Dr. Anne Golden, C.M.
President and Chief Executive Officer,
The Conference Board of Canada
Friday, November 18, 2011 at 9:30 a.m.
Great Hall at Hamilton Place - 1 Summers Lane
I am delighted to be receiving this honour from McMaster University. In doing so, I am very conscious that McMaster, which is regularly ranked in the world’s top 100 universities, with graduates in more than 120 countries, has Ontario roots that go back 175 years to the days of Upper and Lower Canada (for you historians). Since then, McMaster has grown and flourished as a seat of learning, generation by generation.
McMaster has been a good friend and partner of the Conference Board of Canada. One of my early decisions as President of The Conference Board was to partner with McMaster University in establishing the Directors College to deliver corporate governance education to board directors and senior executives. The graduates are granted the coveted McMaster University C.Dir. designation. McMaster is the first university in Canada to grant a formal designation for corporate directors.
I’m also pleased that McMaster University is very active in our Quality Network for Universities. In fact, Dr. Peter Smith, Associate VP Academic, who was born and raised in Brazil, is playing an important role in helping us organize a site visit to universities and education departments next year in Brazil.
At the risk of striking a sobering note on this most wonderful day for each of you and your families, today’s reality is that we live in turbulent times. Most of that turbulence these days seems to be economic. We are immersed in the terms of the “dismal science”, economics: mortgage meltdown, double-dip recession, sovereign debt defaults, potential European bank failures, the American debt ceiling debacle…all very depressing.
But I have to tell you – linked to this economic gloom is something more fundamental. All the stories of excessive borrowing, debt-driven overexpansion, and governments paralyzed in deadlock – in the U.S. and in Europe – lead many people to feel that matters are spinning out of control. Visceral anxiety is growing that economies won’t recover, that high unemployment will continue, and that leaders and the institutions they run are simply not up to the task.
This is the topic that I wish to explore with you today – the growing lack of confidence and trust in leaders and institutions: in the private and public sectors; in banks and other corporations; in politicians and the public service; and in the media – and what we can do in response.
Any society is built on trust. We trust that we can walk safely down our streets. We trust that money we put into the bank will be there when we need it. We trust that the airplane we take has a trained pilot and will not fall out of the sky.
But in Canadian society today, we are losing trust in free markets to deliver steady improvements in our family incomes and standard of living – and we are losing trust in the ability of governments to limit the market’s excesses. The snowballing worldwide protests that began in New York on Wall Street as a rallying cry against income inequity and a recovery that left the majority behind have given voice to this lack of trust.
What do I mean by trust, and why does it matter? When I talk about trust, what I mean is the threshold in our minds that determines whether we are willing to engage in cooperative behaviour in the face of risk and uncertainty. Trust means counting on others to act with the same competence, integrity and goodwill that we ourselves bring to the table.
The relentless erosion of trust that we have been seeing for years now strikes at the heart of our ability to prosper – in our workplaces, in our communities and as a nation.
We live in a highly competitive and rapidly changing world. Competing effectively requires innovation. Innovation requires a willingness to take risks. And to be willing to take risks as a group, we have to trust each other.
What can you, as this country’s future leaders, do about this growing public cynicism?
First, you can commit to always acting personally in a way that engenders trust, that makes you worth trusting. You, yourself, can commit to being honest, to demonstrating competence in what you do and to communicating with transparency to everyone you deal with, be it customers, employees, or the public. This may sound simple, but these qualities are too often lacking in our leaders.
Second, you can engage personally in helping to find solutions. When any of us confronts a problem, we essentially have two options. We can reach out, engage with the issue and help deal with it. Or we can hunker down, build walls around ourselves and passively hope things get better.
Over the past decade, I have seen all too much building of walls and too little constructive engagement. When major corporations like Enron and Worldcom betrayed our trust, we passed more laws and regulations that we hoped would stop that from happening again. It’s become a reflex: when bad things happen, make more rules.
It’s an approach that may make us feel safer, but it creates two new dangers. First, it can lead to us trying to regulate conduct so minutely that nothing bold, or innovative, or risky, ever gets done. Second, citizens who feel comfortable only behind walls become less and less willing to engage in the public realm.
For our democracy to be healthy – and for our economy to be healthy – we need citizens to be politically engaged. I don’t mean political in a partisan sense, although partisan debate and competition should help shape better public policy. I am thinking more of the original Greek term politeia, of how we organize and govern ourselves as a society, including the conditions and rights of citizenship.
We need citizens to be engaged in our shared institutions – in our businesses, in our communities, in our governments. We need people willing to work “hands on”, to grapple with the problems that come up, to suggest solutions, and to help us make the most of the opportunities that result.
Engagement in this sense is not just good for you and good for those around you. Engagement is a moral imperative: it is the right thing to do. I subscribe to the Jewish principle, with which I was raised, of tikkun olam – repairing the universe – that each person must strive to make better the society of which he or she is a part.
To be cynical, to be passive, is to undermine the future both for ourselves and for others. What each of you in this room chooses to do – or not to do – matters to all of us.
That may seem a provocative statement. Especially in the early stages of your careers, it may seem hard to see how you, as one person, can make a difference as a small cog in a big company, in a sprawling government bureaucracy, in the life of our country. But my experience suggests that you can – indeed, that it is individual leaders who are pivotal in creating the climate of opinion that ultimately determines when and how change happens.
Much has been written and said about leadership over the years. And most of the definitions and formulae boil down to five characteristics: vision; the ability to focus and set priorities; a drive to excel, including passion and commitment; innovative thinking; and effective communication. All of us have those qualities in some measure.
None of us is great at everything. But all of us can choose to stand for something; choose to engage; choose to be the best leaders we can be with the talents we have.
I have benefited hugely from a lifetime of engagement. I first became inspired by issues of urban development, and learned that you can fight city hall and win – you can even take it over. Then I became engaged in my community in a different way, as head of the United Way. And for the past ten years, at The Conference Board of Canada, I have been doing a job where I learn something new every day, where I get to meet and work with exceptional people who care and are committed to important work, and where I feel proud that together, we are making a difference in the life of our country.
I feel very fortunate in the sense that I always have had the luxury of being able to choose only jobs that are worth doing and people worth doing them with. Whether for pay or as a volunteer, these are the only criteria that have mattered to me – because nothing is more important than working with people I trust to express values I cherish.
As new graduates facing a distinctly unfriendly economic climate, you may be wondering whether you will ever have such luxury. And yes, sometimes economic necessity means doing whatever you have to do to pay the bills. But you always have the ability to choose to engage – or not – with the people around you. And if you do choose to engage, if you choose to trust and to work with others toward goals that you share, you can and will make a difference.
At the end of the day, there are only three kinds of people in the world. There are people who make things happen. There are people who watch what happens. And there are those who wonder: “What happened?”
I can tell you that there is nothing more rewarding than being one of the people who makes things happen. Many of you already know that from what you have learned and accomplished right here at McMaster University.
The poet W.B. Yeats once wrote, “Education is not the filling of the bucket, but the lighting of a fire”. Over the course of your lives you will need to keep refilling the buckets of your knowledge so that you can participate intelligently in the public debate on the mind-boggling problems facing global civilization. This alone – staying informed, keeping up to date – is a daunting responsibility in this era of instant information. But this is only half of what you need to do. At a time when we also are bombarded by demands for instant opinions and instant response, it is vital for us to make the time and take the time to reflect – to use the skills of critical thinking that you have honed at university.
I hope that your education here at McMaster has prepared you for this task by stoking the fire of your curiosity to keep learning; the fire of commitment to be trustworthy members of your professions, whatever you pursue; and, as I’ve suggested today, the fire of your determination to be engaged with those in your community who seek to tackle the problems that are now threatening to overwhelm our ability to solve them.
I congratulate you on this day and wish you good fortune.