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Last Refrain – Humanity’s Poet

Saturday night Canada shared a moment that will be burned into our collective history for years to come. We came together as a country to celebrate the life, talent, and most of all humanity of Gord Downie as the poet of our generation. September seventeenFor a girl I know it’s Mother’s DayHer son has gone […]

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Emotion Leads to Action

I joined a group of Niagara professionals at IdeaShare yesterday for breakfast and met some very inspiring entrepreneurs who had some great stories to share. The IdeaShare concept is essentially a Mastermind group (think Napoleon Hill – Think and Grow Rich) where a group of business leaders and entrepreneurs get together to discuss issues that are […]

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Be Willing to Change – Change is Power

Last week I was in the car driving and listening to the Jeff Blair Show on Sportsnet 590 The Fan. While discussing the pitching situation with the Toronto Blue Jays he said something that really stuck out to me. Jeff had recently changed his position on whether pitcher Aaron Sanchez should move to the bullpen and he was […]

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Build a Strong Foundation for Innovation

Those of you who know me won’t be shocked by the fact that I have a serious passion for innovation. I believe you always need to be constantly pushing your organization (and your life) forward. You need to focus on reinventing what you do and how you do it as often as possible to drive […]

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Connecting Strategy and Execution

I will be speaking next week at the Bank-IT Conference on the topic of “Building a Full Stack Strategy: Integrating Strategy from Business Vision to Tech Execution” so I felt that I would share some of my thinking more broadly here. While my discussion next week is focused on the Technology area, connecting strategy to […]

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Stop Firefighting

As traditional organizations look to address the new competition and rapidly increasing pace of change in today’s competitive marketplace I see some fascinating struggles. Traditional markets are seeing unprecedented changes in their customer’s expectations. New competitors who are chipping away at their traditional profit centres. There are even changes in the employee base with the […]

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Reality Check Your IT

I spoke last week at the Auro Bank IT conference here in Toronto on the topic of IT Transformation in an increasingly complex and fast-moving world, and the feedback I got from my talk from the participants was not exactly what I was expecting. I hoped that people would be enlightened by my ideas for […]

Innovation Applesauce

Leading in Innovation – Who Are The Innovators?

Over the past several months I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the industry in which I work (Financial Services) and wondering what it is that keeps this industry from leading in innovation. Like many other industries, the leaders in banking regularly talk about innovation, and some even claim to be leaders in innovation. But […]

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Karma Is A Beaut!

How many times have you heard someone in a moment of anger or frustration say “Karma’s a bitch!” We are conditioned to think of karma in this way – something to be feared or an invisible hand of retribution that somehow will be used by the universe to smite those who have wronged us. But […]

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Who Are You?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I define myself as a person. What parts of my life define who I am and if I’m asked what would I consider the most important things to communicate about who I am? What I’ve found is that by taking a good long look at all of […]