Re-Layering Canadian Tire Acceptance by Using Requisite Organization

Speaker A So when I started the process of having the consultants come in and going through their interviews and doing everything I mean by the time I was asked to join them to listen to their results I really had no particular clue about what they would come back with. But at the same time when I looked at in my own way and I read a little bit and all these kind of different things I knew that we weren't a level twelve organization so the eleven levels we had wasn't going to be there. But when they came back and said it's really at your level and four other levels is only five, I immediately saw the drastic change we had to make and I can't say that it scared me. It was more like it's a big job you have to do. But it also gave me enormous relief because I felt now there was a clear solution to the mess that had been there and it cut through everything that one could see and one explained. Here is the accountability for this group, accountability for that. It made sense to me. We talked about it, we modified a little bit but not much and we did some drastic things in order to bring the accountability together. For instance, finance and credit together was a totally new notion in the functionality of a credit company. People saw credit in itself as the issue but if you don't combine it with finance then you don't have accountability for the funding and the controls. So you really have to in the end bite the bullet and say credit and finance are together because they balance each other out. You can't leave that to one vice president and the other one it's basically two level threes and then the integration happens at level four. The credit finance that cut down probably one third of the whole management structure. So just by simplifying that notion and I would say a lot of people now in the industry probably do it that way but then it was not considered kind of the right thing to do so that was a kind of a surprise but the rest of it was relatively straightforward. It was simple. It was just like clean like I really must say now I remember that the director of human resources was part of that process and she was probably in it in the discussion. I think it caused her immeasurable pressure because she saw that the organization she'd worked for for a number of different years as being totally changed and different here in her head she was right and said okay yes, this is the right thing. But I think her stomach and her heart said oh my God no. Who needs to do this? And it was obviously very difficult but for me it's a little bit different because I come in there to do something and so to be given a clear picture of what needs to be done is almost like a relief. It's not like a relief and say, oh, yeah, let's party. But it's a relief to say, we now know what we need to do in order to get this organization to where it is and code it. So it was a very drastic plan, but at the same time, and probably in my naivety of kind of wanting to do the right thing, I said, Fine, let's go there and do that. Was I kind of the morning of September the 6th of 88? Was I not nervous. Oh, boy, I was intense and everything. It was not an easy thing to do because you're telling people that they don't have a role in the organization, but yet at the same time, I also had to. So it was just part of that just very eventful day in itself. But I must say, when I heard about a solution to it, I really felt a sense of, yeah, this makes sense. This is something I can work towards, making workload.