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Marketplace prophet >> Montreal magnate J.-Robert Ouimet tries to bring God to the assembly line by PHILIP PREVILLE
The question is this: Is it possible to turn a profit and contribute to human happiness at the same time? The question is pretty standard fare for anyone doing an undergraduate arts degree--it's the subject of seminars and the origin of many arguments at campus bars. But Ouimet is no armchair socialist; he's an industrial magnate, one of the wealthiest men in Quebec. For him, the issue is definitely not theoretical. At age 65, Ouimet humbly believes he may have found the answer. His obsession has turned him into one of the most unorthodox businessmen around. He has hired a company "ombudsman" to whom employees can complain if they've been treated unfairly. He invites people he's laid off to have lunch with him, to find out how they are coping and what the company can do to help. And each of his factories has within its walls a non-denominational meditation room where people can go, at any time, to sit in silence and find some peace and quiet. He credits this idea to none other than Mother Teresa, with whom he maintained a personal correspondence for the better part of 15 years. She even visited one of his factories in 1988, and helped pen a company prayer. She became, in essence, his most trusted business consultant. He insists his success is a direct result of these and other measures, and thinks other companies should follow his lead. "With neo-capitalism going unchecked the way it is right now, it will self-destruct," he warns. "Companies must respect the human dignity of the people who work for them. If not, within the next 20 years we will witness a great deal of unrest, and probably the return of Communism in some form or other." Baked-bean titan J.-Robert Ouimet is quite possibly the least-known rich man in Quebec. He likes it that way; throughout his career, he has kept his life and his business as private as possible. Because of his discretion, it's impossible to know just how wealthy he is--but there are some clues. His name appears on the list of Montreal magnates in Titans, Peter C. Newman's who's-who of the Canadian elite. Numerous other people on Newman's list also make up his board of directors. And the library at Quebec's most prestigious business school, the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, is named for him and his wife Miriam--thanks to a generous (though undisclosed) endowment on their part. He has also turned his father's company, Ouimet-Cordon Bleu, into a key player in the processed-foods industry. He makes everything from Clark baked beans to Piazza Tomasso frozen lasagna to Cordon Bleu meatballs and gravy. Despite his success, he still owns the house on Esplanade in Mile-End where he grew up, and regularly herds the wealthy members of his board into the cramped, damp basement where his father started the business for meetings. MBA bullshit While he takes spiritual pursuits seriously, he admits he's no saint. "It's still a business, and I have to compete," he says. "My workplace is not unionized. I fire people, I lay people off. But that doesn't mean I don't respect them. "I believe that the better educated people are, the less intuition they have. And people without much education have tons of intuition. People who work on assembly lines and in warehouses can tell, within minutes, if they're being manipulated. They know when their MBA-educated boss is full of shit. And I think they know I'm not." But do they feel he's pushing religion on them? "They're always skeptical at first, and they're right to be skeptical. Things like the meditation room seem cultish. That's why Mother Teresa said it had to be non-denominational. "It's taken years, but now people use it when they want to. And they know that no one will hold it against them if they don't."
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From the time he was 18 years old, when he understood that he would soon inherit his father's canned-food company, J.-Robert Ouimet has been driven by a single burning question. "To this day, the question has never left me," he says. "I continue to devote myself to it."