Graduation Address

"Notes for Remarks by Tony Comper, President and CEO, BMO Financial Group, Ceremony A." (18 May 2005). (UA Case 67, Box 3)

Thanks so much for the generous introduction, and good afternoon everyone.

I’ll begin with deep-felt congratulations to those hard-working souls of the Class of ’05 at this great university – with which BMO Financial Group has an abiding relationship.

I will quickly add how delighted I am to be presented with an honorary degree from the University of New Brunswick. I can’t speak for every corporate leader who acquires a similar distinction, but given the value I place on education and the respect I have for educators, this honour has special meaning for me.

In exchange I am going to tell you a story I hope will have special meaning for you; or, at the very least, good reason to be optimistic about where most of you are headed next.

If there is one thing I regret about being somewhat closer to the end of my working life than the beginning, it is not being there to witness firsthand as the next generation in to the workplace dismantles what’s left of the hierarchies.

Now I suppose I should sound less jubilant about this turn of events, given how well I fared myself in a just-about-prototypical-hierarchical organization. Let me say several things about that.

To start with, I was one of the very first university grads (and in English, no less!) to be hired at BMO or any other major bank; and for that and, I hope, other reasons, I was moved along fast enough that I rarely had time to get jaded or bored.

What’s more, I zigzagged around to the point where I developed a good working knowledge of just about every business in and of the bank, from the frontlines to the back rooms plus Human Resources and what was at first called "Operations and Systems" – at the very same time, fortuitously, that the digital revolution was dawning.

I loved that job in technology. And not just because it got me into the executive ranks for the first time, either. We were breaking new ground by the day – and taking a still-stalwartly 19th century organization onto the edge of the 21st.

This reminiscence has a point. Until 1996, when University of Toronto demographer Dr. David Foote first published his best-selling Boom, Bust and Echo, I hadn’t known that what I was doing was something he called "spiraling."

And while the corporate culture was already transforming before my very eyes at that point, it had not yet occurred to me that spiraling – mixing lateral moves with promotions, switching disciplines, acquiring new skill sets – would be pegged as the dominant "lifestyle" in an increasingly hierarchy-free 21st century corporate workplace.

From that point on, however, it was hard to see how the revolution could end any other way:

First, the work of organizations like mine had risen to levels of complexity that required at least a university or college education.

Second, such people – exquisitely represented here by the Class of 2005 – are not the type who take kindly to getting "orders from headquarters," or anything else that smacks of regimentation and chain of command.

Third, for demographic reasons of which you are all aware, the graduates of ’05 are entering a seller’s market, more so than I can remember in my own professional lifetime.

Fourth, I have done enough watching and reading to know that, as a generation, you "Echo kids" as Dr. Foote calls you are going out into the world-after-school with (let me stress this) a not-unreasonable sense of entitlement to the good things that our planet really does have to offer these days.

You want a career and an "other life" too? You couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

What it all comes down to is that if we at (say) BMO have hopes of staying competitive in a very touch field – and vie to become the top performer, as we’re doing now – we’ve got to hire and retain the best and the brightest.

Which means we have to make accommodations that I am sure have a lot of the old command-and-control guys just a-spinning in their graves.

As for me, well as I guess you can see, I don’t just accept this turn of events, I revel in it. What’s more, if I may say so, I have done my professional best to push the process along.

When the process is complete at BMO, the very notion of "bosses" and "workers" and a division between the two will have become a quaint memory of the Industrial Age.

In the transformation I’ve set in motion, a manager is a member of a team – the one whose specific talents include facilitation, coordination, communication, and inspiration.

In he new, flattened corporate universe, in other words, it is taken as a given that all colleagues (as we refer to each other at BMO) will treat the success of the organization as a matter of pride, self-interest and personal responsibility.

Is that too much to ask? Of course not. In fact, I suggest that you grads of 2005 ask yourself another very different question: Would you – could you – settle for less in your professional life?

Now I’m not going to tell you that workers, in the modern guise of colleagues and associates, have seized the means of production. And I have no doubt that many members of this graduating class will still have the opportunity to clash with relics and remnants of the "them-and-us" Industrial Age every now and then.

But you know – in fact, I hope you really do know – that as you make your way through the workplaces in the post-industrial age, these will be opportunities not just for one engaging career, but a sequence of engaging careers – and possibly, as in my case, all in the same organization.

I will close by restating how pleased I am that the top-down and issuing-orders corporate world I entered back in 1967 – and which, let’s face it, did okay by me – is vanishing, ever so quietly, into the history books.

It is customary for speakers like me on occasions like this to speak of exciting times ahead, and possibilities yet undreamt of. And given the universe that’s now unfolding, what else – or more – can I say…except to thank you once more for the honour and wish you all wonderful lives.