Jay Goldman

I had the unique pleasure of meeting Seymour Schulich today, bringing my grand total of Members of the Order of Canada to two (Donald Ziraldo is the other). In addition to being an incredibly generous philanthropist and the name behind his namesake School of Business at York University (and schools at Western, Calgary, McGill, University of Nevada, Reno, and Technion), Seymour is also one of the investors in Rypple.com, one of my new clients. Rypple is sharing office space with Seymour as part of that investment, which has the added perks of being free and guaranteeing visits from the man himself (also: the lobby features a big and very awesome statue of an eagle).

He dropped by the “War Room” today to show us two of the slide rules he bought 50 years ago for engineering school. I had only ever seen one before, which rests proudly in my desk drawer as a memento from my grandfather, so it was interesting to take a look at some other models. Seymour’s stories provoked a great conversation about Rapid Data, makers of some very early desktop electronic calculators available from the equally-defunct Eaton’s for $250 in 1972 ($1,279.15 in 2008 according to the Bank of Canada). Austin Beutel advised against investing in the firm, which turned out to be a wise decision as they ran into some problems related to lack of control over technology and vanished.

I spent a good ten minutes chatting with Seymour in his office and he was kind enough to give me a signed copy of Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons, his 2007 book aimed at ‘younger’ people as they get started in their careers (I offered him a copy of The Facebook Cookbook in exchange, but I don’t think Platform app development is really his thing ). He also gave me a copy of a CD of Israel Army Marches produced by The Canadian Technion Society for a gala dinner held in May 2007 in honour of Peter Munk, Arnold Recht (former President of the Society), and Mr. Schulich himself. It’s playing in the background while I write this and ponder the first track, Song of the Night Squads composed by D. Sambursky and I. Graziani, which apparently accompanied the “Special Night Squads” of the Hagana during the 1936-39 riots and who later formed the basis of the elite “Palmach” strike force. Those did not sound like the most pleasant and friendly groups of guys, so it’s a little weird to think of them being accompanied by a marching band. Perhaps you’d like to read the rest of this post to the same stirring melody?

MP3 courtesy of German War Films Online Store, player courtesy of Odeo.com

Part of my conversation with Seymour was about the distressingly low rate of book reading among today’s yoots. Yoots these days. All they do is blog and hang out on Twitter and play with their iPhones. [Ed: <throat clearing> followed by <finger pointing>]. When he was doing a book tour of Canadian universities to promote Get Smarter, Seymour observed that only about 5% of any audience had actually read the book before he spoke to them (though, I suppose, the tour was to promote the book so hopefully that went up after the fact). Not wanting to let down my Marching Band Benefactor, I jumped right in this evening with a breeze through Appendix II (The Franco-Nevada Story: An Illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences) and the introduction and first few chapters. The book is written in a very ADD-friendly style, full of short but poignant tidbits of info that work well in quick hits rather than long sessions.

As an example, Chapter I is about The Decision Maker, a technique Seymour has been using to make important life decisions since he decided where to do his MBA when he was twenty-three. It builds on the idea of Pros and Cons lists that we’ve all made, but assigns a positive score (1 to 10) to the Pros and a negative score (-1 to -10) to the Cons. If the positive is at least double the negative, do the thing immediately if not sooner. If you don’t hit that magic ratio, seriously reconsider. The Decision Maker overcomes our natural tendancy to let a single Pro or Con outweigh the rest for emotional reasons by limiting the impact of any one factor to a maximum of 10 points. It’s also definitive in a way that most lists aren’t: math doesn’t play favourites. It occurred to me as I was reading the chapter that this would make a small but useful web app. Enter your decision at the top of the page, add Pros and Cons with scores in left and right columns, automatic total and decision at the bottom. Someone want to take a shot at it?

I’ll report back with more from Getting Smarter as I read it. If there’s enough interest, maybe I can convince Seymour to do an interview for this blog. Post your questions for one of Canada’s few billionaires in the comments and I’ll see what I can arrange.