Bringing Canadian Leadership to the World with Richard Martin

Patrick Daly:

Hello. This is Patrick Daly, and welcome to Interlinks. Interlinks is a program about connections, international business, supply chains, and globalization, and their effects on our life, our work, and our travel over recent times.

Today on the show, we’ll be talking to Richard Martin, president of Alcera Consulting, located in Quebec in Canada. At Alcera Consulting, Richard helps business executives seeking to exploit change, maximize opportunity, and minimize risk. Richard is also president of the Canadian Academy of Leadership and Development of Human Capital, and the mission of that organization is to bring Canadian expertise and know-how to leadership and development of human capital to leaders and executives of developing nations around the world. So, Richard’s activities at both Alcera and CANLEAD are founded on his over 20 years of experience as an infant … infantry officer, excuse me, in the Canadian Armed Forces from about 1980, including operational command in Bosnia and staff appointments at Kuwait at the National Headquarters and the Directorate of Army Training. So welcome Richard, and thank you very much for being here with us today.

Richard Martin:

Well, thank you very much, Patrick. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Patrick Daly:

Delighted to have you. So Richard, to kick off, could you tell me a little bit about your career to date and how you went from being a young military cadet, an officer around 1980 or so, to being a business consultant in the 2020s?

Richard Martin:

Well, I guess it’s a bit of a meandering path, but I enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces in 1980. I went to the Royal Military College, Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean, in Saint-Jean, Quebec, just south of Montreal. I was there for five years. The first two years are sort of equivalent to a community college, and then the last three years equivalent to a university degree. I got a degree in business administration, not particularly because I was interested in business at that time, but because I considered it sort of like a general degree where it would be useful in general.

But I had decided early on I wanted to be an infantry officer, so I graduated in 1985, was commissioned into my regiment, and then I served as an infantry officer for 21 years until my retirement in May of 2006. And as you’d correctly pointed out, I had some tours in Bosnia, in Kuwait, just prior to the invasion of Kuwait in [inaudible 00:02:29] of the Iraq in 2003. And I also served in Germany and various other postings and positions.

Then when I retired in 2006, I worked for about two months for a defense contractor, but I was really champing at the bit to try something, my own business, so I decided to launch my own business. My first contract was with the defense contractor that had hired me to do defense contract work in simulation, but I decided to launch my business in the summer of 2006. And so that’s where I launched Alcera Consulting Consulting, eventually incorporated, and that’s how I became a consultant. I mentored under Alan Weiss, who’s also your mentor, I believe.

Patrick Daly:

Right.

Richard Martin:

And so everything I know about consulting I learned from him and from members of his community. I’ve been doing that now for close on, I guess it’ll be, 17 years this summer, and I’ve worked with companies mainly in Canada, companies and organizations. I worked with the federal government in Canada, also with some provincial-level organizations, municipalities, private companies in the insurance sector, and also in a couple of other private sectors.

Right now, I’m doing some work with a company based here in Montreal that builds residential housing, so high-rise apartments, university residences for students, and I’m helping them with their project management processes. I also did a master’s in project management in the ’90s when I was serving at National Defense Headquarters in Ottawa, and I became interested in that. I occasionally teach in the master’s level course at the University of Quebec, and also undergrad in business strategy, and I do training and occasionally speaking, those kinds of things. But that’s basically what it is that I do. And you captured it well in the intro where you presented what it is I do through Alcera and through CANLEAD.

Patrick Daly:

Okay. And CANLEAD, is CANLEAD a voluntary organization or is that a commercial organization?

Richard Martin:

No, no, it’s incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act, so we’ve been in existence for about five years. Back in 2017, somebody referred a gentleman to me who is originally from Africa, and he was looking for somebody to help him with business strategy development for his businesses in Africa, and we decided to launch the Academy then. It’s been a long, drawn-out process. Working with people in Africa is not easy. We primarily worked in Francophone Africa, so our biggest contacts right now and our biggest advancement, I would say, are in the Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, where we have a number of proposals being worked through the machinery there, but it’s a very long and arduous process.

Patrick Daly:

I can imagine.

Richard Martin:

We can talk about that if you have any questions. But my partner is originally from the DRC. He’s been here in Canada since the early ’80s, but he has all the contacts over there. So, what I bring to the piece here is the expertise and the ability to organize and bring together people, experts who can provide training and developmental expertise, which is what they really need the most, is developing their human capital potential in Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa.

Patrick Daly:

What attracted you to the military in the first place? Was that a family thing? I know my family’s kind of … a lot of people have been in various arms of the military of different countries, and I almost did as well, but it stopped at me. What attracted you?

Richard Martin:

Well, I was a little kid and probably like most little boys that played cowboys and Indians and soldiers and things like that. And being in Canada, you have snow banks and you can actually dig trenches in your yard and pretend you’re in the trenches.

But my father was in the army for 20 years in the Canadian Army. He was in the Service Corps, so he was a clerk. And I have another brother who was a clerk in for 20 years, and then I went into the infantry. So yeah, it is indeed a family thing. I was born in Quebec City and my father was serving at that time, so I guess I grew up with it, but I got another brother who never wanted to have anything to do with the military, so I guess we could say it is a family thing, but on the other hand, I was interested very early on in military history and war movies and everything like that. And like probably a lot of young guys or young people who join the military, there’s a difference between the reality of being in the military and watching war movies and reading history books. But I got over that, and I was able to have a career.

I like to say, there’s an old expression, “You can take the man out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the man,” and I’m 61 now. I joined when I was 18, but I really became interested about the age of 15. I joined Army Cadets. I went to summer camp, and I quit Army Cadets because it wasn’t military enough for me, if you can believe that. But when I did finally go to military college, it was like coming home. So for me, it was the best thing that I could have done, and I have no regrets about when I left, about what I did in my career, and it’s still, I guess in a way, I’m still military to the bone, and that’s never going to change.

Patrick Daly:

Your time in Bosnia, what were the most significant challenges you faced as a military commander and leader in Bosnia, I guess leading a peacekeeping force? And then maybe a follow-up question from that, is peacekeeping something that the military train for specifically? Because it seems militaries are there for offense rather than peacekeeping, so is there a tension there? And what kind of challenges did you face?

Richard Martin:

Well, I can answer the second question first. Peacekeeping is something that evolved during the Cold War as a means of, as a good friend of mine says, “avoiding turning Canada into a radioactive briquette from one ocean to the other.” So, it was a way of containing conflicts, specifically decolonization conflicts in Asia and Africa and various other regions.

In order to be an effective peacekeeper, you have to know what you’re doing. You have to be able to separate military forces. And that’s the main point is to create an interpositional peacekeeping force to separate the forces so that they’re not at each other’s throats, because military forces in contact will end up fighting. It’s just because they’re jockeying for position and everything. So, the standard form of peacekeeping that evolved starting in the ’50s was to keep military forces apart. In order to do that, you have to be militarily proficient. So that’s why forces like the British Armed Forces, the Canadian Armed Forces, Australia, various European countries, Ireland, to a lesser extent the United States, because they tend to be much more a shoot-first-ask-questions-later type of approach. But that’s got its advantages and disadvantages. So that’s really what it’s about is, you’ve got to be able to fight in order to keep the peace. Let’s put it in those simple terms.

When I went to Bosnia in August of 1999, it was under the auspices of the Stabilisation Force, the NATO Stabilisation Force, so we weren’t wearing blue berets. We were wearing our normal Canadian Army kit, as was everybody else. It was under a combined international command structure with an American leading the mission at the top. And we were in Northwest Bosnia, but believe it or not, that was called Multinational Division Southwest. That’s your military logic for you. We were in Northwest Bosnia in an area that was primarily occupied, let’s say, by Croats, but had been previously one of the crown jewels of the Serbian part of Bosnia. So the Serbs-

Patrick Daly:

Is the area near Banja Luka, is it that kind of area?

Richard Martin:

Yeah, Banja Luka, Bihać. The Bihać pocket was part of our sector. I was in a town called Drvar, which had previously been 98% Serb, and when I was there it was 80% or 85% Croat. So, these Croats that were there had been shipped around all over the place. They were originally primarily from south of Sarajevo.

And so, I think, the biggest challenge in terms of the peacekeeping part of it was to be impartial, but also to be fair, but firm with … Primarily, in my location, it was the Croats who were the, let’s say, the occupiers, and to not take everything you hear first as evidence of something. So, we had a saying, “First information is usually wrong, so don’t overreact, so always verify before taking major action.” That, I would say, is the major thing I had to deal with.

Patrick Daly:

And how do you tap into that experience of peacekeeping today in your work, say, for lessons, for insights, for wisdom that’s relevant to your activity, say in consultancy or leadership at CANLEAD?

Richard Martin:

Well, one of the things is, what I like to say is, “Leadership is 98% competency.” There’s a belief that there’s all these personality traits about leaders and everything, and I’ve seen all kinds of leaders, extreme introverts, extreme extroverts, people in the middle, people who are very expressive and get excited, and other people who keep their cool. The primary thing, people will follow leaders who are effective, who get the job done. If people think that they’re going to be led in the proper manner towards their objectives and get what they need out of it, they will follow them, so that’s number one.

The second part is exactly that, is never trust the first information you hear. Always delve into it and look into, go beyond appearances, go beyond the first thing you’ll see or hear, because there’s always two sides to a story. I would even say anybody who’s raised kids would know, it’s the same thing. There’s always two sides to a story, and it’s the same thing, whether in peacekeeping or in a business. Everybody’s dealing with the same issues, from that perspective.

Patrick Daly:

And when you transitioned from the armed forces into business, what were some of the cultural differences that you noticed and that you had to adapt to?

Richard Martin:

The first one was nobody shows up on time. When I say that, I mean semi-jokingly, but it’s true. And people, “Do we still have that meeting on this morning?” “Well, yeah, I put it in my calendar three months ago. It’s there. You didn’t tell me otherwise.” That, I think, is probably one of the things that differentiates the military from everybody else is timings, because timings can mean the difference between life and death. And you’re a logistician, time is of the essence. It’s the critical thing. So that, I would say, is one of the big things.

The other one is trying to translate my experiences and my knowledge, my expertise, into a form that would be understandable or readily understandable and that people can grab onto. I found that people in business or in organizations in general, they have respect for the military, at least in Canada and in most Western countries or Anglo-Saxon countries. They even find it fascinating in a certain extent, but at some point you have to make that relationship and make it evident for people.

Patrick Daly:

Was pricing your value a challenge?

Richard Martin:

Yes, but right from the beginning, I went with the model of following along from what I learned from Alan Weiss, which is value-based pricing, value-based fees. And I did go with a bit of hourly fees and a bit of daily fees, but that was when I needed the money and it was subcontract work and things like that. But it’s mainly just going based on, what is the value that this client is getting out of it, and finding a way to come to an agreement with the client about what proportion of that incremental value should be allocated to me as a consultant.

Speaker 3:

93.9, Dublin South FM.

Patrick Daly:

There’s a recent PwC Annual Global CEO Survey, relatively recently, and in it I noticed about 40% of CEOs surveyed said, this is globally now, said that their business models will not be economically viable within 10 years if they continue on the path that they’re on currently. So, what do you see as the major strategic issues facing businesses in the coming years?

Richard Martin:

Well, I think that the geopolitical situation is changing. I think we’re still going to be a globalized world, but we can no longer rely on certain partners in the globalization space.

I’ll just give you a concrete example. Obviously it’s relating to China, and one of the things, everybody’s realizing that China is not a fair player. They don’t play fair. They steal, they spy, they copy. And on top of that, they can change on a dime. Things can be going fine, and Xi Jinping decides something else, and the whole economy shuts down. We saw that with the pandemic where they had a very extreme … First they were very secretive, and then they became very extreme with shutting everything down, and whether or not that was a viable option, if you’re relying on that for your strategic supply chain, that’s going to be an issue.

I have a client of mine who does construction. Like I said, they’re real estate developers, and they were ordering furniture and fixtures from Chinese manufacturers because the price was right, except there were major delivery issues and then quality issues. So, they’ve decided to go with not necessarily a Canadian supplier, but a North American supplier, because we have the free trade agreement here in North America. So, I think there’s a lot of onshoring going on. We can see that certainly with electronics, with things like that. So, I think that’s one of the major issues is globalization is probably going to continue, but it’s going to change. And what we’ve come to rely on in the last 20 or 25 years, cheap labor in say China or whatever, is going to change. Some of it is migrating already to, say, Southeast Asia and other jurisdictions, but a lot of it is coming back onshore in Western Europe, in North America, I guess in Australia too, simply because a lot of the suppliers, we can’t trust a lot of the locations.

The second one is the global financial system, which I think is very fragile. I’m not an expert in banking or finance or things like that, but I do have an interest in economics and monetary economics, and from what I can tell, it needs to be monitored and the risks, financial risks needs to be hedged, as with any other risks. So, that would be my two main things.

Patrick Daly:

You mentioned you’re in Quebec, and I know that you’re fluent in both English and French. Are you of both French Canadian and English Canadian heritage, or are you just French Canadian and you speak English?

Richard Martin:

Well, I’m primarily French Canadian, but I grew up speaking both, so I like to an annoy Quebec separatists by telling them I’m both, but yeah, I really am both. I like to tell people, “I’m the most bilingual person I know,” and sometimes it irritates people, but I’m really good in French and I’m really good in English, so let’s put it that way. So I’m bicultural, bilingual, whatever you want to call that.

Patrick Daly:

And how do French Canadians manifest and live their identity in Canada today? Are they generally comfortable in modern Canada? I know there were a couple of referendums on independence. I think the last one was 1995. We don’t hear much about that anymore, so how is the French Canadian identity now in modern Canada?

Richard Martin:

Well, I think it’s mostly what I guess you could call realistic, you know what I mean? The population of Canada is now closing in on 40 million because of immigration, so there’s about eight and a half million Quebecers, of which about 80% are French speaking. There are French speakers outside of … I’m actually not from Quebec. I’m a Franco Ontarian, so I’m from Eastern Ontario. And then there’s that huge … the country to the south of us called the United States of America, which doesn’t care really which language we speak as long as we speak English to them. So, it’s a reality.

When I was at military college, we used to have … There was one week all the official announcements and everything was officially in French, and then the next week it would switch to English, and then it would come back to French, so it would alternate. But the joke was always … And this was in a primarily French Canadian, French-speaking military college in the province of Quebec, in a French area in the province of Quebec. There are anglophone areas in Quebec. And the joke was always, “We have English week and we have bilingual week,” so that’s the reality. I mean, English speakers tend not to put a lot of effort into learning other languages. It’s just the-

Patrick Daly:

Well, we see that everywhere. We see it in the UK, we see it in Ireland, Australia, everywhere.

Richard Martin:

Yeah. Well, I was talking to somebody who lives in the east of France, actually in Ferney-Voltaire, which is Voltaire’s hometown. It’s called Ferney-Voltaire, and right near the border with Switzerland, and he works in Geneva, and he says everything works in English now in Geneva. And he says, “It’s hardly a francophone city anymore.” So there’s the vernacular and then there’s the international language. Here in Montreal, the business I’m working with, they’re all bilingual or francophones, but everything happens in English, despite what the government says. If somebody speaks French, nobody’s going to get upset because they’re all bilingual, but the clients are all anglophone or almost, so you just got to adjust to your market.

Patrick Daly:

Sure. Yeah, yeah. So you’re a successful person, but success as we know is not a straight line, and everybody faces setbacks in their career and in their life. How do you approach setbacks, and what do you do, what you think, or what do you say to yourself to get yourself back on track?

Richard Martin:

Well, I think you have to realize that if you don’t try something, you won’t fail, so setbacks are the sign that you’re trying something. It’s funny because just this morning I was anticipating that SpaceX would be launching their big rocket, the Starship, and they halted it. They halted the launch sequence about 15 minutes before because of some kind of a technical issue. They said, “Well, we’re turning it into what’s called a wet dress rehearsal.” So in one sense, they failed, but in another sense, if they hadn’t tried, they wouldn’t have been in that position. That’s mostly the way I see things is, I don’t beat myself up. I mean, like everybody else, I can go through a period of where I’m angry or disappointed or whatever, but you have to get over it and just keep moving forward.

And it’s like in the military, like in battle, you’re going to have wins and losses. In sports, nobody has a hundred percent win percentage. I mean, it does happen in some cases, but it’s very rare. Whether it’s soccer or football or baseball or hockey or whatever other sport, you just have to take those as learning opportunities to say, “Okay, what did I do wrong? What did I do well?” And keep moving forward. And occasionally you reevaluate your goals. Was this a realistic goal to start off with? Or was I being unrealistic? You also have to look at the goal within the broader context of your life. I’m happily married for 35 years. I’ve got a family, I’ve got a house, I’ve got three daughters, they’ve got boyfriends, et cetera, so life isn’t that bad.

Patrick Daly:

Yeah, perspective. So by way of hobbies and interests, what kind of things do you like to do when you’re not working?

Richard Martin:

Well, when I’m not working, it tends to blend in. I read a lot, as you probably know. I read a lot of history, science, philosophy, just about any topic. I watch some videos on YouTube, but I don’t watch a lot of TV. If I’m in my car, I’ll listen to some podcasts. If I got an hour and a half or two hours in the car, I’ll listen to podcasts and stuff like that. But it’s mostly reading, and that’s pretty much it [inaudible 00:24:58]

Patrick Daly:

Is there anything you’re reading or listening to lately that you find inspiring that you’d recommend?

Richard Martin:

Yeah, well, it’s funny because … Well, there’s a couple of things right now is obviously is with ChatGPT. I’ve been delving into AI, and my thing is, it’s like everybody’s going on, like, “Oh, it’s going to take over the world,” and I just don’t believe that. It’s impressive. It’s going to improve our productivity.

I just recently read a book, I forget what the name of it is, but maybe I can send you a link once this interview is done. But right now, I’m reading a book called, something along the lines of, What Is ChatGPT and How Does It Work? It’s written by Stephen Wolfram, who’s a computer scientist and an entrepreneur and everything, sort of like Ray Kurzweil, but without all the wonky stuff. He really delves into how it works, and when you start reading that, it’s not too technical, but when you start reading that you realize, well, yeah, it’s just basically a machine. So I would recommend that book. And the other book, like I said, I’ve forgotten the title, but that would be an interesting book to read just to put a lot of the hype into context. And I find it hilarious that Elon Musk and many other AI researchers and entrepreneurs write a letter, an open letter to say, “Let’s halt AI for six months.”

Patrick Daly:

So that we can catch up.

Richard Martin:

Exactly. So it doesn’t take over the world, but it’s like I say, these guys, some of them, they’re very limited in their understanding of … They’re extremely smart, but sometimes they lack common sense.

Patrick Daly:

Yeah. This is the thing of people who know more and more about less and less, there’s a very deep but very narrow field of knowledge.

Richard Martin:

But it’s also, they look at things through their own particular filter, like, well, this is how the world works. Well, wait a second. There are other ways of seeing things. And I just find that hilarious when, say, Elon Musk, all of his businesses are driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning and deep learning, whatever the heck you want to call it, top to bottom, everything, whether it’s this full self-driving, how they design things. His factories for Teslas are all based on robots. And like I like to say, “A hammer is artificial intelligence. Who the heck came up with the idea of the hammer?” Well, that’s a way of instantiating artificial intelligence. Anyways.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent. So how can listeners find out more about the services of Alcera and make contact with you if they wish to?

Richard Martin:

Yeah. Well, my website, which is getting a bit out-of-date, but it’s alcera.ca, so that’s A-L-C-E-R-A.ca, because we’re in Canada. And I also have a blog, which is ExploitingChange.com, all one word, and that’s where I put my thoughts occasionally. But I’m going to merge all that together over the coming months. And then there’s CANLEAD.org, which is our website. It’s primarily in French because that’s our primary market in Africa right now. But CANLEAD.org talks about our services and what it is that we do to help develop leadership and human capital in developing countries.

Patrick Daly:

Excellent. Many, many thanks, Richard, for being here with us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.

Richard Martin:

Thank you very much.

Patrick Daly:

Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in again today, and be aware that if you enjoyed this episode, you can find a full series of over 120 episodes on Interlinks, on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Acast, and other major podcast platforms. Until next time, keep well and stay safe.