Fact Sheet From Peter C. Newman's Canadian Establishment Series, Part 3

This final part, following facts garnered from Mr. Newman's writings on Conrad Black in the Canadian Establishment series, is a fact sheet about the man who, next to his father, influenced Conrad Black's style of business the most: Bud Macdougald. A profile of him takes up an entire chapter of Mr. Newman's The Canadian Establishment - the first chapter, "The World of Bud Macdougald."

Mr. Newman's portrait of Mr. Macdougald, as a mature businessperson, shows someone who was quite content to be "merely rich." Mr. Macdougald hob-nobbed with aristocracy and even royalty, and yet never expressed any resentment at being a "mere mister." He was one of those unnoticed tycoons that was content to stop the social climb at the level of gentry.

He was always a silent and discreet man, which can be attributed to how he became a syndicate manager at Dominion Securities at the age of twenty. Anyone who's ever heard a civil servant brag that (s)he could have been a multi-millionaire had (s)he gone into the private sector, and snickered after hearing it, should consider that the secret to Mr. Macdougald's early success backs that brag up flatly. When he was hired as an office boy at eighteen, one of his jobs at the end of the day was to file the correspondence of the senior partners. He stayed late, sometimes until midnight, reading them before filing them. This self-education gave him so much knowledge of Dominion's deals that he managed his first bond syndicate deal before he was twenty. (pp. 29-30, hc.)

(A cautionary note: I compared this strategy to civil service custom deliberately for two reasons. In order for it not to blow up in the user's face, it requires using these two virtues traditionally upheld by the civil service: complete discretion and that kind of disinterestedness that takes no notice of personal elements. It also requires social adroitness in deploying the acquired knowledge of the business but not of the top executives' personalities. Any lover of gossip who tries this strategy will almost certainly fail.)

Of course, Mr. Macdougald did have two advantages in his climb to one main pinnacle of commonerhood: a father who was already a heavyweight in Canadian finance, and an education at the same private school that Conrad Black had gone to - Upper Canada College. Like Conrad Black, Bud Macdougald left UCC at fourteen, although in not as scandalous a fashion as Mr. Black did. This hustle-out, Mr. Macdougald turned into one of his favourite lines: "Left school at fourteen and I've regretted it all my life.... Biggest mistake I ever made. Should have left when I was twelve!" (pp. 28-9, hc.) He did not have the advantage after the Great Depression hit, though; the firm his father co-owned went broke.

It's ironic that a man who took a perverse pride in bragging about his lack of formal education would have "made it" through early-career studiousness. A related irony is, pre-Dominion, him finding his métier as a teenaged entrepreneur. (pp. 29.) Both habits, nowadays, would mark such a person as Harvard MBA-bound...if (s)he bothers to get good grades. Also surprising about the man was his teetotaling, gotten though seeing the indignity of "young gentlemen" going to the speakeasy in the 1920s, when the Ontario Temperence Act was still in force, followed by seeing the ones who went broke during the Depression drowning the rest of their lives in alcohol. A third irony was his characteristic urbanity in social matters comibned with hard-nailed business toughness.

He definitely had a tough-minded, Scotseque opportunism to him. (Had he instead of Conrad Black been the CEO of Hollinger International, he would have answered the shareholder revolt with this rough observation: "Oh, I'm only the CEO here? And one of the multitude of shareholders? Well, I'll tell you what. I can sell my shares in a day, and I can quit and walk out right this moment. Once I do so, any 'fiduciary duty' of mine goes with me and whatever's in my desk, which are going with me too. That's customary for any employee who's been hoofed out.")