The next time somebody asks you what you can possibly do with a university degree in philosophy, think of Michael Raynor.
Born in Wasaga Beach, Raynor and his Mum, who was the first female nurse ever to work underground in Canada in the mines of Thompson Man., moved to Mississauga in 1984.
The young man went to high school at Appleby College in Oakville where he and the school team won the national debating championships in Grade 12. He went to Harvard for a degree in philosophy.
Raynor is now one of the young lions of strategic business planning in North America and around the world. His new book, called The Strategy Paradox, is really starting to gain some momentum, although business books are notoriously slow starters. Sitting in his Erin Mills home recently, he talked about how he got his start.
“I was working the night shift at the old Molson Brewery as a summer student. On my breaks, I used to read the want-ads.” One of those ads caught his eye — for a company in Mississauga called Tennessee Associates International, a consulting firm that did advanced statistical training for national corporations.
Its managing director was Phil Green, who would later found the local cycling advisory committee and become a two-time federal PC candidate here.
Green could tell Raynor was razor-sharp intellectually when he interviewed him but he hired him because there was something truly insightful about how he looked at things.
“Lots of people study business and it tends to create conformist thinking,” says Green. “I am a great believer in bringing the perspective of one discipline into another. We all become victims of our own education.”
Raynor had the immediate ability to pick up on the “logical and illogical” of the way things were done, remembers Green. That’s a trait that would come in handy in his future life in developing business strategies.
With his interests and his aptitude, Raynor was almost, by default, headed for law school, until the Tennessee experience in southern Mississauga (the office was in Port Credit) let him escape that fate, a fate he really didn’t want to face.
He worked at Tennessee for a while, picked up his MBA from the University of Western Ontario. Then he got his Ph.D. from Harvard Business School.
If there were a top 10 hit-maker list for business brains, Raynor would now be the guy with the bullet beside his name. The rising star with Deloitte Consulting LLP flies around the globe giving keynote speeches to major international conferences about his ideas. For instance, he’ll be talking to the leaders of the world’s biggest newspaper chains about the effects of the Internet on their business at an event in South Africa soon.
The Strategy Paradox, which has received excellent notices, builds on the thesis he completed at Harvard. Drawing from notable cases histories, such as that of Sony Betamax, Raynor shows how you can do everything right in business and still be wrong, if the market changes on you at the critical time.
The Mississauga father of two provides a tool box for avoiding all of those nasty surprises the future can bring, and urges senior managers to develop a variety of constantly evolving strategic options for potential use.
“Taking philosophy was helpful to me in just about every way,” says the 39-year-old. “It taught me to think critically and to construct a simple argument clearly, and in a compelling way.”
His first “solo CD,” as he jokingly refers to the book, was not an easy process. “It’s like one of my favourite quotes, from Kark Weick: ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’” Writing it all down gave him the opportunity to really start leaning what he thought.
He had the ideas all straight in his head but they would not organize themselves on paper for the longest time. “I had mountains of material and no thread to the argument,” he says.
So how did this big dilemma get resolved?
“I’m almost embarrassed to explain this,” says the author, who is already working on his next book. “I woke up at 4 a.m. one night and I had dreamed the table of contents.”
Kind of comforting, isn’t it? This hard-headed business guru solved his writer’s block with a little subliminal help from the netherworld.
Published by Doubleday, The Strategy Paradox has already sold out its first printing and is well on its way, for a business book, to becoming a best seller.