Fight Club

Students come to Ivey with diverse backgrounds—some are fresh from two years of university, some have PhDs, some are engineers, some are artists. A few have a very special kind of experience: military service. 

The tradition is not new. During World War II HBA students joined the Canadian Officers in Training Corps instead of other extramural activities. After exams in third year, they attended a three-week boot camp at a local golf course. Many went on to active service during the war. John Cheshire, HBA ’43, joined the Army Medical Corps after graduation. He once said that the combination of university and military experience taught him how to assess, motivate, evaluate and reward people—important skills in his subsequent business career.

Of course, military metaphors have always been rife in business speak, which often portrays the market as a battlefield. But is there actually something that business can learn from the military? Professor Gerard Seijts thinks so. In an article in Huffington Post, he wrote “Our troops have long had a reputation for being welldisciplined, highly effective and well led... And the wisdom accumulated by successive generations of Canadian military leaders represents an underutilized Canadian competitive advantage.”

That thinking led to the development of a unique HBA course, Leadership Under Fire: Developing Character, offered in partnership with the Canadian Forces. The course involves three gruelling days of basic training on an army base and presentations by both business and military leaders. Students “stress test” their leadership ability in an environment filled with physical and mental challenge, and learn about their strengths and weaknesses. 

Intouch spoke to four Ivey graduates who have served in the military to find out what they think business can learn from the military, and vice versa.

Matthew Foley, EMBA ’06
Managing Director, Foley Tan Group Pte Ltd

For Foley, who grew up on a cattle ranch in California, the decision to go into the military was an easy one. “My family has a long history of military service going back to the First World War, and given that I was a young man looking for adventure, it made a lot of sense.”

Foley did basic training in Oklahoma, and then was posted to the 175th Field Artillery Unit in Bamberg, Germany, 13 kilometres from the Iron Curtain, from 1986 to 1988. It was the final days of the Cold War and he was part of a special weapons team responsible for deploying tactical nuclear weapons in case of an attack from East Germany. “Fortunately it never happened, but they alerted us all the time,” he says. “I remember a number of occasions when I didn’t know if it was for real or just another drill.” For the final two years of his enlistment, he was stationed with the 101st Airborne in Kentucky, where he was part of a rapid deployment regiment capable of being almost anywhere in the world within 36 hours. “I never saw combat, and I feel very fortunate for that. But at the same time, as a soldier you should expect to be in that situation.”

Foley left the military in 1989, earned a BA and worked for several years as an auditor. Eventually his work took him to Asia, where he has lived for the past 18 years. Strongly committed to lifelong learning, he was thinking about returning to the U.S. to do an MBA when he heard about Ivey’s Hong Kong program. 

Foley says being in the army taught him valuable lessons about leadership. “Military service places you in really tough situations,” he says. “In those situations people don’t necessarily follow you because you tell them what to do: they follow you because they believe in you and your purpose and vision.” Foley says he also learned to develop a strong work ethic and the sense of confidence that comes from “just knowing you can do it.” Equally important in his business career was the military focus on setting targets and doing detailed planning while staying flexible and responsive, and being able to see the bigger picture.

On the flipside, Foley says the military could probably learn people management and motivation techniques from business, especially at a time when the U.S. Armed Forces are getting smaller. “The military needs to find a way to retain their best people by emphasizing merit-based pay, setting up mentoring networks and recognizing exceptional talent—instead of using tenure alone.”

Linda J. Colwell, MBA ’89
CEO, LJ Colwell & Associates

Colwell completed a degree in nutrition and microbiology in her native New Brunswick, and qualified as a dietitian. But she soon found her work in a small hospital wasn’t challenging enough. To move her career forward, she joined the Armed Forces, expecting to spend five years gaining experience. Instead she became a career soldier. She retired as a Brigadier General after nearly four decades of service. “I found my calling,” she says simply.

Along the way she worked on bases in Nova Scotia, British Columbia and Alberta, did three tours of duty in Ottawa, and served with peace-keeping forces in Egypt and in the Sinai. Although not as dangerous as recent Canadian missions in Afghanistan, Colwell admits that “there were times we had to be very alert.”

Initially her career focused on food services and procurement. In Egypt she was one of 54 women and 500 men in the Canadian contingent. “When we had dances, I never sat one out!” In the Sinai she was responsible for feeding the multinational force—a challenge she referred to as “3,000 to dinner.” Eventually she moved into human resources management. “I was able to serve the same employer—Canada—for 37 years, but always with the opportunity for new challenges. And there’s a great comradeship in the Forces. You work and play with the same people—it’s such an intimate relationship.”

Colwell is proud of some of the policies she helped develop during her time with the Forces. She was part of the team that got legislation passed to give pensions to reservists, and she developed policies to provide more help for serving members and their families and people wounded, whether physically or mentally, in the line of duty. “I know the policies aren’t perfect, and there are still people who are not completely served, but things are better, and I had a hand in making them better.”

When Colwell was selected to do postgraduate education, she applied to Ivey for her MBA. She believes the experience made her a better soldier. “The case study method trains the mind to think, to get to the nub of the matter, and to analyze alternatives,” she says. “It also honed my ability to make the case in a few words. That’s so important when you’re dealing with busy superiors, and you’ve got five minutes to brief them.” In addition to using these skills throughout her career, she has taught them to the people working with her.

Colwell believes that one of the most important lessons from her military experience is the difference between management and leadership. “In management you tend to force people to do what you say and that limits your results. Real leadership inspires people, giving them a vision and then they help you do whatever you’re doing.”

What can business teach the military? Colwell says it’s all about measurement. “When you don’t have a bottom line, it’s difficult, but I think business could probably help the Canadian Forces measure success more effectively.”

Don Kester, MBA ’78
Certified Financial Planner

Kester grew up near Washington, D.C. during the war in Vietnam. Recognizing that he was about to be drafted, he enlisted in the Reserves. After he had trained for a year, the troops were back from Vietnam. “I was fortunate to do 20 years in the military between wars,” he says. “I got out just as the first Gulf War was starting.”

Kester was a combat engineer. Combat engineers have the unenviable task of clearing the path for the advancing army and delaying the enemy on retreat—in other words, first in and last out. Two of his former units were deployed to Iraq, and several friends served there, clearing land mines and building roads. As a Reservist, he worked one weekend a month, with two weeks of annual training and the occasional extra duty.

Meanwhile, he was pursuing his fulltime career. After college he worked for a time with a U.S. security service, and then got involved in the overheated Washington housing market. He completed his MBA at Ivey, where he learned an important lesson in cultural differences. “I was in a room where all the people looked and sounded like me, but I eventually realized that Canadians thought very differently. I learned to find out what other people were thinking before I opened my mouth, which was very valuable in the army.” He experimented with several career paths before becoming a successful financial planner.

Kester says he learned many important lessons from his time in military service. He was especially impressed by the U.S. Army’s famous “five paragraph field order” which requires officers to succinctly identify five elements—the situation, the mission, the execution, the resources available, and communications—for any operation. “Although it’s a very structured approach, there is tremendous opportunity for individual initiative,” he says. “It goes down the chain of command right to the squad leader, who has to figure out how to to do his or her part with the resources assigned. It’s the same in business—you need a clear mission, you need to know what you’re working with, and then it’s up to the on-site manager to figure out what to do.”

The U.S. Army has been “abused” in recent years, Kester says. “It’s been given impossible missions in terrible places.” Reservists have been called up to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, used as “fillers” for the regular army. It concerns him that the value of military service is not well understood today. “There aren’t enough people who have friends and neighbours serving. We need to remember that military service is a very honourable choice.”

Lu Li, MBA ’14
Fire Protection Specialist, Hilti Canada

Li was 15, living in a suburb of Toronto, when he decided he wanted to be in the Army. “I always chuckle when people ask me why I joined up,” he says. “I was a teenager—I wanted to drive tanks and shoot guns, and I wanted to be different from my classmates!”

Li attended Royal Military College when he finished high school, and then was commissioned as an Engineering Officer, serving in bases across Canada. One of the first challenges he faced was acting as a representative to the families of fallen soldiers. The first funeral he ever attended was one he had organized. Says Li: “You mature very quickly in the Armed Forces.”

But his biggest challenge was serving as part of the last Canadian combat tour in Afghanistan. He was stationed in Kandahar for eight months. “It was like stepping back into the Middle Ages,” he says. “We were living in mud huts with no electricity, and there were people shooting at us. In Canada you’re not really worried about your next step: over there you live day by day, because that’s really all you can count on.”

After the stint in Afghanistan, Li was looking for another challenge. But transitioning to a new career wasn’t as easy as he thought. “The MBA became a realistic choice when I began to realize how hard it was to translate the experiences I had in the army to civilian employers. There aren’t enough soldiers coming out of the army in Canada for people to understand what that experience means.”

At Ivey, Li found himself learning alongside students with professional designations and years of business experience. It was a daunting experience but one that taught him to “step back and focus on my strengths and weaknesses.” He realized that his time in the military had helped him develop strong leadership skills. “I found that when we were doing business cases, one person might be focusing on the dollars and another might be thinking about the marketing approach, whereas I tended to take a more human approach and look at the issue from an ethical perspective.”

Li served in the Reserves during his MBA—what he describes as his “nicotine patch” for military service. At the end of his Ivey program he left the army to devote himself to the management training program at Hilti. Looking back, he has no regrets. “I entered the military not really knowing what I was getting into, but knowing it was what I wanted to do.”

Photos: Nation Wong
Art Direction: Greg Salmela, Aegis