next_to_herb
New Member
In Crazytown, Robyn Doolittle said that once Doug took over operations from his father, he grew the business dramatically - I assume she didn't attribute that strictly to Doug. (I think she interviewed two former Deco executives, but she doesn't source where she got 250 current worldwide employees - just that there were 45 employees when Doug moved to the US.)
I've read other articles that state that Doug, when not in beast mode, is quite charming and gregarious (in particular, I remember mention of Doug being regular smoking buddies with Gord Perks, highlighting his ability to separate the political from the social).
Doug reminds me a bit of my last boss - both entrepreneurs. (I know a lot of UT folks bristle at this characterization of Doug. Yes, Doug did start with a profitable business handed to him by his father, but his father didn't increase the workforce by a factor of four - Doug did, by building that side of the business.) A successful entrepreneur has a vision, and drives until he reaches that vision. They're loathe to admit failure, and they describe small successes in grandiose ways, all in order to keep moving toward the vision. And a lot of time, a really driven entrepreneur just misses some of the human touches on occasion (fortunately, those misses also come back to bite those same driven people in the end).
But pure entrepreneurs often have a hard time when they're not the guy in all facets of their businesses. My entrepreneur was nowhere near as successful as he should have been - he could not accept that his engineer / product developers were the best at developing the details of our product, nor could he accept that his accountants / finance staff were the best at developing tax and business processes, nor could he accept that his sales & marketing staff were the best at developing the details of the marketing plans, and ultimately cost himself and the company millions of dollars. As per Crazytown, Doug had the same sort of issues with the 2010 election strategy and the post-election operation of the Mayor's Office - as a result, Kouvalis, Batra and a host of other smart people left, and a bunch of others hung in despite their disagreements with Doug. I know that many in UT disagree violently with the early Ford activities - imagine if the early staff, with their abilities to sway centrist councillors pre-Doug, had stayed around longer!
Doug is likely pretty successful as a lone wolf, or as a leader of small number of managers. He's likely a good sales person with a simple, targeted product. That would work really well in a small / medium size business like Deco, and whatever his earlier pursuits were.
But his life in public is very different from his plain Deco life. He likely does still have a lot of responsibility with Deco, no matter how trusted the remaining management is - Deco is still one of the main drivers of the lifestyle for the whole family (Diane, Randy, Kathy & her kids, Doug & his family, and Rob & his family), and based on the issues of the rest of the siblings, the whole thing falls on Doug. He has neither a small group to lead at City Hall (as Rob's proxy, he would have needed to lead 43 other councillors), nor a simple, targeted product (transit! waterfront! hundreds of City services! libraries! too many to list!) And, he has to babysit the only sibling left with a tiny chance of success in life. The pressure, and the prospect of public failure (and that prospect is growing every day, as Rob screws up another thing), would make Doug less friendly and more irritable with every interaction.
It's said that Doug really wants to be in politics. I think the entrepreneur in him works against his success, and definitely Rob makes it more difficult. Others would just pack it in - I don't think Doug can do that, and it's going to get tougher for him as time goes on.
