by John Furlong
Understanding the individual players on the executive team allowed for an environment that was more open, understanding and effective. Books on team building and team dysfunction were circulated for reading. When I talked to my team, I drew on my experiences as a coach. Players who are not prepared to declare their vulnerabilities, such as an injury, fear or lack of confidence, will cause great grief in the dressing room—and on the field. By not being upfront and honest they hurt their team. I told my team it was really important that if people weren’t sure of themselves they were to raise their hand and declare it. I didn’t give a damn how badly they felt about it—on this squad it was a sign of strength not weakness.
I was not about to allow the vision for the project, or our mission and values, to be overpowered by a strong lineup of assertive individuals. That is why it was so important to embed these ideals as deeply into the organization as possible and to constantly reaffirm them. As a group, we decided that the vision, mission and values would always be our moral compass, the thing that we would use to strengthen ourselves when we were tested or feeling lost. And we agreed that no individual would be allowed to join the company if we felt that person couldn’t live our culture.
Our vision for the 2010 Winter Games had always been that they would be Canada’s Games—even during the bid phase. We recommitted to it when we became an organizing committee. Our mission was to touch the soul of the country, get inside its heart. After the Summer Games in Beijing, many people asked me how we were ever going to top that. My answer was easy: that’s not what we were trying to do. We were not looking to provide a spectacle; we were looking for something that was deeply moving, that would leave behind an emotional legacy for the country. If people didn’t care deeply about these Games, our legacy wouldn’t last a weekend.
Establishing the values that would guide our organization was serious but invigorating. We wanted principles that would allow us to build a consistent code inside the company, and provide us with a yardstick against which we could measure potential partners. If we felt Company A didn’t share our values, we would leave money on the table and walk away. Our values would be so ingrained that we would know instantly if something was off with a potential business partner.
Teamwork was our number one value but not something we were particularly good at in the beginning. Coming out of the bid phase, we were a bit arrogant and self-satisfied. We didn’t immediately embrace new partners like Bell Canada and the Royal Bank when they came aboard. We had to grow a bit as an organization before we could see that we were at times standing in our own way to the detriment of the overall project. Every partner represented a teammate who could do something to help us succeed. So it was best we treat them like friends. Our mantra became “We all cross the finish line together.”
Trust was another of our values. If you were working outside my door, it was important that you knew I had faith and trust in you. We needed every employee to know and feel that it was up to them to make the Games great. Whatever their job we wanted them to feel it was the most important one in the company and that what they produced must be perfect. We tried to get people to look at their work and never be satisfied, never settle.
When we came home from Prague someone asked me to describe the culture of our organization. I said if you put a sign over the front doors it would read: BEYOND HERE EVERY SINGLE THING MATTERS. Excellence and creativity were our other values, for obvious reasons. Everything needed to be first-rate, and we were surely going to need non-traditional solutions to everyday problems. More than once we had to pull a rabbit out of an empty hat.
The last value was sustainability. One member of the board, Jim Godfrey, was adamant on this. He had allies in board member Judy Rogers and several members of the executive. I wasn’t so sure. I thought it was one of those politically correct words that didn’t have a clear meaning. Did it mean the greening of the Games? Cutting down fewer trees? A smaller this and a smaller that? What does sustainability really mean, I asked. From Jim came the answer I will never forget: “It means you do what’s right every time, period.” That principle couldn’t be any more evident than it was a few years later when we were involved in some construction in Whistler. At one point, our staff had to move dozens of frogs and tadpoles by hand to a location 40 metres upstream. They would do this, at great cost, on five different occasions during work on the men’s and women’s downhill runs.
That’s what was meant by doing the right thing. In front of the camera or behind it our behaviour needed always to be impeccable. No exceptions. Our reputation was the one asset we had that was priceless, so we needed to protect it at all costs. Lose it and we would lose ourselves.
DESPITE ALL THE team building that we had done, life was far from smooth for us. The first few years in the life of an Olympic organizing committee are always challenging, but we had an additional problem that was making our job even harder: an underlying tension was building between the executive and the board of directors. We were like oil and water sometimes.
We felt that some of our board members were putting the needs and desires of the stakeholder group he or she represented ahead of those of the organizing committee and the Games. If we were going to succeed we needed everyone to be united and on the same page.
The other issue that had emerged was leaks, much like what had happened before my appointment as CEO was announced. Sensitive information we were providing to the board was getting out and sometimes appearing in the press. It was as unsettling as it was infuriating. We did not feel that the boardroom was a secure environment to discuss matters that had, on occasion, the potential to impact a company’s share price if made public.
I also felt there was far too much politics going on. We would make a presentation before the board and often come away feeling that we had not taken advantage of the considerable expertise in the room. On the contrary, we sometimes felt the information we were providing the board was being traded and used to our disadvantage by certain stakeholder groups, such as a city council or a government partner. There were just so many conflicts around that boardroom table. My feeling was that if the board’s modus operandi was to allow seven different stakeholder groups to fish for themselves we were going to be in big trouble. We wouldn’t be able to put on the Games we wanted to. Their job was to be a good team too and to help us be successful.
By early fall, I’d had enough. I was frustrated beyond words. We needed to change the dynamic in the boardroom and convince the directors they were supposed to be on our side—that was the only way it could work. My team needed to be better too. I had talked to Jack about this on many occasions, and he completely agreed. He knew we had a problem and that something had to be done—but that did not make dealing with it any easier.
In mid-October 2004, we were going to be announcing our first major sponsorship initiative and we’d come down to two bidders. The board was holding a retreat in Whistler before its October meeting and that is where we were making our presentation on the deal. Outnumbered though I would be, I thought that this might be the best time to speak to the board about our concerns. I began by telling the directors that I understood how difficult their job was—on the one hand, they were representing entities that were negotiating with VANOC; on the other, they were supposed to be looking out for the greater interests of the organizing committee. But, that said, we were all supposed to be playing for the same team. Unfortunately, I continued, my executive was worried about the sanctity of the boardroom. We felt that some directors couldn’t be trusted to keep the information we were giving them confidential; there had been too many leaks.
I had to give them examples of what was going on, which meant awkward innuendo and finger pointing. Some board members resented being told they weren’t trusted and said so. One director later called me borderline impudent. I told them that regardless of whether they felt the charge against them was warranted, the executive was having a hard time and morale was suffering. Although I acknowledg
ed that the scattergun approach had annoyed the innocent members, at least now the healing could start.
(I knew I was taking a personal risk in being this direct. But I figured it was better than trying to solve the issue behind the scenes, working one director off against another. Still, there was a good chance I had offended a lot of people in that room, and depending on how it turned out I may or may not have a job after it was over.)
By the time I finished, the divide between the executive and the board was as wide as the Grand Canyon. A team? I don’t think so. Not even close.
Later on, Jack and I met in my hotel room. “My God, you’re unbelievable!” he said. Jack did not much like conflict so he couldn’t fathom how strident I was with the directors. It was a side of me he’d never seen before. But he still agreed something had to be said.
Members of the executive drove up from Vancouver that night to have dinner with the board. Everybody was polite and friendly, but there was an undercurrent of tension. No one was happy, least of all me. After dinner I had a separate meeting with my team and told them what had transpired earlier in the day. I warned them that the sponsorship presentation to the board the next day was going to be challenging, and we needed to perform at our best.
The meeting would have its noisy moments, but ultimately the board signed off on our proposal. We had received so much pushback on our recommendation that it did not feel much like a win for my team. Before leaving the room, I reminded the directors that this was a strictly confidential matter and that we would be advising the two companies of our decision as soon as we could meet them face to face. I figured that after my earlier conversation with the board, we didn’t need to worry about any more leaks.
Wrong again.
Dave Cobb and I drove to Vancouver right after the meeting. We hadn’t been in the car 15 minutes when my phone rang. It was a good friend who had been heading up what turned out to be the losing bid. “So,” he said, “I understand you’ve made a decision. You might have had the courtesy to let me know in advance, given our long-standing relationship.”
I felt an inch tall. A grenade went off in my head.
I couldn’t believe it. Someone on the board had struck again— even after my warning about leaks. I was furious. I had no choice but to deny that a decision had been made, but my friend knew beyond all doubt this wasn’t the case. When I got off the phone I called Jack and told him what had happened. We agreed that we would investigate fully and confront the board with this information as soon as we could.
I told the directors when we finally did meet that we had a pretty good idea who leaked the information and that as soon as we had it 100 per cent confirmed we would be reporting back to them. Mostly, I wanted to drive home that we were on top of what was going on and determined to root out those who were not working in our best interests. The strategy worked: this would be the last time such a breach occurred. The boardroom became airtight. Score a point for team building.
Our problems with the board didn’t end—not entirely anyway. During the next couple of years, I picked up rumblings about a power move to replace Jack with someone else. There was a feeling among a minority of directors that he and I were too close and that Jack wasn’t objective enough about the job I was doing and the decisions the executive was making. There were some on the board who had the mistaken impression that Jack was meant to be chair only for a couple of years before stepping aside. That was never meant to be the case. Or if it was, it was news to me. For his part, Jack insisted on being reappointed as chair every year. He wanted to earn his spot the old-fashioned, democratic way, by a majority vote of the directors, and did not accept a lengthy term on the board like everyone else.
The executive was made aware of the chatter about replacing Jack, and as a group we made a decision to rally around his leadership. I certainly made it clear to the board, through back channels, that if Jack went I would be gone and some members of the executive team would probably leave too, which would lead to an incredibly messy and unstable situation at the organizing committee. To us Jack was a rock, a giant.
Luckily, that disaster never came to pass.
5
Calls for My Head
I WASN’T LONG into my tenure as CEO when I realized there was a massive problem lurking on the horizon. Not the distant horizon, either. It was barrelling right toward us.
At the time we were bidding to stage the Games, we had to build a plan as if we were holding them in 2002. That meant that our $470-million construction budget was not going to be enough for us to build the sport venues in five or six years’ time. I knew this was going to be an issue from the beginning, but those were the rules by which all the bid cities had to play, and we followed them. The explanation we were given was that this stipulation allowed the IOC to evaluate the relative merits of each bid without having to factor in inflation and other economic elements, which could be radically different from country to country, from year to year.
Bid cities provide dramatically different construction programs because they all have different visions. Some undertake massive infrastructure projects—such as Sochi, Russia, which is building almost everything from scratch—while others don’t. We focused on using existing structures and building as little as possible. We were all about sustainability, and for us less was more. Still, we were going to have to do some construction and we knew the cost was going to be greater than what we projected it would be in the bid book because of inflation alone. It had to be. What we didn’t know when we were designing our original budget was the multiplier impact a red-hot economy would have on the construction industry. The price of everything was sent soaring.
Looking back, if I have any regrets, it’s that we didn’t better explain to the public at the beginning that our construction budget was probably going to need to be increased. We should have better clarified how the IOC bid process worked and why our financial plan was going to have to be reworked to account for a rise in the cost of labour, materials and other inflationary elements of the construction industry. Here we were, an Irish minute into the project, faced with having to ask the federal and provincial governments for more money—and having to tell the public that our costs were going up. Talk about having a queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach. I could picture the screaming headlines about cost overruns and the comparisons with other Olympic cities that had ended up mired in debt.
Everyone at VANOC knew this was going to be one of those storms we were going to have to just get through. Perhaps our first big test.
As an organizing committee, we were unique in that we had asked upfront that the construction program be our responsibility. Most Olympic organizing committees delegate that duty to another company altogether. That company then carries responsibility for all costs, and if there are overruns it—not the organizing committee—has to go cap in hand to some level of government for more money. But we felt that model hadn’t worked well in the past. Most recently, construction on venues for both the 2004 and 2006 Olympics was still being done mere weeks before the start of the Games. Costs went way over budget, and the headlines were ugly. In both cases, the overruns would taint the Olympics. We wanted to control our own destiny, especially given that our reputation was our single biggest asset.
Before we announced that we were looking for more money, we had to demonstrate that we had already tried to trim construction costs as much as we could. This meant taking an almost forensic look at every project and seeing if we could cut something out of the original design to save a few bucks while not harming the integrity of the venue itself. It was vital that we demonstrated to taxpayers that we understood and respected the fact that this was their money and we were not going to be frivolous with it in any way.
The evolution of the Richmond Olympic Oval is a good example of our taking a hard second look in light of the funding challenges that were confronting us. In our original plan, the Oval was slated to be built at Simon Fraser University for an estimate
d cost of about $63 million. But by the spring of 2004, that projection was already out of date and under pressure. We now estimated the Oval could cost as much as 20 per cent more, given that a lot of construction materials, such as concrete and steel, were rising at ridiculous rates almost weekly. Steel prices had more than doubled over the previous year, and concrete costs were three to five times higher. Greater Vancouver was in the midst of a construction boom, so workers were in high demand and their rates were going up as well. We were facing this perfect storm of circumstances that was attacking our bottom line.
It didn’t take long for the media to conclude that if the costs to build the Oval were up 20 per cent, the cost of everything else was probably going up by a similar rate. And every time the media went to a provincial or federal politician, the answer was “There’s no more money,” which we read as we’d better pull out all the stops. The punditry portrayed us as being in trouble and perhaps in over our heads. The situation forced us to be ultra-creative.
We had hoped that the Oval would be a major contributor to sport programs at SFU long after the Games were over. It was expected that the university would also make a significant investment in the project. But it quickly became apparent that almost the entire cost of the project was going to be borne by us. The university was going to come up with $5 million and no more. With costs rising at the rate they were, that wasn’t going to be enough unless we were prepared to put up a building that resembled a giant shed.
One day I was driving home to suburban Richmond and got stuck in a rush hour traffic jam. I started daydreaming about the Oval challenge. It occurred to me that the City of Richmond had invested $500,000 to help us secure the bid without any expectation it would get something in return. Sitting in my car, I mapped out on a scrap of paper the potential sports legacy a structure like the Oval might have in a community like Richmond. I figured Richmond, with its entrepreneurial partnership-like spirit, might be interested in taking this project on.