The Standouts

Aretha Franklin demanded it. Rodney Dangerfield couldn’t beg, borrow or steal it. The rest of us try to earn respect the old-fashioned way, by paying our bills, standing up for the occasional principle and just plain doing the right thing. But it can’t be bought or sold

Jun 1, 2007  

by Tom Keyser

A concrete example is the company’s Centennial Learning Centre, an on-site “campus” set up to drill executives, middle managers and ordinary staffers in fundamentals of PCL corporate culture. More than 10 years ago, PCL’s management team projected an acute shortage of skilled labour, particularly out west. Anybody with even a cursory interest in the industrial construction sector knows how shrewd that perception turned out to be.

In response, managers set about crafting long-range plans to deflect the impact of the inevitable. And the learning centre is one result, a training facility where professionals teach rookies and veterans alike how to plan projects, prepare estimates, draw up schedules, estimates and cost analyses the PCL way. Bonus: the PCL campus has been granted gold-level LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certification, emblematic of the highest standards of energy efficiency and sustainability.

Public-sector institutions were also placed under the Alberta Venture microscope and the University of Alberta aced every test. Privately, many hard-core business types admit they find it hard to shake a vague distrust of the groves of academe. But Indira Samarasekera, U of A president and de facto CEO, has the gumption and the intellectual tickets to unlock every door that separates campus and corporation.

As the antithesis of the stuffy, disengaged academic, the U of A’s twelfth president combines an unpretentious personal style with an authoritative resolve. A thoughtful listener, she’s also fluent in corporate lingo, after a lengthy and distinguished career as a metallurgical engineer.

In short, Samarasekera believes in excellence, in the classroom as well as the research lab. Her reputation preceded her. Not long after she moved to Alberta from the University of B.C. in 2005, she was invited to join a panel of business brains, including Research In Motion Ltd. co-founder Mike Lazaridis and Toronto financier Joe Rotman, to help the feds decide how to streamline the process for bringing new technologies from conception to
market.

“We (the universities) are significant generators of new ideas, of discoveries, that can lead to the creation of new high-tech industries which would then… create more jobs and more wealth,’’ Samarasekera recently told a reporter.

And while she’s justly proud of the U of A’s track record in this area – campus labs have served as launching pad for more than 70 active companies – she worries that the private sector’s own research labs are currently underutilized. It’s a message she takes to the streets – and to corporate boardrooms – as frequently as she can.

While most of our 2007 Most Respected Corporations list testifies to the endurance of good brands, that doesn’t stop the odd turnaround story from moving up. A dozen years ago, it’s unlikely the Calgary Exhibition & Stampede would have registered more than a hiccup on any scale of public esteem. Fairly or otherwise, the home of the “Greatest Outdoor Show On Earth” was perceived to be insular, aloof, even arrogant. It was tapped out of ideas, with all its vision reflected in a rear-view mirror. To their credit, Stampede board members eventually accepted the fact they had a major public-relations problem. Six years ago, they retained an Edmonton firm of reputation-management specialists and asked the pros to try and set things right.

“Since then, we’ve opened our doors to the community because we recognized that we used to be kind of a closed shop,” explains local businessman George Brookman, who began his tenure as Stampede president and board chair this spring.

In a revitalization effort, younger people have been aggressively recruited to augment the not-for-profit organization’s core of 2,300 volunteers. Meanwhile, top hands such as Steve Snyder, CEO of TransAlta Corp., and Sherali Saju, a ubiquitous local businessman with a dazzling community-service record, have been drafted to sit on the board, where they’ve made a tangible impact. As Brookman puts it, they were “outsiders, people who didn’t grow up in the (Stampede) family.”

Newly fortified by fresh blood and a fresh new brand, the Stampede is at last moving forward on its endlessly-debated $550-million expansion plan, crafted by Calgary architect Rick Singleton and scheduled for completion in 2020. Now ranked tops in hospitality/tourism by Alberta Venture readers, the Stampede’s self-imposed stint in reputation rehab can be proclaimed a success.

But that’s generally how respect works. If you don’t have it, you can flood the Internet with upbeat news releases and still never drag your share price up from the gutter or become an employer of choice.

But if you’ve got it, hold on tight. Nurture it, water it like a fragile plant. If you’ve got respect, other good things seem to fall into place.

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