D'Alessandro opens up in new book on Manulife

With yesterday’s annual meeting now over for Manulife Financial (MFC:TSX), which marked the retirement of Dominic D’Alessandro, the excitement can turn to the release of the new book on his time at the helm of MFC: “Manulife – How Dominic D’Alessandro Built a Global Giant and Fought to Save It“.

The authour is one Rod McQueen who, according to Penguin’s jacket cover, is one of “Canada’s best known and respected writers”, “the author of a number national bestsellers” including the #1 Bestseller The Eatons, which won the Canadian Authors Association award for Canadian history, and Who Killed Confederation Life?, which won the National Business Book Award in 1996. (He also happens to be, to my great good fortune, my father.)

I’ve just started in on it, but already one can see how personally Mr. D’Alessandro takes his business career. And, unlike so many other businesspeople, he actually tells you what he’s thinking. Here’s an excerpt from the book on his former Royal Bank colleague John Cleghorn and why he left RBC:

“I didn’t respect him very much and I don’t think he particularly liked me, either. I didn’t want to be part of his team. I didn’t like his style,” said D’Alessandro. “I didn’t want to work for somebody that I didn’t respect. I had no aspirations to be the CEO of anything at that stage – I just wanted to have progressively increasing responsibility. I certainly didn’t have an aspiration of being CEO of the Royal Bank. I left because I had never compromised myself to work with somebody I didn’t respect or like, so why should I do it now?”

Manulife is the largest life insurance company in North America today. One has to respect and admire what Mr. D’Alessandro has done over 15 short years. The $15 billion acquisition of John Hancock remains the largest Canadian acquisition in history. As my Dad said last night on BNN Television with Andy Bell, many Canadian CEOs wait for shareholder value to be “visited upon them when a U.S. company comes to acquire their company.” Mr. D’Alessandro built Manulife from “nothing” (as he himself shared with BNN last evening), and the stock is up 412% since it went public in 1999 (prior to the market meltdown, MFC was up 830% and had a market cap. larger than the Royal Bank for a time).

If you want to read the rest, click here.

MRM