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From Toronto Life Magazine, October 2003 A Profile of Dr. Sherry Cooper
By Gerald Hannon |
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It's been the crystal ball business for Sherry Cooper ever since she was a kid. Back in Baltimore, where she was born and raised, little Sherry saw a lot of busy suburban moms, thought ahead to just what might make their day - and by the age of 11 was running her own neighbourhood day camp.
"I picked up the kids from their moms in the morning," she remembers, "sat them in my backyard and taught them things - I was definitely giving lectures, even then - and returned them to their homes for lunch. I made some significant money that summer."
She's been making significant money pretty much from then on. Today Dr. Sherry S. Cooper is executive vice-president and chief economist for BMO Nesbitt Burns, which means she spends a lot of time thinking, speaking and writing about where the world economy is heading. And she's just as good at the prediction game as she was in her Baltimore day camps: Bloomberg - the American information services, news and media company - ranked her as the best forecaster of the U.S. economy's gross domestic product last year. An arcane field, but she's often its public face; she gives great TV sound bite. Perhaps the only puzzling thing about Sherry Cooper is that she doesn't seem, well, all that puzzling herself.
We meet in her office, on the 15th floor of First Canadian Place. She's just five-foot-two, very fit, wearing a silver-threaded bolero jacket and navy slacks, and favours a single, rather large, diamond on a chain around her neck. She has something of the bounce, and very much the hairstyle of a Hillary Clinton. The office is spacious, comfortable, a little characterless. The windowsill features a queue of crystal tchotchkes (no crystal ball, though), the gift detritus, she says, of countless speaking engagements (she gives some 200 speeches a year, all over North America and Europe).
Economics grabbed her almost by accident: she was doing math at university, had a hole in her schedule and took an economics course to fill it - and found both a career and an obsession. A Ph.D in the subject from the University of Pittsburgh catapulted her to the Federal Reserve Board in Washington D.C., where she became special assistant to chairman Paul Volcker (there's a framed note from him on her wall). Her job, she says, is 60 per cent data crunching ("the scientific part - everyone does that) and 40 per cent intuition and experience. "I spend a lot of time," she says, "assessing the fuzzier aspects of the economy," like what might happen if SARS comes back. "No one can see the future," she says, but for the second half of this year she is optimistic about the U.S. economy. "And that," she adds, "is inevitably good for Canada."
She moved to Toronto in 1983 (she and her then husband having been offered jobs in Canada) and decided this town was a great place to raise a kid. This job went spectacularly well, the marriage went sour (she subsequently married businessman Peter Cooper), and today she keeps up a pace that is wilt-making even to hear about.
Rises somewhere between 4:15 and five a.m. Reads five newspapers and countless research papers. Listens to courses on audio tape as she drives to work (these days, it's American history). Is never home before seven p.m. Writes a twice-weekly column for the National Post. Travels extensively. Has written two books (she is presumably better at her chosen field than she is at popularizing it - the books are platitude-heavy business inspirationals). When she turned 50, she trained for and ran the Toronto Marathon, clocking a very respectable four hours and 15 minutes. "I love what I do," she says. "I have no interest in retiring."
She is the classic overachiever, her surface so glittering with the trappings of success that it's a little hard to peer beneath. Even simple pleasures are positioned as win-lose challenges: when she reads mystery novels, she does so with a coloured highlighter in hand. When she finds what she thinks is a clue, zip goes the highlighter (though she takes some pleasure, too, she says, in discovering an author who constantly outwits her).
The sole idiosyncratic feature of her office is the amount of space devoted to her son, Stefan Atkinson, whom she describes in the introduction to one of her books as "my mentor and shining model." An odd take, she concedes, but not an unlikely one: he is a graduate cum laude of Harvard, an excellent rugby player, a singer, an actor, a young man just embarking on a career in broadcast journalism at CNN. Mentor? An intriguing spin, but it doesn't take crystal ball to guess that he's just taking after Mom.
Reprinted with permission from the author, Gerald Hannon - Toronto Life, October 2003 Issue
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