AT THE BOARDROOM TABLE WITH
IDA GOODREAU
A Women’s Leadership Circle® Interview Series
By Gayle Hallgren-Rezac and Judy Thomson, CA
We recently sat down with Ida Goodreau, CEO of LifeLabs and a WLC Advisory Council member and asked her to answer our version of Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire. Ida is the former President and CEO of Vancouver Coastal Health Authority (a role she held for almost seven years) and has been LifeLab’s new CEO for just over six months.
LifeLabs is a made-in-Canada success story, employing more than 3,000 professionally trained staff, who deliver more than 50 million laboratory tests annually to over 10 million patients and nearly 20,000 physician customers. The BC division of LifeLabs was founded by Dr. Don Rix as Metropolitan Biomedical Labs almost fifty years ago. These days Ida divides her time equally between LifeLab’s offices in Toronto and Burnaby and her two homes—a condo in downtown Toronto and a “get-away-from-it-all” place on Bowen Island. Ida loves this “no packing” lifestyle. She has everything she needs in both places.
We met Ida at Life Labs’ offices in Burnaby. Everything about the place is light and airy. The boardroom has lots of windows and the view is trees and more trees. The walls of the building are filled with art that looks personal and very West Coast. Ida tells us that this building has Dr. Rix’s signature all over it. Ida has a cool, calming manner and she looks you straight in the eye, smiling frequently.
WLC: If you could give a key piece of advice to a 16-year old girl (and guarantee that it would ‘take’) what would it be?
Ida: Believe in yourself and have the confidence to take some chances. I think most of us rarely regret what we did, but may often regret what we didn’t do. But if you haven’t been a bit bold and adventuresome when you are young, it makes it much more difficult to do so when you are, say 40. It’s a little bit like a muscle, if you haven’t exercised it, it is very tough to use. Not impossible, but tough.
WLC: What are you reading right now?
Ida: The Help by Kathryn Stockett (a novel about black maids in white households in Mississippi during the early 1960’s) and a book I may have read as English major. It was time to reread The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (this book won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize – the first one awarded to a woman!)
Ida is enthusiastic about her Kindle given to her by her brother-in-law in Seattle. It weighs next to nothing, and as someone who travels a lot it is a fantastic way to not only read books, but journals and newspapers. Ida has a couple of hundred on hers, but it can take 1,500 books. We talk about this amazing technology and the loss of the touch and feel of opening a book. Ida’s clear-headed logic is “I love books, but I love to read more than I care about the medium. In other words, I now realize I love reading more than I like books.”
WLC: Do you have a time-saving thing that you do (could be for work or home life)?
Ida: I’ve given up on perfectionism. When I am retired, I will be able to do things to greater perfection.
WLC: What do you do just for yourself?
Ida: For the past nine years I meet up with old friends from my time in Norway. (Ida lived in Oslo for two years when she worked in the forestry industry for Norske Skog.) We go to the Saltzburg Music Festival every August. The music is wonderful and on opening night there is the whole red carpet with celebrities, minor royalty, long gowns and jewelry. It’s so old world and something you don’t see here in BC.
WLC: What time do you start your day?
Ida: 5:30 to 6:30 AM. A lot of work can get done on the Bowen Island ferry.
WLC: Tea or coffee?
Ida: Tea. My time in New Zealand made that decision for me. At one of my first meetings I had a choice between steaming pots of tea brewing at the back of the room or a teaspoon of instant coffee in the lone coffee cup on the table. I decided the tea looked a lot better and I have been drinking it ever since.
WLC: What was your most rewarding business experience?
Ida: Working for Fletcher Challenge in New Zealand. From 1994 to 1997 I was managing director of Tasman Pulp and Paper which had the largest industrial complex in the country at the time. It was still a somewhat male-dominated industry so there were quite a few interesting attitudes to women. New Zealand is a beautiful country with wonderful people and it was my first real CEO experience. And, I had only been in the forest sector for 18 months so it was a bit daunting, but also exciting and exhilarating. There was a great sense of I’m doing it!
WLC: What woman leader (dead or alive) do you admire and why?
Ida: Eleanor Roosevelt, Anita Roddick, Harriet Tubman (who escaped slavery and helped rescue other slaves through the famous Underground Railroad) and Marie Currie. These women all blazed a trail, most of them without any significant advantages in life. They did major things, well before their time.
WLC: What male leader (dead or alive) do you admire?
Ida: Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill
WLC: If you could take a sabbatical (a year away, doing anything you want) what would it be and what would you do? Do nothing is not an option!
Ida: Work with the World Health Organization or a NGO. Today we think about providing aid to “help” those countries in need, but I’m interested in the school of thought where we look for positions of strength. How can we enable more success?
WLC: If you were starting your university education over today (assuming you could get into any university and cost was not an issue) where would you go and what would you take?
Ida: I would do what I did when I went to university. I studied the humanities first and then got a business degree. I would want to study overseas, perhaps Oxford. I would choose an English-speaking country.
WLC: How do you follow up with the people you meet?
Ida: My BlackBerry. I would love to send more cards, write personal letters but it goes back to my earlier comment, I’ve given up on perfection. I have a core group of friends whom I value deeply.
WLC: What book do you wish you had written?
Ida: Any book!
We asked if it would be fiction or non-fiction. Ida’s first response was non-fiction, but on reflection we could see she was leaning to fiction. “When you are busy you don’t let your imagination run loose.”
WLC: What time of day do you stop looking at your Blackberry or similar device?
Ida: Just before bed.
WLC: What company do you most admire?
Ida: RIM (Research in Motion). It’s the elements of innovation, how they slipped in kind of quietly, that they seem to be a good company and they are a true global success story, based in Canada.
WLC: What is something about yourself that people may not know, which may surprise them?
Ida: I used to do stained glass, windows and lamps a number of years ago. I was in the process of getting divorced and it was a way to focus my attention on something else. I could spend 14 hours straight in my basement studio! I’ve never been able to do anything so intensely. The therapy worked. The result is my friends and family were given lots of Ida Goodreau stained-glass pieces.
WLC: What’s your guilty pleasure?
Ida: Chocolate, dark chocolate, but 85% is too extreme. 65-70% is what I like. Lindt is a favorite, but in a pinch a handful of Hershey Dark Chocolate Chipits will do the trick!
WLC: What do you love about your job?
Ida: I love the work that is being done in predictive medicine. For example, a quite common side effect amongst children who receive certain cancer treatments is deafness. New work being done here in BC, using DNA testing, can show whether a child would suffer this side effect. Exciting work is happening here.
We have an opportunity to commercialize these innovations ourselves, rather than selling the work done by our BC researchers to other places, only to turn around and buy the commercialized product back. This is the exciting future.
“The Women’s Leadership Circle provides a new and relevant forum for women to become engaged with the business community,”
Henry Lee,
Chairman, The Vancouver Board of Trade
Be a part of this exciting new initiative for Board of Trade members
