By Harvey Mackay

Whether you’re managing a team of employees or you’re on your own, remember that although what you do and how you do it are important, it’s the “why” that provides real motivation to succeed.

An experiment conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business demonstrates the power of “why.”  At a university call center where employees phone alumni to solicit contributions to scholarship funds, the staff was randomly divided into three groups:  The first group read stories written by former call center employees about the benefits of the job (such as improved communication and sales skills).  The second group shared accounts from former students about how their scholarships helped them with their education, careers and lives.  The third, a control group, read nothing, just explained the purpose of the call and asked for a contribution.

After a month, the researchers found that the first group and the third group raised roughly the same amount of money from alumni after the experiment began as before.  But callers in the second group, who had related the stories about the impact of the scholarships students received from the fund-raising campaign, raised twice as much money from twice as many alumni as they had before.

By Lisa Brost and Jeffrey Levine of McMillan LLP

Generally speaking, banks’ customers have no immediate right to the proceeds of the cheques that they deposit. Under the terms of most banking services agreements, banks can place holds on cheques deposited by their clients for a reasonable period of time. Further, even if a hold is not put on a cheque, any advance of credit by a bank on deposit of a cheque is usually provisional in nature. The cheque may still be returned, or dishonoured, by the bank on which the cheque is drawn, leaving the bank that provided provisional credit in respect of the cheque with recourse to recover such amount from its client.

These guiding principles of the cheque payment process were recently considered by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Re*Collections Inc v The Toronto-Dominion Bank.¹ The plaintiffs in this action moved to certify a class action against three of Canada’s six major banks (the “Banks”). In the proposed class action, the plaintiffs sought to recover profits that the Banks allegedly earned at their customers’ expense through use of the proceeds of held cheques between the time that cheques were deposited by their customers and the time that the proceeds of the cheques were made available to the customers.