Heroes by Peter C. Newman

Author:Peter C. Newman [Newman, Peter C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4434-0449-5
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2010-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

David Thomson: Fortune’s Child

SHORTLY AFTER I first met David Thomson, he invited me to his Rosedale mansion in Toronto. It was really an art gallery, with kitchen, bathroom and bedroom attached. Of all the many art objects he showed me that day, the most memorable was a magnificent depiction in gnarled, petrified wood of the crucifixion, with a near-life-size Jesus mounted on its original cross. The carving had been the worship point of an unidentified church in southern Germany during the last quarter of the twelfth century.

“The agony of Christ is pronounced with the hips slightly tilted,” he explained. “The profile of Jesus’ head is quite spectacular. In this piece one confronts the beginnings of Gothic carving and the tremendous expressionism of the northern world …”

He went on and on, praising the creative genius of the holy sculpture in his living room, speaking in a guttural monotone, his throat muscles stretched by the force of his concentration. Overcome by the emotional intensity of the moment, I reacted with one of the great gaffes of uninformed art commentary.

“Look at those nails,” I offered helpfully, “how honest and meretricious they are …”

“Yeah, well actually, I put them there myself,” he shot back, looking at me as if I had just thrown up on his hand-woven Persian rug. “They’re what the cross is hanging on.”

Bad start.

I remembered that small incident of a decade ago as David Thomson moved into the top job of Thomson Corporation, a multinational electronic information provider, with annual revenues of more than $10 billion. Its stock, 73 percent of it owned by the Thomson family, is worth $48 billion, making David the richest Canadian and head of the country’s largest privately controlled enterprise.

Burdened with an original mind, his brew of ideas constantly in ferment, the forty-four-year-old heir is starting out on the journey for which he has been training all of his precocious adult life. He will guide the world’s most successful digital media empire, which operates in one hundred countries and is radically changing how business is done and how executives think.

It will be a fascinating spectacle. David Thomson may well be the prototype twenty-first-century global executive, a corporate space cadet who follows an existential path to highly profitable self-enlightenment. His thought process is a one-off. No head of a major Canadian firm behaves or acts like him.

A cerebral energy bunny on the loose in corporate North America, he relies on a strictly instinctive approach to business decisions, which these days are based on the data that overheated computers spit out. “In the end,” he confided, “judgment and instinct are still the elements of great success. One can have all of the numbers prepared, all the logistics, all the statistics run, but until one faces a human being or a corporate entity, one really has no sense of its service, let alone its potential. How can one quantify success or failure? Is it a failure if it revives a purpose, if it makes one move in another direction

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