bcbusiNess.ca
october 2015 BCBusiness 27
At what point did you decide
to join the family business?
I was ˜nishing my law degree
and setting up my articles in
England. We were a small com-
pany and doing relatively OK,
and my father asked me, 'Do you
want to spend a career in law or
do you want to come back and
help me grow this business?'
I said, 'I want to come back
because I love the business.' He
said, 'Then come back now.' My
plan was to come back ˜ve years
down the road after I practised
law, so I ended up leaving a
career that I never even began
and joining my dad. We were
just over 100-plus acres. We've
really grown it. My parents
allowed me to come in and apply
my vision to it and supported me
so I could do what I did.
What inspired you to launch a
centre for business ethics?
I was having a conversation
with a friend about the misbe-
haviour of the corporate world,
especially in 2008 after the
credit crisis. When you realize
the hundreds of billions of dol-
lars of taxpayer money that was
spent to keep some of these
businesses aoat, you would
think that somebody would
have said, 'We've got to start
looking at changing behaviour
of students as they go through
business school.' You would
have thought this idea would
have come from Bay Street
or Wall Street. It came from a
cranberry bog. But I'm a busi-
nessperson, and I realize that
corporate misbehaviour can
have a big impact on all busi-
nesses, so I really wanted to do
something that was meaning-
ful and I had the opportunity
with Sauder to do it. There's no
reason why there can't be room
for compassion and kindness
in business. I'm not saying that
it's not there, but it really needs
to be more of a pillar than it is
today. Not even an elective. It's
got to be mandatory. If we get
it right, we can pass it to other
business schools around the
world and put this program all
over the place as a model.
How will it work?
We have an international search
going on for a professor to be
kind of a skipper of the ship.
We're going to have an advisory
board made up of business
leaders. The dean may even go
outside British Columbia and
Canada and look at bringing
some international business
leaders into this. So it's a real
collaboration of business and the
university coming together and
putting something forward that
will be hopefully meaningful for
future business leaders. What-
ever the vision is today, it's going
to be completely di£erent 10
years from now. It's kind of like a
farm: I plant the seed, and now I
watch the plant grow.
Where the
cranBerries
GroW
B.C.
Land devoted to
cranberries (2014)
6,453 acres
Marketed
production (2014)
94 million lb.
Number of cran-
berry farms (2011)
91
Canada
Land devoted to
cranberries (2014)
15,191 acres
Marketed
production (2014)
348.5 million lb.
Number of cran-
berry farms (2011)
267
source: statistics
caNaDa
