Three years ago, John Taft, a senior Canadian banker, wrote a thought-provoking book about finance. Stewardship appealed to bankers to stop thinking of themselves as “speculators” and start acting like “stewards”. They needed, Taft argued, to take a more collectivist approach, focusing on the collective good rather than acting as short-term, profit-maximising individualists.
It was an eminently sensible piece of advice. But what really grabbed my attention was not what Taft said about profits but what he said about the weather. Halfway through his book, he inserted a sidebar citing research that suggests the brutal extremes of Canada’s winters fostered a pragmatic, collegiate spirit in earlier generations of Canadian society. Nobody can afford to be an egomaniac when it is -40C on the prairie — not if they plan to survive.
And that climate-induced social history influenced the modern corporate culture, Taft suggests, making Canadian banks more imbued with a pragmatic, collective spirit than those of, say, Wall Street. Lots of snow helped to promote a focus on stakeholders — or so the argument went.