Co-CEOs of Canadian credit union prove two heads are better than one

financialpost.com:

Lewis Bublé stepped away from the sand and ocean surf and into a blissfully air-conditioned room on a searing-hot July afternoon in Turks and Caicos to speak about “the boys.”

Boys, as in, plural, and not the individual boy named Michael, the Canadian crooner and global sensation who happens to be Bublé’s son, as well as the person the retired B.C. commercial fisherman most often gets asked about.

“I always joke that Michael was our first child, our experiment,” he said. “And then our two girls turned out perfect.”

Jokes aside, the elder Bublé has had a hand in a few other experiments in his day, including a successful foray into human chemistry involving Bill Kiss and Jeff Shewfelt, the boys in question.

The 60-something-year-olds are the co-chief executives of Gulf & Fraser, a B.C.-based credit union founded, once upon a time, by commercial fishermen.

Bublé has been a director with the co-operative financial institution for close to 30 years, and he was present at the moment of creation, in 2011, when a relatively small organization did a relatively gargantuan atypical thing by putting two executives in charge, as equals, instead of having just one person at the top.

“We thought having the boys as our co-CEOs would be a no-brainer,” Bublé said.

But there are not too many brains out there in the financial sector, or any sector, who generally, historically, have thought the same. In the time honoured, corner-office-occupying tradition of alpha-dog executives, the buck in business almost without exception stops with a boss, and not with the bosses. Reaching for the top is a competitive affair, a cutthroat, scale-the-corporate-ladder undertaking that demands supreme self-confidence and office-politicking skills. As such,