White with blue stripes and discreetly lettered CF-BNK, the Hawker Siddeley jet sat on the tarmac like an ocelot straining at an unaccustomed leash. An aircraft is the ultimate business status symbol, the corporate magic carpet awaiting the owner’s bidding.
A black Cadillac pulled up. Out clambered Bill Mulholland, chairman and CEO of Bank of Montreal from 1979 to 1989, with the measured gait of a man who knew that whomever he was meeting would patiently await his often belated arrival.
For my part, the five-and-a-half hour flight from pc28to Calgary in 1982 was an exceptional amount of time for a journalist to spend with his quarry compared to the usual 30-minute interview in some workplace. Beneath Mulholland were 1,200 branches and 27,000 employees with offices open twenty-two hours every day, somewhere in the world.
The bank was moribund when he arrived in 1975. The turnaround was quick. “I just knew when the engine had caught, sometime early in 1977,” he said. By 1978, two-thirds of the thirty vice-presidents there when he arrived were gone.
The U.S.–born Mulholland had a Harvard MBA and experience at Morgan Stanley where he masterminded a $500-million bond deal for the Churchill Falls power project in Labrador and then went to work for the builder, Brinco.
For much of the flight Mulholland talked to me while he stood in the aisle of the plane, elbows against the chairbacks. At five-foot-nine and 190 pounds, he looked like a Notre Dame fullback. A cap of close-cropped grey hair topped a head perched directly on his body. He seemed to have no neck, his shoulders frozen in an eternal shrug.
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Mulholland was not the most courteous individual. He’d been known to hear some brave executive begin a sentence, then override those faltering words with multiple paragraphs of his own that swept away the other’s thoughts like waves erasing names in the sand. It’s as if no one else could speak, or even exist, except as up against a wall against which Mulholland’s own words were tested and never found wanting.
On this flight, 35,000 feet up, banking was not the only thing on his mind. He recounted war stories from his time with the U.S. Army in the Philippines during the Second World War. One tale was about an enemy sniper who was a poor shot. While telling the anecdote, Mulholland laughed so hard that tears formed in his eyes and his entire body shook as his coffee sloshed around in its mug while his free hand punctuated his words.
On stage that evening, Mulholland’s light-hearted manner continued with oil-patch executives attending that year’s Outlook Conference. “I get a sense of pending tragedy,” he began, “when I see the smiling hopeful faces, and I know what’s in store for you. You’ll go out trembling wrecks, dabbing at your eyes.”
The group survived the forecast then moved to a dinner of salmon with fine wine. Guest speaker was Arthur Laffer, the laid-back Californian author of the Laffer Curve which argues a capitalist theory that lower tax rates can actually increase government revenue. Mulholland was still in a merry mood when he introduced Laffer. “Mr. Laffer has told me,” he began with a smirk, “that his favorite curve happened when a bikini dropped off one shoulder.” Mulholland waited for the laughter to subside, and then added, “That’s my kind of economist.”
When the evening was over, it was well past midnight by the mental clock that had begun ticking inside Mulholland’s head when he left Toronto. He’d been aboard the flight, met with Calgary staff, oversaw a two-hour presentation on the economy, a reception, dinner and another speaker. All this with not a hair askew nor a word put wrong.
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Earlier in the day, Mulholland, who died in 2007, had taken several runs trying to explain banking to me. “Banking is intellectually challenging — if you enjoy doing puzzles.” He tried again. “You’re doing it from duty. Not doing it is not acceptable. It’s not the sort of thing you take off like a coat. You just can’t go to the directors and say, ‘Chaps, I’ve had enough.’”
“I don’t really do banking. I don’t get to do the equivalent of kicking the tires. I used to like going out with the geologists when I was at Brinco, out into the field. That was fun. I’d feel guilty — the Presbyterian genes in me coming out, I guess.”
“The ultimate accolade is when they say: ‘Mulholland, we don’t need you anymore.’ Like man’s earliest effort, you have created a tool that can be used over and over again. In fact, there’s no way of knowing how you did until after you’ve left.”
With that, he climbed into another Cadillac come to do his bidding. Driver, he said, to immortality, please.
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