. I’m sure there were some in the room that day who thought that over time this grand plan of mine would change, and we would have a sober vision correction, and that practical realities would temper my hyped-up ambitions. But I also knew that there were many who wanted in on the action because the adventure I was proposing was just too compelling to pass up—even though the road to our final destination was likely to be tough and bumpy and fraught with danger.
Happily they all showed up the next day, just as I had expected.
AT THIS POINT there were about 50 of us. I didn’t have my entire executive team in place yet. I was going to be relying, to a large extent, on this core group to build much of the greater organization, one that would swell to more than 1,300 full-time employees by the time the Games rolled around in six years’ time. If this first group really took ownership of the vision, if they understood and believed it was a great privilege to be part of this operation from the outset, they would remind others around them why we were all here. They would ensure we never lost our way. They’d be the leaders who would protect the vision from others who didn’t share it or were working at odds to it.
One of my early concerns was how my executive team would respond when the first crisis struck. As part of trying to understand and anticipate what that reaction might be, we decided to make a real investment in exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the various team members through a number of different workshops.
If we were to be a team then we’d better practise hard.
I have attended different leadership workshops over the years. I remember one in London, Ontario, at which I experienced fire walking—that is, walking on 950-degree hot coals in bare feet and not burning. The course helped cure my fear of flying—actually my fear of anything. We did other crazy things there, like cramming as many people as we could inside a scorching hot pup tent. The idea was to see how long we could last in that stifling, claustrophobic environment. The exercise was supposed to measure tolerance, focus and commitment. In another drill, we fed someone else dinner and vice versa. No talking allowed—a real test of patience. For my Olympic team we had everyone do the Myers-Briggs personality test designed to measure how people perceive the world and make decisions, among other things. It was incredibly revealing, showing that we were blessed with an extraordinary amount of diverse talent but that almost everyone was fiercely competitive. Oddly, I was the only member of the team who was confirmed to be an out-and-out introvert. A “Feeler” is how I was described. Leads with the heart first. I was in one corner of the chart with the rest of my team as far away from me as one could get. Most of the others were heavily Type A: driven, ambitious and tenacious, and typically more detail-oriented than me. My team—rational and logical. Me—driven and aspirational.