John Furlong spent more than a decade breathing life into Vancouver’s Olympic Games, and now the former CEO of the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) is giving the public a candid look at the biggest sporting event the city has ever seen.
In his new memoir, Patriot Hearts: Inside the Olympics that Changed a Country (Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), Furlong recounts the 14 years he spent developing the Games, along with the successes and incredible setbacks he stick-handled to make 2010 a memorable year.
In a recent interview with Business in Vancouver, Furlong recalled how he nearly quit VANOC, why he wanted to pull his hair out over former Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell and took the time to pass on some important lessons about leadership.
I wanted the job less than I wanted the project to succeed. We had just won the Games. I was managing the transition, and there was an argument going on about who should lead the Games. I made my case and said, “This is not a job for one person; this is a job for a team. If it’s me I’m going to build a team, and we’re going to do it together, and it’s going to be about everybody not a few.” Ultimately, they made a decision, and I was awarded the job.
When you’re running the Olympic Games, the thing you get used to on a day-to-day basis is getting second guessed by absolutely everyone. I thought the best I could do for this project was to take myself out of that and let them finish what they had to do, and if they need me they know where I am. No person could ever be bigger than what we were doing and no leader could be. I think there’s a lot of people that end up running organizations and are so smitten with their importance to the project that they get lost in what everybody’s there for. We were there to do this enormously challenging project, to bring the country together, and it was time to get on with it.
First of all you have to understand what “team” really means, and a lot of people think team means gathering together a bunch of people and telling them what to do, and they go do it. It couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s trying to build a culture where everyone in the organization understands what their ability is on the team. I wanted everybody in the organization to not just understand their mandate but [also] believe they were mission critical to the Olympic Games. The other thing is that it’s hard to put a team together if there isn’t something that inspires them, and what inspires them is not the CEO. I tried to inspire them, but you have to have something to do it with and for me it was the vision of the Games.
Vision. I told people if we did this right we could change the country. We gave sponsors a different view of the world. Normally, sponsors would buy the right to associate with the Games, sell T-shirts. We wanted these sponsors to help us put on the Games, to feel that they were critical to the success of the Games. We wanted them to share this with their employees, their customers, to become ambassadors for the project. Today, if you talk to Bell Canada or RBC or HBC or Rona or Petro-Canada or General Motors or Air Canada they would say to you, “We put on the Olympics. We weren’t a marketing partner; we did the work.” We believed in something very different, and we threw out the “old way” and said, “If we did that we’ll go broke.” This has to be the way. Bell Canada’s comment the day we met with them was, “This will help us take an old company and make it new again.”
Most [people] look at this as adversarial, we saw it as exactly the opposite. We thought, ‘OK, what country in the world has this asset?’ None. Instead of having an argument about whether to have them as partners or not let’s just extend an invitation. We essentially said to our first people, “Why don’t you welcome the world?” I spoke to [former national chief] Phil Fontaine, at that moment he really thought something profound had happened. He said, “In 100 years we would not have achieved so much in this country.” Today, there are First Nations companies and consulting firms and experts that have come out of this, and I think the Games were an example of how to work with First Nations.
It was a challenge because we had 200 partners, and everybody wanted their piece of the Games, and we had to deliver the Games. I think there are people who think I was critical of Gregor Robertson. Not at all. He did a great job; in fact he did a terrific job. But there were times along the way when something the city wanted someone else wanted it and we were left in the middle. If I was picking a politician that I wanted to pull my hair out over the most [it] was Larry Campbell, because he wanted us to have a vote when we were almost at the finish line. I went to his place and I yelled at him a few times. He turned out to be a great advocate for the Games and a great guy.
There’s a way in business to navigate through just about anything, and you can very easily find yourself in situations where you can choose the convenient route to the end because it’s staring you in the face, it’s easier and it’s less expensive. But often you lose so much when you do. If you build a great organization, and you rely on your people and you look after them, they’ll take you wherever you want to go. And in your worst moment when you feel that the world is falling apart around you, they’ll go over a cliff for you. I think that’s the kind of leadership people deserve in the workplace.