THE GOOD, THE BAD
AND THE DEADLY ABOUT MOJO

IN THIS ISSUE we learn that the current outbreak of high-end investment boutiques on Bay Street could be more about mojo than money. We also learn how worrying about losing one’s mojo is a leading cause of death among Canadian men. Let’s deal with the business of boutiques first. A boutique wouldn’t seem to be something associated with any kind of machismo behaviour per se. A boutique is traditionally a place where fashionable clothes are sold. However, when you put words like “global strategic” or “discretionary investment management” or “hedge fund” in front of the word “boutique,” you’ve got something fashionable, but in a different way. You’ve got the promise of lean-and-mean investment houses run by some of the Street’s most noted alpha investment executives.

These people made their names at the big houses on Bay Street and are now striking out in business for themselves. As our writer Mike Dojc points out in his piece about the rise of investment boutiques (page 6), they allow their fledgling proprietors more freedom to do what they do best without the bureaucratic restraints of larger financial institutions. Fact is, in the past, even the most gifted and creative among them had few other options than to either adapt to large corporate cultures or practise rugged individualism in some other line of work. However, new technology has allowed the entry of small players onto the investment playing field.

Now this is not to say that working for the big banks was not lucrative for these folks. But what is the price of having one’s full self-expression or, shall we say, mojo put on ice? Apparently very high, as evidenced by the number of big names that have left the corporate fold to go it alone.

More specifically, it seems the essence of the type of mojo these people crave is better served in the high-stakes arena of entrepreneurship. As we have seen, the initial bank response to the enticing away of their young has been litigious. However, if the banks are going to stem the brain drain in the long run, they are going to have to adapt their environments to the needs of superstar investment performers, without putting mainstream clients at risk levels distasteful to the banks. Dojc has taken a more facetious approach, suggesting the banks adopt the methods of big-league sports franchises to keep their superstars happy. Not terribly practical, but somewhere in between, perhaps, lies a happy medium where the banks look at doing some franchising of their own in potentially lucrative niches. At any rate, the courts are clearly not the place to deal with the rise of new competitive forces being generated by the marketplace.

Having said all this, we turn to the darker side of mojo. The kind that would have one in eight men in Canada fall victim to prostate cancer simply because they won’t get checkups.

Our story begins with John Blanchard, a fundraiser extraordinaire, who took on the challenge of raising money and awareness for prostate cancer: a non-winning proposition in the fundraising world, until Blanchard decided to operate from the premise that men just don’t behave like women when it comes to their health. In this case, they downright ignore it. Blanchard realized using strategies and tactics that have been wildly successful in raising money for breast cancer just don’t work for men.

Blanchard himself was one of the lucky ones who caught his own prostate cancer in time. And that was only because he felt obliged to get tested himself since he was going to run a campaign encouraging other men to do so.

Blanchard developed his own quiet approach to raising research money, all the while understanding that the cure to prostate cancer is often what men fear the most, losing their mojo or in this case their ability to have sex during the recuperation period. But as Blanchard learned, it does come back in most cases, and getting that checkup isn’t as undignified as it may seem once you realize where you stand on this deadly matter.

I’ve made my appointment.

See you in June!

Sincerely,

Martin Power