From left to right: Claude Laguë, Dean, Faculty of Engineering; Gilles Patry, President, University of Ottawa; Micheál J. Kelly, Dean, School of Management; Bruce Firestone, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, School of Management.Photographer: Mélanie Provencher

By Tony Patterson

All Ottawa knows the name Bruce Firestone because Bruce Firestone brought back the Ottawa Senators after an absence of sixty years. He is a local hero.

At local universities, first Carleton and now uOttawa as entrepreneur-in-residence, he is known as an inspiring prof who teaches engineers how to be entrepreneurs. At a breakfast earlier this week in historic Tabaret Hall, he delivered the first lecture in the Entrepreneurship Bridges Lecture Series ─ an opportunity for students to learn from industry leaders about how to leverage interdisciplinary skills into a career. His talk was entitled Execution Counts: Ideas Are Not Enough. In the course of it he told the following story:

In 1990 he was at the NHL Board of Governors meeting that would decide which cities would get the new franchises. It was a tense competition with many players involved. One of the 21 governors came up to him and leaned in very close to say, "Ottawa will never, ever get an NHL team." Bruce tried to persuade him otherwise, but failed. The guy left with, "Remember what I said."
Bruce met with his lobbying team to say, "Well that's one vote we won't get; there are twenty others, let's go after them."
Later, as the governors were about to convene behind closed doors to make their decision, Firestone was given a piece of advice. "Be sure," he was told, "that yours is the last face they see before they close the doors to the committee room." So Bruce stood there until the very last minute, almost, he says, until his nose was caught in the closing door. All the while he was being jostled by Phil Esposito, who was promoting Tampa, and who also wanted his imprint on the governors' minds as they deliberated.
Ottawa won and so did Tampa. When Firestone was being welcomed by the league president, John Zeigler, he asked how the vote had gone. "Oh," said Zeigler, "it was unanimous."
That was a bit puzzling, given the aggressive certainty of the guy who had told him it would never happen.
A few weeks later he got a call and an explanation. A couple of the NHL governors conceived a plan to help them judge who should be let into their club. Almost all the cities that wanted in were larger than Ottawa. But Ottawa wan't singled out for discouragement. Three or four governors decided to approach all the candidates and to tell each of them individually and in no uncertain terms that they would "never, ever, get an NHL team."
Some got upset. They were insulted, angry and openly discouraged. Some even got up and left. These were readily discarded. The cities that continued to fight for a win to the very end came home with a franchise. Ottawa was one.