Resisting the urge to turtle, going grey and my Uncle Doug

My Uncle Doug, who has since passed away, was one-of-a-kind.?He lived alone in Florida for most of his adult life and when we visited him, he would spend a lot of time trying to convince us that we didn’t need hot water to shower. By all accounts he was weird. But despite his oddness, he was also immensely curious, fun-loving, strong-willed, and truly kind while somehow maintaining those rough edges. He had once been a wildly successful, beloved business executive at Dupont, and he remains to this day my favourite uncle.

Why am I writing about my uncle on LinkedIn? Well during this pandemic I have often wondered just how much of Uncle Doug I inherited - and it looks like I didn’t do all that badly. I probably won’t try to charge you for parking in my driveway if you come for a visit, but I did laugh a lot watching the neighbourhood kids bounce off the walls during online learning from my home office window. I also saw a lot of other “Uncle Dougs” out there in the business community, and specifically in my defence and security community, as we all struggled to adapt. With that in mind, I thought that I’d share the top “Uncle Doug-isms” that have helped me, my organization, and my sector to emerge from this pandemic not only standing, but stronger.

When you’ve been dealt a nasty gut-punch, don’t ‘turtle’

My uncle was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease a long time ago – an almost-literal gut punch. He treated the disease as something he had to live with, but that shouldn’t prevent him from living, and I always admired that.

Near the start of the pandemic, CADSI had to cancel our marquee event, CANSEC (which incidentally brings in roughly 85% of our annual revenue) two years in a row. In March 2020 when I was staring at my CADSI gang over a Teams call to talk about the first cancellation, I knew we had built an emergency financial cushion over the years, and we could rely on that to see us through. But I could still feel the panic coming back through the screen. It lasted about 30 seconds until we asked: “So, who has some bright ideas they’ve always wanted to throw down?” Turns out there were a lot.

I witnessed this time and time again among our member companies in the defence and security sector. Business models shifted, new lines of production opened up. Suddenly companies were making face shields, ventilators and gowns right alongside satellites, simulators and CADPAD uniforms. Employees looked proud to be a part of something bigger than themselves and their corporations and equally proud that their corporations were choosing to step up for Canada. ?

Cut your losses and embrace change

You’ll notice that I have silver hair now. The transition was atrocious, humbling, and one could say I’ve been living a hair disaster for over a year.

But given that I love fashion, the change presented the perfect opportunity for some compulsive shopping for my new colour palette.

It’s one thing to embrace change, but the best leaders I’ve seen use it to cut losses, set new goals, and never look back. The commercial aerospace sector (most companies in aerospace have a defence line of business) was crushed by COVID.?It cut its losses quickly by stopping or converting production lines and mothballing orders. In many cases, companies even made new, bold investments in defence lines of business.

If it wasn’t working in CADSI’s business model, it had to go. If we tried something new and it didn’t work, we didn’t spend time trying to polish it into a diamond. We burned the lump of coal (sorry environmentalists) and moved on. I’m confident that Uncle Doug, who spent a good portion of his life adjusting to challenges on the fly, would do the same.

Accept help

Towards the end of my uncle’s life, things got pretty ugly, and it was hard for him to get around. I can only imagine how humbling it must have been for someone so fiercely independent to have to rely so heavily on others. But nothing was going to stop him from showing up to our last family gathering at Cedar Point amusement park, so we each took turns pushing that wheelchair in the sweltering heat waiting to ride the roller coasters.?

There is no shame – none – in asking for help. CADSI had to ask the Canadian Embassy in the UAE to support us in delivering an overseas event we could not travel to because we were in lockdown. Our community asked for and received needed government support, both in terms of keeping businesses afloat and to remove roadblocks to keep revenue flowing. Competitors put aside their differences and lifted each other up, sharing tips and tricks to keep manufacturing lines running. Cyber firms offered free services to municipalities getting hit by ransomware attacks on their healthcare databases.?

At CANSEC, we often talk a lot about how we are one community of Canadians serving our country in a variety of capacities. That’s not lip service. Over the course of the last 16 months this was demonstrated time and time again, across the country. Check out our map if you don’t believe me.

Never lose sight of the future

For a man who knew that he was very sick, my Uncle Doug never lost sight of the future. He’d set goals for himself, and one of the last ones was to witness the first SpaceX launch.

It’s easy to be myopic when things are a mess and just putting out the daily fires turns into a full-time job. It’s also easy to forget that tomorrow is a new day. Some of the best leaders I saw during this pandemic balanced surviving with thriving, positioning their businesses for economic recovery whenever possible.

CANSEC delivers about $10 million in economic stimulus to the City of Ottawa each year. It makes up a huge amount of the city’s revenue in the first half of the year. For many of our contractors and suppliers it is the single biggest source of income. We felt an obligation to look forward and to start the process of re-building the show for 2022 while counting every penny during the pandemic. Today we are investing in additional infrastructure anticipating a better return. Meanwhile, our sector stands poised on the edge of profound change. In Canada there is no shortage of natural disasters to keep our Canadian Forces at the ready, and they need equipment to do their jobs. Cyber attacks are also increasing exponentially. Our allies know that public-private partnerships are the only way to succeed on this new battlefield, and we all have a role to play in being forward-thinking.

Nothing could have truly prepared us for COVID-19. It’s been a long, extremely tough road for Canadians on a personal level (I tip my hat to all you parents out there), and for much of our business community.

For some sectors,?and for many SMEs,?there was no escaping the profound,?crippling?impact?of this pandemic. But it’s been encouraging in recent weeks to see the beginnings of resurgence and rebirth.

I’ve learned a lot about myself over the past year and a half, and a lot about the community that surrounds me. If Uncle Doug were here, I think we’d have made him proud. And from where I sit, half in my home office and half at CADSI’s offices downtown, our future looks fully bright.