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The Montreal Gazette published an excerpt from former Alcan CEO David Culver’s new release, Expect Miracles: Recollections of a Lucky Life.
From the excerpt:
Growing up in Montreal prior to the Second World War, it wasn’t hard for English Canadians to ignore the reality of French Canada. The English and French worlds were quite separate, divided not just by language but also by religion, education, and social class. Montreal was a much more anglophone town then than now, not just because of the economic dominance of its elite but also because of the demographic weight of the English-speaking community at the time.
Although it might have been easy to live in Montreal while ignoring French Canada, its culture and history, that was not the way I was raised.
(…)
From the very beginning my mother (Fern Culver) had French Canadian friends. Granted, they spoke to her in English because her French wasn’t very good, but she saw no difference between French Canadians and anybody else. Fern’s mother was Catholic, and despite her father’s efforts to give her a good Protestant upbringing, my mother quite liked Catholicism. … The upshot of all this was that when I first heard the phrase “two solitudes,” to indicate the mutual isolation of English and French Canadians, I remember being angry and thinking it was a lot of nonsense because I had grown up in an atmosphere where there were no such solitudes. …
When the winds of change blew through Quebec in the 20th century, Alcan became a major catalyst for development, particularly in the aptly named Royaume du Saguenay, the Kingdom of the Saguenay. Along with the pulp and paper industry, in the space of a few short decades Alcan transformed the Saguenay from a sparsely populated region dominated by agriculture and forestry to an industrial powerhouse. And, more remarkable still, this company, with its U.S. origins and multinational ambitions, did so while retaining a remarkably positive rapport with the Quebec public, particularly in the Saguenay.
Over the years, I’ve often been asked why Alcan seemed to have such smooth relations with successive Quebec governments whatever their political stripe. While other large Canadian companies based in Montreal would occasionally incur the wrath of Quebec nationalists and be accused of lacking sensitivity to the French fact or of treating the province like a colony, Alcan seemed to escape that kind of opprobrium. As a company, we always worked hard to have the best community relations possible, whether we were operating in Jamaica or Guinea or Australia. In the case of Quebec I really think that our understanding and appreciation of the province and its people had been imbued in the Alcan culture from its early days and so became part of the company’s DNA.
Click here for the full excerpt
Expect Miracles is the personal and professional story of a leader in the worlds of business and culture. David Culver narrates his journey from his upbringing in Montreal’s Golden Square Mile, through his studies at McGill and Harvard, his army service during the Second World War, to his impressive rise at Alcan to become chairman and chief executive officer of one of Canada’s leading multinational corporations.
The memoir provides an inside look into the management of a global company with roots deeply planted in Quebec and offers pragmatic advice on how to grow talent, foster technology, and handle adversity in a far-flung organization. Anecdotes of meeting the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Jawaharlal Nehru, reveal the experiences of a strong corporate leader who continued to live a Montreal life, while never losing his interest in discovering the world.
To learn more about this book, click here.
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