“I BEGAN MY CAREER AT ROGERS 45 years ago, just after the 1968 Broadcasting Act was enacted and this Commission was created,” Phil Lind told CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais during the company’s appearance at September’s TV Policy Review hearing.
“Since that time, Mr. Chairman, I have had the pleasure of appearing before you and all your predecessors. I reckon I have represented Rogers at more than 100 broadcasting hearings over the past four-and-a-half decades.” That’s right, Lind has appeared before every single CRTC chairman there has ever been. His fingerprints are all over broadcasting policy in Canada.
There are very few people left in the business with that kind of history and institutional knowledge, or who generate the amount of affection and respect which the 72-year-old Lind does. “Phil has had a passion and a love for the company that goes far beyond the average employee’s commitment to their job,” said Edward Rogers, the son of the company founder. “I’d say he shared my father’s enthusiasm for the business like few others did. You could see that kind of excitement over the years.”
It’s actually pretty hard to think of Rogers Communications or of the Canadian cable and telecom business without Phil Lind. The company’s vice-chairman and executive vice-president of regulatory joined Ted Rogers 45 years ago when the company had just north of 10,000 cable customers and a pair of radio stations. The two proceeded to build the largest cable company in the land through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, buying the likes of Canadian Cablesystems Ltd., Premier Cable and Maclean-Hunter (below is a shot of the Rogers team facing the CRTC
when it was seeking the okay to buy CCL).
Having been Ted Rogers’ co-pilot for four decades until the founder’s death in 2008, then continuing to lead the government relations and regulatory group since (not to mention being the eminence grise for the whole company, brokering deals, too), Lind has decided the time is now ripe to step aside. The 2012 Cable Hall of Fame inductee announced earlier this year he will give up his operational roles at the end of 2014, then working certain special projects for about three more years. He’s retaining his seat on the RCI board as well, where he is vice-chair. He’s retiring – but not leaving.
Lind joined Rogers in 1969, the same year Edward was born and Edward, now a Rogers board member himself and head of the Rogers family trust which owns control of the corporation, joked before the company’s annual general meeting earlier this year he never was sure which debut, his or Lind’s, was most important to his father that year.
“He’d always reach back and help us all, because Rogers was a front-runner.” – JR Shaw
“He’s always been a good friend to everyone in this industry,” said Shaw Communications founder JR Shaw about Lind. “He’d always reach back and help us all, because Rogers was a front-runner.”
According to those who knew Lind best and have worked with him over the decades, it was Lind’s loyalty, tenacity and legendary people skills that led to his extraordinary business successes, on both sides of the border. While those under the age of 45 or so might not recall, Rogers Cable was once a big deal in the States and Lind was one of the premier generals in the U.S. cable wars of the 1980s when companies went from town to town trying to win cable franchises from local town councils. The company once famously promised to plant 10,000 trees in Portland, Ore, as part of its bid to win the franchise there. (In the U.S., cable is not licensed regionally via a national body as it is here. It’s done locally.)
With his “Road Warriors”, the group of executives and lawyers Lind put together to identify and claim territories (yes, there were T-shirts…), Lind built up a sizable U.S. cable operation in places like Minneapolis, Portland, Orange County, Calif., and San Antonio for Rogers in the ’80s. “It was a gold rush,” said Lee Sheehy, a long-time Lind friend and one of the Minneapolis lawyers who worked on many of the Rogers franchise bids. Many companies devoted serious resources and various tactics to win market after market.
“It was the Wild West,” added Colin Watson, Rogers Cable’s president at the time. “There were cases of people being caught with their hands in pockets… there were some that got caught and sent to jail, as I recall. Everyone wanted the same franchises, and the bidding wars were extreme. The typical M.O. was to go in and get local investors, so you had a very local face to offset the Canadian aspect of the company. That formula worked very well for us.” And for a time, Rogers was a serious American cable player.
“It was the Wild West.” – Colin Watson
“The stories are legend about Phil’s ability to create relationships and to bring insights,” added Sheehy. It was never easy to be the Canadian, the outsider, asking local American town councils to grant a cable franchise, so Rogers was often looking for an edge. While the company was bidding for Minneapolis the American public was consumed by the U.S.-Iranian hostage crisis and when Canadian diplomats help smuggle six Americans out of Iran, Lind had the idea to buy a full page ad in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune which proclaimed loudly “Thank You Canada” but keep the ad’s buyers a secret.
“Phil had the political sophistication to try and listen to what the local communities wanted. Again, I think he brought an ear that some U.S. companies didn’t, who relied more on bravado,” Sheehy continued. “Phil had a subtlety and a little bit of the Canadian ability to listen to what the customer wanted and be responsive was my experience representing the company… Somewhere along the way, I said ‘Phil, you should be the Canadian ambassador to 
the United States’.”
But in the late 1980s, Ted Rogers the visionary began telling people the future of communications was in cellular phones. However, taking that road wouldn’t be cheap and in order to fund wireless in Canada, Rogers made the decision to sell the American cable clusters – very much to Lind’s chagrin.
He still tells anyone who asks that the cable franchise wars was the most fun he ever had in business and it “broke his heart” to have to sell the American operations, which the company did in in 1989, says Missy Goerner, one of those road warriors who began working for Rogers when it purchased the San Antonio cable system she worked for in 1981 from UA Columbia.
“But the quality of the man is – and how he was always – it was always Rogers company first, not his own personal feelings,” said Goerner. And Lind worked hard to get the best deal possible for the company – a deal which very nearly fell apart thanks to a single clause in the franchise agreement with San Antonio.
Rogers had a deal to sell the U.S. division to a company which would become Paragon Cable. “They were kind of new in the cable business… so we got the top-of-the-market price, at that point,” she said. It was a $1.37 billion deal. More than enough to help fund a telecom launch in Canada.
But there was a snag. San Antonio’s franchise agreement said that whatever the fair market value was of the system, the city had the option to buy it for 5% less. Rogers didn’t believe San Antonio would exercise the clause, but Lou Fox, the city manager at the time, convinced council to do it. “They could’ve cratered the entire U.S. sale,” says Goerner.
No amount of convincing and negotiation between the city and Rogers would work and when Fox went on the radio to say he had Rogers “by the balls,” Ted was beside himself with anger. The deal looked scuttled because, seeing the battle in San Antonio, many of the other cities stopped negotiating their sales, too. Lind, however, was able to calm his boss down (another skill he was renowned for within Rogers) and Goerner managed to finagle one last meeting between Fox and Lind mere weeks before the Paragon deal was to expire.
“I said look, give Phil one more chance to talk about this. He said ‘I’m going to a city manager’s meeting tomorrow in Charleston, South Carolina. He said if he wants to come talk to me, I’ll be there’,” says Goerner.
“Just he and Lou sat down for hours, until Phil took out a napkin, put it in front of Lou, and asked him to write down what number he had to get from Rogers in order to be willing to move forward on the transfer. Lou Fox took his pen out, and he wrote $10 million, which is what they figured it was worth to the city if they were to buy the system, and then flip it.
“Phil said ‘okay, sign the napkin.’ He signed it, Phil signed it and that napkin was what Lou took back with him to the city council – truly a napkin. He went back to the city council, and the city council approved the deal,” recalls Goerner. The Road Warriors then fanned out across the country in order to finish the rest of the franchise transfers and save Rogers’ American exit.
“I’d love to be in the Comcast war room right now.” – Phil Lind
Lind would clearly relish playing in the U.S. cable sandbox, still, however. “I’d love to be in the Comcast war room right now,” he said in an interview, referring to the ongoing Comcast takeover of Time Warner Cable. “There’s thousands of touch points and you have to imagine that taking care of a lot of them… I’m actually quite envious.”
At Rogers, Lind is also known as a champion of the media side of the business (he and Watson used to appear regularly – and live – on Rogers Cable 10 community access channel in the 1980s and ’90s to answer customer questions on Ask Us – one time in Santa suits). What has become Rogers Sportsnet was his idea, he was the force behind the creation of CPAC (Canada’s C-SPAN) and Lind helped pioneer multicultural programming through the OMNI-TV brand.
But there’s another important way Lind has moved those who have had the good fortune to work with him. On 
Canada Day in 1998, Lind suffered a significant stroke which very nearly claimed his life. He had to learn to speak, read and walk again at 56. His fellow executives visited daily, helping with rehab, reading newspapers and keeping him informed about the business, Ted included. Lind taught himself to write with his left hand and returned to work just over year later.
He didn’t slow down once he recovered. He continued to travel, do deals, lobby politicians, lead Rogers’ efforts in front of the CRTC, collect art, see his beloved Cleveland Browns (he has season’s tickets and was a close friend of the late Browns and Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell) and turn up at industry events. He was even front and center this May at the NCTA Cable Show on a general session panel (pictured).
“I think he was an inspiration for folks around here.” – Edward Rogers
While he doesn’t like talking about himself too much, Lind admits he set himself a goal of five more years at Rogers after his stroke, something he thought would be a stretch. It’s been 16. The most he’ll say about his physical limitations is “it’s been a struggle sometimes” – and thankfully noting how the iPhone, something he can operate with one hand, has so dramatically improved his life. “It’s fantastic,” he often says of the device.
“He was at a point of his life where financially, he didn’t need to come back to work,” said Edward Rogers. “But he never hesitated in coming back and was a real example for many of us –meeting the challenges that life throws at you and continuing the work that you do. I think he was an inspiration for folks around here.”
We had no shortage of people who worked with or for Lind who wanted to comment on him and his career. Here is a sampling of what some of them said.
TONY VINER, former president of Rogers Media
Ted asked me whether or not he should buy the Toronto Blue Jays, and I told him no, I didn't think it was a very good idea because sports wasn't a great fit with corporation. People paid him lots of money and would be urging him to buy a switch-hitting third baseman, which it appears they've just done, actually.
It wasn't necessarily business-like, where Phil was a big proponent of buying the Jays. It's just another manifestation of Phil's vision. People think “oh, Phil's a sports guy,” but it was, in fact, Phil being a programming guy. He recognized that if we bought the Blue Jays, we would own those rights. I've always been a big fan, as Phil has been, of simple business plans. A simple business plan is hockey all winter and baseball all summer. That worked for Sportsnet.
I think two things that Phil recognized that nobody else did at the time is that one, owning a sports team meant owning those rights, which meant programming. Number two, in an era where the storage and retrieval of content was really trivial, only live sports and news were the two areas in which broadcasters could survive and content would be useful.
COLETTE WATSON, VP television and operations, in a speech at Lind’s recent retirement party (where this tribute video played)
Phil is a born leader. He commands a room just with his presence. He guides his teams with two principles: One: you do it for the cause and if you work hard you will be rewarded and two, since we spend so much time working… you should always, always have fun doing it.
As a man of great vision, it goes without saying that Phil was a trend-setter. He refined the art of working from somewhere other than his office decades before working remotely was in vogue. Phil was a corporate champion in the advancement of women in management. He walked the walk on that file. In fact, he invented the concept of allowing women to work from home 25 years ago – although most other people call it mat leave.
KEN ENGELHART, senior VP regulatory, at the retirement party
Early on in my career at Rogers, I sent something out without fully vetting it with Phil. As bad luck would have it, Ted objected to what I said and confronted Phil with it. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Phil to say: “Well Ken sent that out without checking with me” but that is not what he said. He said: “Ted that is our position in the regulatory department.” It was then for the first, but not the last time that I learned that Phil really had my back. And it is stories like that that account for the incredible loyalty that all of the people who work with Phil have for him.
PETER BISSONNETTE, president, Shaw Communications (pictured with Lind and former Astral CEO Ian Greenberg, at Lind’s 2012 Hall of Fame induction)
He's as close to Shaw as you can get. We just love him. He is absolutely like family – first cousins, anyway. He’s a 
tremendously generous person.
When Rogers was taking over Western Cable (in the early 1980s), we were preparing for the hearing. Colin wanted me to say something at this hearing that I didn't – he wanted me to talk about what Western was going to do on the capex front and how that would help in our applications. I said “Colin, we aren't going to spend that much money. That was never our plan. But he still wanted me still to say that.
Anyway, Phil finally said “Colin. He's told you three times he's not going to say it. He's not going to say it.” He was very supportive… That made me feel so good that he would be that forthright in a very, very sensitive kind of setting. That's what Phil is.
KEN WHYTE, senior VP, public policy, RCI
He’s just a man of wide ranging interests generally. Interested in sports. Interested in politics. He’s interested in media and gossip. He’s interested in the arts world. He reads a lot. That voracious curiosity about everything in business and in life, I think, makes him a tremendously interesting individual. It’s also a great weapon for him as a businessman because there is really no room in the country that Phil can’t go into and find common ground with someone. That’s a rare talent. There really isn’t anyone else at Rogers who’s like that.
I don’t know very many people in any businesses who are like that. He has kind of single-handedly been a state department for Rogers. He handles all kinds of external relationships with government, with the academic community, with the arts community and sports community. It’s based on that ability to find common understanding, in terms of reference. That’s really important.
KONRAD VON FINCKENSTEIN, former CRTC chair
We clearly had our policy differences but I have enormous respect for him both as a man and a broadcast entrepreneur. He is a tough negotiator but once a deal is made he is true to his word and one can rely on his commitments. I watched in amazement how the broadcasting side of Rogers under his leadership grew and how he managed to make a reality out of Ted Rogers' dream of growing Citytv into third viable national broadcasting network.
PETER GRANT, lawyer, McCarthy Tetrault
In the course of acting both for and against Phil, I have recognized for a long time his immense talents in the communications field. He is keen, creative, enthusiastic, and inventive. He was more than Ted’s right-hand man. He is owed a huge debt of gratitude for his efforts to build Rogers Communications to what it is today. Phil has been a seminal figure in our industry, combining an intense interest in content with a deep understanding of carriage issues. That is a rare combination.
