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Phil Graham '89, who has represented Canada at two Olympics in rowing, was awarded the 1st Distinguished Alumni Award. The award is presented based on a person's achievement and leadership in their field. Recipients will have shown leadership in business, industry, a profession, or in public life, and they will have brought honour to Trent University through endeavours which have earned them prominence within their field. Their vision, commitment, creativity, and leadership will have been recognized within their field and beyond it.

(Right to left) Phil Graham '89 and Alumni Director Tony Storey.

The following is Phil's acceptance speech.

Welcome and thank you.

So I was thinking, if I am the first recipient of this award then shouldn't it be called the Phil Graham award?

A while back I came across an interesting discussion on customer satisfaction by the Gallop Organization(1). The argument went like this. Customer satisfaction could be broken down into 4 expectations.

1. The first expectation is that of accuracy. Customers expect that their telephone bill accurately reflect the calls that were made over the course of the month, or that the waiter will bring you exactly what you ordered.
2. The next level of customer expectation is that of availability, customers expect that the dealership will have the car they want or that the bookstore will have the new book that they want to read.

It is interesting to note that meeting these expectations can only prevent customer dissatisfaction, it can't actually make someone satisfied that when they get the bill after a great meal everything is in order. You never hear "Wow, this bill is just what I ordered. Lets come back here again!" Rather, you just pay it.

The next two expectations compete the to satisfaction. By meeting these next two expectations you will have actually created satisfaction not just avoided customer dissatisfaction. The claim is that by meeting these two expectations you will turn your most fickle customers onto your most ardent advocates.

3. The third level is that customers expect partnership. They want you to listen to them, to be responsive to them and to make them feel as though as though they are on the same side of the fence as you. A great example of this is the Dell computer sales model. At Dell.com customers pick and choose the components that they want in their new computer and then they tell Dell to go and build it. When the computer arrives at their house on time and with the components that were ordered they feel as though they helped build something and the first three levels of satisfaction have been met. Accuracy, availability and partnership. This helps explain why so Dell has so many satisfied customers.
4. The most advanced level of customer satisfaction is advice. Customers feel the closest bond to organizations that have helped them learn. Which completes the circle and brings us to where we are today. At the most advanced level we are here because we all spent some of the most formative years of our lives surrounded by an institution that helped us learn to be who we are today. It was by meeting this learning expectation that Trent has turned what, by some accounts, are fickle students into ardent supporters. If we hadn't learned we wouldn't be here today.

It was back in Newfoundland in 1988 while I was deciding which universities I should apply to that I happened to see the Trent University poster with the rowing boat going under the Ottonabee Bridge just a few days after I had watched Olympic rowing on TV for the first time. With that poster they had me, Trent was the only place I applied and I chose Otonabee College because it was the closest to what, on the map, looked like the rowing club. Choosing to do history seemed almost an after thought although I did do some pre-internet research on the Trent History program. Of course back then I could have walked to Peterborough faster than I could have found relevant information on the net.

The rowing that I did certainly defined the moment for me, in 1990 I was a member on the Trent University crew that won the Head Of the Charles, the largest single day rowing regatta in the world. Trent came in first in front of the famed Harvard boathouse and ahead of the great Ivy League schools Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown. It was there that I first learned a lesson that has been repeated over and over again during my life.

With talent, hard work, friendship and most importantly teamwork we can all be world-beaters in any of our chosen fields. This lesson has been drilled into my head through two Olympics and during my current career with a small Victoria based software company that has a technology second to none and is capable of competing with any of the multi-billion dollar conglomerates throughout the world.

When I left Newfoundland I 1988 I was leaving a small close knit community that lacked cultural diversity to enter another small close knit community that lacked some things of which cultural diversity was not one.

Back in Corner Brook it was not that we were intolerant, it was that there was little to be intolerant of. We had just one African-Canadian family, the Best's and one Chinese-Canadian family, the Wong's. While it wasn't an issue that they looked different or that they had different customs than we did it wasn't until I got to Trent that I began to understand how fundamentally important tolerance is and also how easy it is to get the same outcome using two completely different methodologies. One of the great life lessons that I began to learn and explore while at Trent was the ability to distinguish that sometimes it is the outcome that is important and sometimes it is the method and further, which was which.

In my current job as a software project manager I rarely use my Trent History degree to recall when the war of 1812 occurred, I have, however, hired several software developers recently arrived in Canada for the first time from such diverse locals as China, Romania and Germany whose command of the English language is an oxymoron. Finding ways to help them communicate and thrive in our corporate culture requires soft skills that no degree can grant you but that can be developed in an environment like the one we all discovered at Trent.

So if we look at the four levels of customer satisfaction we see that Trent provided accuracy in the course material, we had small class sizes that promoted the availability of our professors, we all developed partnerships with the staff and other students that helped us to feel like we were all in this together and most importantly Trent gave us a chance to learn, grow and live.

It is with great pleasure and humble thanks that I accept this award of behalf of all Trent university alumni.

Thank You.

Phil Graham

Endnote:

Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, First Break all the Rules (Simon & Schuster, 1999), 128-132.

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