Gloria Steinem is too political in Toronto

Vanessa Grant, McCarthy Tetrault, kindly invited me to hear Gloria Steinem speak in Toronto. Gloria is an admirable person who has made a huge change in attitudes in society and I was excited to hear her speak and wondered what her message would be.
It was disappointing to hear her start with the right wing's attitude to women's reproduction. According to Gloria, the right wing only want hearth and home and sex is for the reproduction of the species, nothing more. This Footloose style attitude has certainly not stuck around in Canada and as I sat with a table of dynamic female lawyers, all partners at McCarthy, I wondered if Gloria's activist message no longer had the same urgency for North American women.
I also wondered if the American right wing did believe that sex was all around procreation. Quite the image painted by Gloria.

Business must be about values

Ultimately, the finance industry is about trust. The regulators and government can bind up the gigantic finance industry with the tiny ropes of many rules, but like Gulliver, the finance industry will find new ways to free itself.  Business in finance must come down to good human decisions made every day. These simply are too many to be restricted and guided by well meaning government and regulators hovering nearby.

I was at a recent finance event held by CIBC for their partners in the lending industry and was struck by how many of these industry leaders lowered their voices and expressed their concern about the values, or lack of, spreading across the banking industry. This decline in values is a contagion that threatens the investment industry and our economic health.
In the Nineties, companies did spend a great deal of time - and money on expert fees - discussing "Values" and building Values statements. The process of having employees ponder what makes the bank successful over the long run is what counts, along with the interest and sincerity of those executives managing the banks. At the same time, top bankers had to understand numbers and financial instruments like swaps, but to climb your way to the top, you also had to have a strong sense of people.
Sadly, Values consultants got a hold of the concept and many turned a valid part of working together into phony processes not run by the leaders and the output were oily values statements - just adding to cynicism.
I have mentioned before that my uncle ran the insurance division of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and was appalled at the upcoming leadership as the men were purely financially driven. Their lips would curl at the suggestion of having a process for employees to talk about what is the best code of conduct for bank traders to hold in their hearts.
Knights of the Round Table stills fascinates a large audience of young people. What is it about this ancient tale of a Kingdom long ago?
Perhaps it is due to the loyalty of all the knights to help each other and that invisible moral code that bound them all but also made them the best in the land.
As we think about our financial leaders, do they have a moral code that guides their employees? How involved are they at demonstrating daily how to behave? How does each bank leader demonstrate how to make profits? What is the message given on treatment of all clients of the bank - including those faceless traders on the other side of the world who were sold those viral derivatives with mold infested mortgages.
Here in Canada, we are fortunate in our bank leaders like Gord Nixon and Ed Clark. They have risen through the bank hierarchy and are what my uncle would call "true bankers", not the fast thinking corporate finance types who financial engineer profits.
Can the banking and investment system lead the way back from the edge of this madness and build back the trust? How will they demonstrate that business - everyone's business - needs to be built on strong values.
The UBS trader is the most recent rogue trader bringing down the value of a bank. His friends say he was a nice fellow so what happened in his mind? What was it? Greed or pride? I would prefer the latter. On his final Facebook page he asked for a miracle. Could he have done with more emphasis on values?

Roger Martin reinvents the finance system

What makes a the Dean of an MBA school effective? Personally, I appreciate Roger Martin, Rotman, because he puts his opinions down on paper and we benefit from his books but he also participates in public debates.
Here he is with Ed Clark of TD Bank and Arianna Huffington on a panel with The Economist and their video series on the financial markets. Arianna does not agree with Roger Martin's thesis that the system needs regular tweaking just like the NFA. As I am a Director on the board of the Exempt Market Dealers Association, I do agree with Roger Martin. Making changes in the finance industry takes a great deal of time to get through the system and encouraging incremental changes in the rules is good. The danger is that this tweaking will morph into an ever thickening rule book. I am in the private equity industry and as an example of the foolishness of government and regulatory rules, my small office must submit Anti-Terrorist reports every few months as part of our compliance. It is the over-zealous rule book making we all fear.
The comments by Ed Clark also make the video well worth watching, particularly where he answers the question, "Banks are hated by the public - do you think that view is valid?"
http://bcove.me/9g98h0j9

Why do entrepreneurs drop out of school?

A list of top entrepreneurs will reveal that many do not stay in university for very long. What is it that makes them less likely to follow the usual path?
A study of 5,000 business innovators, described in the recent book The Innovator's DNA by Hal Gregersen, Jeff Dyer, and Clayton Christensen, identifies five mental habits that characterize how successful entrepreneurs operate:

1. questioning, 
2. experimenting, 
3. observing, 
4. associating (that is, making connections among disparate ideas), and 
5. networking. 

It is clear that curiosity is at the heart of these mental habits—the desire to find out more about something that one finds interesting, to tinker with it, and to forge something new from ways that have grown stale. Curiosity is fueled by a passion to explore the world.

What did Jobs himself have to say about the genesis of his amazing career? He shed light on this question during his 2005 Stanford commencement address.

Jobs recounted the story of his brief college experience: at seventeen years old, he enrolled in college and then dropped out six months later. He recalled that "I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure that out." Yet he did not disappear entirely from the college scene. He stayed in town, sleeping on friends’ floors and dropping into some college classes that he found interesting. First and foremost among these was a calligraphy class.

This is the part I like in particular as Jobs dos the terrible act of dropping out but then gets to experiment with learning because he is just curious. I often wondered what Bill Gates thought of Steve Jobs' speech when he talks about Microsoft's copying ways.

"Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take normal classes," Jobs recalled, "I decided to take a calligraphy class...I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle…and I found it fascinating." At the time, he thought that his interest was just in fun, without "even a hope of any practical application in my life." But it turned out differently, with world-transforming consequences. "When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, [what I learned in that class] all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac." He added that, since Windows copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have the elegant typography that they all now share if Jobs had not dropped in on that college calligraphy class during his free time of intellectual soul-searching. "Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on."

 Three points from Jobs' commencement address are noteworthy for an understanding of youth entrepreneurship and how it is fostered. First, consistent with evidence presented in studies such as The Innovator's DNA, a principal factor in entrepreneurial achievement is persistent curiosity. Second, many young entrepreneurs are unable to satisfy their curiosity in the context of today's schools and colleges, so they drop out. This has been the response of not just Steve Jobs, but of founders of Microsoft, Facebook, and a host of other contemporary business icons. Third, there is a vast store of useful knowledge available in our academic heritage that can prove invaluable for entrepreneurs who learn it. Jobs found useful ideas in calligraphy; others have found useful ideas in science, engineering, economics, history, art, music, psychology, ancient Egyptian studies, and the list goes on.

Putting these three points together leads to an inescapable conclusion about educational priorities today: They are poorly suited for cultivating the entrepreneurial genius that lies nascent in many young people today. At the K-12 level, amid the frantic pressures to raise student test scores on basic (and usually remedial) skills, stimulating curiosity is barely on the classroom radar screen these days. Many of the subjects that could evoke interest among all of the students who find memorizing basic skills dreary—subjects such as art, music, theater, or emerging media technology—have been squeezed out of the curriculum by budget reallocations intended to make room for yet more instruction in remedial skills. The intention has been to equip students with abilities that can make them "employable."

The Need For Stable Financial Partners

Businesses beneath the $100M revenue mark and who have narrow EBITDAs, below $5M, will be struggling to find banks willing to lend to them over the next year.
After all, if you had one million dollars and you could lend it out, but at such a low rate of return, would you? That is the question banks are asking themselves. Why would they lend to SMEs who do not have the fat in their systems to take more bumps from Europe and American business news? That risk is just not worth the razor thin profits to made from SMEs below $100M.
Yet, unwittingly, banks are allowing direct competitors to flourish in this Scrooge environment because into this risk category steps Private Equity.
Banks are leaving an enormous gap for those who can take the higher risk and who will be more expensive money if the business owner just looks at the interest rate. The Private Equity firms still alive are tough and are flourishing in this hard economy because they are stepping up to invest in business owners and their companies, even if there is risk. They also get in and help grow the EBITDA.
Private equity partners will be there for business owners who realize that they can grow more with more capital and with smart partners at the Board room table. Here is a WSJ story on Private Equity taking over the bank's usual territory - small business. We will be seeing much more of this.

Private equity-backed bank holding company SKBHC Holdings continues to take advantage of the shaky environment for small community banks, picking up Seattle’s Viking Bank. Viking had assets of roughly $400 million and assets of $379 million as of June 30. read more.