One very sultry evening in early August, a small group of faculty from the University of Toronto's Joseph L. Rotman School of Management has gathered to host the annual barbecue welcoming into second year the five members of the student council. We are picturesquely distributed about the lovely colonnaded terrace backing Rotman dean Roger Martin's Rosedale home. It overlooks a swimming pool, and a cascade of trees and shrubbery leading down to one of the enclave's quiet streets. The student council's four young men and one young woman (who points out that the percentage of women enrolled at Rotman is about the same—27% at last reckoning) are personable, confident, chatty.
Martin is a little late, but finally beams in with his characteristic verve, wearing a salmon-coloured New Yorker polo shirt, beige shorts and—nice touch—turquoise flip-flops. He is at ease with the students, casual. At one point, he takes the whole gang to the basement for a tour of his climate-controlled wine cellar—"my vice," he calls it. He talks about his hometown of Wallenstein, Ontario, and the feed business his family operated, about his days as a student at Harvard and about Monitor Co., the consulting firm that made his fortune. Somehow, the presence of an apricot in the dessert leads him to an anecdote about pro-bono work he did in Russia, which leads to his bringing out sets of Russian matryoshka dolls representing that country's political leaders. But he listens as well, probing the students on what they want and what they're planning. When he hears that one of their priorities will be to strengthen the bond between first- and second-year students, he's exultant. "I love it," he says. "The second-year students at Harvard couldn't give a rat's ass about first-year students."
He says he hated Harvard Business School, describes it as having been anti-intellectual and obsessed with conventional case studies that break the business world into manageable bits when the real world, the big picture, is never quite that tidy. "I remember one student saying no, there must be a new way of looking at this," he says, "and the guy was hissed."
The real world, in Roger Martin's mind, requires that businessmen and women operate as artists almost as much as they do as number crunchers—a belief that has shaped an approach to business he calls "integrative thinking." This belief is also at the core of the Rotman curriculum, and it's a concept many say is behind the spectacular rise in the school's fortunes (though detractors—and there are some—feel Martin's greatest talent is in crafting media "sizzle" when a big chunk of the "steak" came courtesy of donor Joseph Rotman's multimillion-dollar gift to the school). Since his appointment in 1998, Martin has accomplished the remarkable feat of moving Rotman's Financial Times ranking as an MBA-granting business school from 72nd place to 24th in the world—with a promise to take it into the top 10 before the end of his tenure four years from now.
Martin is also the author of the well-received business book The Responsibility Virus, a contributor of newspaper opinion pieces, the subject of many a business profile and an advocate of what he calls "business design." He has also written about virtue and happiness, topics one thinks of as more the province of a Plato or Aristotle than as naturals for a business world that has given us Enron and its kin.
This sense of virtue, moderation and restraint extends to his domestic arrangements. His house is large, but not vulgar. We spend an evening in the living room, which is comfortable but, like the rest of the place, not showy. There are paintings, some of them by his wife, Nancy Lang. There are books. Some pottery. There is a vintage table-soccer game (he has two sons, Lloyd, 20, and Daniel, 15, and a daughter, Jennifer, 18). There are two black cats, Harriet and Olivia, and a white bichon frise called Snowy. When he sinks into the sofa, 50-year-old Roger Martin takes off his socks.
