‘Out of adversity comes strength’
Revisiting an interview with Calin Rovinescu
Air Canada chief executive Calin Rovinescu, who it was announced will retire in February, was named Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year in 2016. Financial Post Magazine editor Andy Holloway interviewed him at the time and what follows are a few of his thoughts on keeping the airline from going bankrupt, what he learned about himself, competition and the power of Canada.
❚ ❚Q Did you have any doubts in 2009 when you rejoined the company that this is where you would be at this point?
❚ ❚A I was very confident that we had an amazing brand, we have, from a geographic perspective, great geography in terms of the capability of covering the world, and we have very, very strong management. This award that I’ve been fortunate to be given here, is not my award. I’m not saying this to be corny, but this is the award of the people who have made this happen. One of the things that I tell our people quite often is that we’re a large company, of course but we need to be a large company that behaves more like a small company, that takes the entrepreneurial strengths that you see in small companies and can exploit them and jump on them and that’s really what we’ve been doing since 2009. That means finding creative ways to grow our revenue base, finding creative ways to compete in markets where we couldn’t compete before, improving dramatically the customer service offering and being named Best Airline in North America for five years running. We had so many of these strengths already embedded in the company and they just needed to be given the opportunity to flourish.
❚ ❚Q You’ve definitely gone through some turbulent times. What have you learned about yourself?
❚ ❚A Well, there’s a line from a poem that somebody, my sister, in fact, gave me on my high school graduation and it’s stuck with me: Out of adversity comes strength. You have that notion that the greater the adversity, the greater that people’s personalities are going to come out, and you don’t have to compromise your values and your principles as you’re actually going through that level of adversity. Look at where we were
with labour before I came in and where we are with labour today in terms of long- term 10- year deals, listening to people and having that kind of understanding of where the product was then and where the product is now, and how accepted the Air Canada brand is and how powerful it is almost anywhere on the planet. If you were to go into many of the countries that we operate in and ask someone to name the companies in Canada they’re familiar with, Air Canada would be on many, many lists. Communication was another lesson that I learned here, that there’s no substitute for consistent, transparent and repetitive communication to your various stakeholders. We’ve changed many, many, many dynamics of our business and we had to do it in real time and we couldn’t wait for one chapter to be completed before getting on to the next.
❚ ❚Q You have a few new low- cost competitors. What’s your take on the landscape?
❚ ❚A Competition is competition and as long as the rules are clear and everyone follows the same rules when they enter a marketplace, we’re very comfortable with any type of competition. In fact, this is again where Rouge has been helpful to us and it’s enabled us to stay and compete in some markets where otherwise we could not compete before based on our cost structure. We’ll see how that all transpires, but competition, provided that the rules are the same for everyone, is a very good thing. It makes us more focused, it provides a cost imperative to the entire organization and it’s enabled us to do creative things and, frankly, risky things like starting a new brand over the past several years.
❚ ❚Q Canada Goose’s Dani Reiss once said one of the big things about his company is that it has Canada in the name and the world needs more Canada.
❚ ❚A Obviously, Canada denotes values that are very, very powerful and that people like. People often write to me and they say that just getting on an Air Canada plane in Shanghai or in Seoul or Saô Paulo or in some part of the world, or now in Delhi, seeing our tail, sitting down in the seat, that they sort of feel that they’re home. We are looking to ensure that we convey that and that the brand lives up to that promise.