Making Sense of the Millennium

Trendwatch
Deirdre McMurdy
 
 

CONSOLIDATION BRANDING BLENDING MOTIVATION GLOBALIZATION  COMPETITION OUTSOURCING ADDING VALUE INNOVATING OPTIMIZING

It’s much more than a list of buzzwords.  Canadian companies are facing an unprecedented range of internal and external challenges.  Growing through merger or acquisition may increase size, reduce costs, and open the door to new markets.  But to maximize the benefits, it requires the delicate art of combining two or more distinct corporate cultures.  By the same token, electronic commerce may offer exciting new business opportunities, but it also means that companies must take a fresh look at branding their goods or services, at deploying their technology capital in the most effective way.  And as ever, optimizing returns for stakeholders, constantly innovating and adding-value are the order of the day in competitive global markets. Deirdre McMurdy is the Business Editor for CTV’s Canada AM and a contributing editor for Maclean’s magazine.

Tech-Business Trends
Tod Maffin

Where will your business be when technology shifts the very nature of commerce into a digital economy?  With more than half of the Canadian population having access to the Internet today, it’s clear that very few industries will remain untouched by the largest economic revolution to occur in a century.  Here are the top three trends you need to know about going into the year 2000.

E-SERVICES SET TO BOOM
The biggest growth will be in the provision of so-called "e-services" – outsourced assistance with line-of-business or administrative operations, largely executed over the network.  Some examples already in development:

• Personalized employee benefits programs, where new employees’ first task is to customize a benefits program by spending "points" on their particular needs, all handled confidentially through the company intranet.
• Secure and expedited email, guaranteeing private delivery of an electronic document within a set period of time and with a registered receipt, just like a land-based courier service.

INTERMEDIARIES THRIVE
Contrary to popular opinion, the Internet is not going to make intermediaries extinct.  Take the most touted e-commerce success story – arguably amazon.com: While the purchase is done online, consider all the "traditional" business intermediaries getting rich off it: book publishers, courier companies, cardboard box makers, credit card companies, and more.

WIRELESS COMMERCE COMING
If you think e-commerce has grown to date, you haven’t seen anything yet.  Cell phone companies and manufacturers of portable digital assistants are just about to enter their biggest growth phase: wireless commerce.  Just as when you launch your web browser and a "home page" shows up, soon your cell phone will have a home page, complete with instant ordering, banking services, weather and travel info, and more.  All for a fee of course. Companies that partner early with these wireless portals and snap up top positions will certainly benefit from this next boom.

Tod Maffin is one of Canada’s most influential tech-business futurists, according to the Globe and Mail. His web site at http://maffin.net/business/ contains a number of related articles.
 

Awakening the Soul at Work
Dr. John Izzo

The airline check-in agent saw a copy of my book, Awakening Corporate Soul, sitting on the counter in front of me. "You have to be kidding," she scoffed, "corporations have no soul." Many people react this way to the concept of soul at work. Still she added, "if you know of one that has a soul I'd sure like to work there!"

There is a fundamental shift in worker's values about work. The baby boomers moving into mid-life want their work to be fun and engaging while providing them more time and opportunity for personal priorities. Younger workers know there is no job security and expect development, fun, partnership, and community as the trade-off for their time and effort. Any organization
interested in attracting and keeping people will have to create an engaging corporate culture.

In my work with major companies across North America I have discovered four paths to creating more soul and vitality in our work and in organizations.  The path of self, is when we are clear about our values and our values align with those of the organization. The path of contribution has to do with creating a culture where higher purpose exists alongside business purpose and people are recognized for their contributions. The path of craft has to do with creating an environment for learning and where artistry is nurtured. The path of community has to do with creating a workplace of truth-telling, feedback, mentoring and where love is central.

There is a longing for more meaning and fulfilment in work and companies that create cultures that can meet this longing will thrive as we move into the 21st century.

Dr. John Izzo is an international consultant and speaker and has been successfully helping organizations achieve their goals for more than 15 years. Dr. Izzo holds an M.A. in organizational psychology and a Ph.D. in organizational communication and has served on the faculty of two major universities.
 

Who Dreams of the Millennium?
Mark Kingwell

There's every reason in the world that the millennium should not matter to us.  So how come it does?

Busting hype is our great preoccupation in these waning days of the century -- next only, perhaps, to generating hype -- and
the debunkers have come along in their numbers to take the wind out of the Year 2000.  By now their litany of deflation is familiar:  the Judeo-Christian calendar is arbitrary and socially constructed; apocalypse is a merely Western preoccupation, theologically suspect anyway; historically there is nothing thicker on the ground than predictions of the world's end or the Messiah's return, all of them unfounded or mad or political.

All true.  Plans to commemorate the occasion, meanwhile, have taken on a depressing tawdriness.  A gaint domed theme park at Greenwich.  Massive fireworks displays.  Bonfires on Fijian headlands.  This is all we can come up with?  Moreover, in this age of relentless and usually thoughtless marketing, nothing has paled faster than brand-names that appeal to the once-energetic tropes of Millennium or 2000 or Twenty-First Century.  With even the Great Champagne Shortage now thought by many to be just a marketing scam by wily French winemakers, who can blame us for throwing up our hands in disgust?  No wonder a restless and able media critic of my acquaintance has taken to urging people -- a bit like this magazine spread -- to Boycott
The Millennium.

All that's left, it seems, is the notorious Y2K computer crisis.  We've all heard plenty -- maybe too much -- about this
projected calamity, in which elevators will allegedly free-fall and banks accounts crash.  But it at least has the merit of closing the hype circle in a neat way.  If Y2K does prove apocalyptic -- nobody seems to know for sure, which is usually the way with prophecies -- what's ironic is that it's going to be precisely as a result of the very arbitrariness of the date-driven switch from nines to zeros.  (Score one for the calendar's power after all.)

* * *

So why resist all this resistance?  Surely the intelligent attitude is to see the millennium for the hype-fest it is, and simply
ignore it.  …  What I have discovered in thinking and writing about the millennium over the past four years, however, is
the complex web of desires and fears, many of them unconscious, that cling to transitional dates, those periods of imagined change that stand outside the regular course of time.  These are what anthropologists call liminal spaces, interstices in the normal flow that must be passed through before the ordinary way of things can be resumed.

It doesn't matter if the transitional date is arbitrary, because it functions despite all the conscious reasons against it.  A
transitional date organizes and measures cultural beliefs and expectations; it carves out time by drawing lines in the social mind.
It reminds us that we are future-producing creatures, dimly aware of our mortality and yet constantly throwing our plans and projects (and our genes and ideas and mortgages) into the unknown not-yet-here.

It becomes, finally, a focus for dreams, those "psychological structures, full of significance," as Freud called them in a
revolutionary book, The Interpretation of Dreams, whose publication was purposely delayed so it could bear the liminal date of 1900.  Dreams express our wishes, anxieties, and hopes. …

Beware the millennium hype, by all means.  But don't ever let skepticism overcome your capacity to dream.

Mark Kingwell is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.  His book "Dreams of Millennium" is being re-released this spring with updates and a new Introduction.
 
 

Finding the right speaker for an event takes research, analysis, and often some  "out of the box" thinking… the results can be quite exciting!        Some recent speakers we brought to our Clients include: Richard Lambert, Editor in Chief of the Financial Times of London John Cleese, Former Monty Python member and Owner of one of the world's most successful Corporate training companies Dr. Tony Alessandra, a pioneer of incorporating client-service strategies into corporate culture William Taylor, Co-Founding Editor of Fast Company Magazine one of the most successful business magazines in US publishing history Dr. Patch Adams, a doctor, a clown, a revolutionary! His life and work was made famous by the hit movie "Patch Adams" starring Robin Williams

Proud sponsor of CSAE'99 Conference and Showcase

Sunday, July 18  2:00pm - 3:00 pm
The Millennium Roundtables - featured guest, Richard Worzel
Canada's leading futurist, Richard Worzel is president of Futuresearch Corp. which consults to industry and government on major trends in business, the global economy, and technology.  He is the best-selling author of four books including, Facing the Future: The Seven Forces Revolutionizing Our Live and 2017:The Next 20 Years of Your Life.  Richard also writes regular articles that appear in The Globe & Mail, The Financial Post, Canadian Business, Your Money, and Teach Magazine.  As a speaker,  Richard helps us to prepare for the future by identifying key factors that are affecting change in our industry and the action we can take to benefit from the changes that are upon us.

Monday, July 19  9:30 am - 11:00 am
Relating to Tomorrow’s Members and Employees.  What Comes After Generation X?
Irshad Manji
What’s in young peoples’ hearts and on their minds?  Irshad Manji knows.  She’s the dynamic voice of youth today.  Author, broadcaster and educator, Irshad was recently declared a "Feminist for the 21st Century" by America’s Ms. Magazine and one of "100 Leaders of Tomorrow" by Maclean’s.  Currently she is the host and senior producer of The Q-Files on CITYTV and working on her next book about Generation Q, the 90 million post-Xers who are so queer and non-linear in their thinking that they’ll revolutionize education - if only we let them be our teachers.  Provocative and passionate, Irshad unveils a way to honour the complexity of contemporary times while giving us a strategy to cope – and succeed.

Monday, July 19, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Making the Best Deal - For You
and
2:30 pm - 4:00 pm, Right Hire Yields Success/Wrong Hire Spells Disaster
Michael Stern
Michael Stern is president of Michael Stern Associates Inc., a leading executive search firm.   Michael Stern Associates was one of just two Canadian search firms to have made the top "Fifty" of the exclusive list named by U.S. based Executive Recruiter News.  After an early career in psychology, Michael Stern has been an executive recruiter since 1978, and formed Michael Stern Associates four years later.  Michael’s work gives him the opportunity to talk daily with senior executives and business leaders from a variety of business sectors – to hear how they think, what’s important to them, and how they are trying to make their companies successful.  As a recognized leader in the industry, Michael is often quoted in the media on various aspects of corporate leadership, executive recruitment, manpower planning and career management.
 
 

CAFP Special Edition The David Lavin Agency is a proud sponsor of CAFP’s 15th Annual Convention and Exposition Friday May 28, 1999 2:00pm - 3:15 pm  Building Total Recall…with Bob Gray Backwards Bob, as he’s called is a very entertaining and educational speaker - just imagine the value of a better memory! First he demonstrates his own incredible memory: he can recall the population, longitude and latitude and area circumference of every capital city in the world!  Then he teaches the audience how they can do the same thing with peoples names, telephone numbers, product information…  Bob proves that,  like any muscle in the body, a better memory, simply takes training and exercise.  A trained memory is a business asset that is available to anyone and Bob makes the training fun and memorable!    Saturday May 29, Luncheon keynote 12:15pm - 1:00 pm Free Traits and Well Beings:  Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Dr. Brian Little An award-winning teacher and Professor of Psychology at Carleton University, Dr. Brian Little is widely respected as one of the early pioneers of emotional intelligence.  His presentations offer a rare combination of substance and whimsy – extensive, up-to-date research and academic credentials matched with warmth, humour, and an altogether brilliant style of delivery.  "Free Traits and Well Beings" addresses very recent research on physical and emotional health, particularly as it relates to the financial services industry.  It challenges a number of contemporary myths about how to deal with stress and difficult clients and proposes some creative new solutions.  Meeting the Challenge With the much-hyped state of volatile markets and dramatic shifts in investor confidence and knowledge base, some of our clients tell us that "seminar marketing is on a down-swing."  Are people seminared out?  Far from it.   Instead, seminar marketing has been evolving to meet the challenges of the day.  As consumers’ tastes become more sophisticated and discerning, they are demanding technically sophisticated seminars on very specific topics. It is imperative that advisors and planners respond by providing unbiased information and qualified advice.  By partnering with one of the David Lavin Agency’s leading authorities to bring the public the answers they demand, advisors can solidify their position as an expert partner in the financial future and long-term fiscal goals of their clients. Not only will partnering with one of the David Lavin Agency’s help advisors keep up with the public’s demands, working with our speakers improves their chances of getting important seminar funding.  For as well as having to adjust to changes on the consumer end over the past year, the industry has also been presented with new challenges from its regulatory agencies.    In May of 1999, the Investment Funds Institute of Canada unveiled new regulations governing the funding of client/educational seminars.  Advisors across the country worried whether they could still afford the traditionally lucrative client seminar.  In response to the biggest question on everyone’s minds—How are seminars going to be funded?—the David Lavin Agency immediately took the necessary measures to ensure that our most popular presenters were IFIC compliant.  There are many challenges that are changing our world and we will need to look ahead to meet them.   At the Agency, we are constantly on the lookout for trends that are shaping the future and identifying the leading thinkers of our time.   We want to work with you to meet those challenges and continue to provide winning solutions as we enter into the next century.  Personal Finance, Business and the Economy Diane Francis Diane Francis is Editor-at-Large of the National Post, a contributing columnist for Maclean’s and author of seven best-selling books on business.  Nationally recognized for her controversial and hard-hitting commentary on the issues of the day, she is one of Canada’s most in-demand speakers.  Diane travels the world exploring and reporting on the global economic and political situation and the role that Canada plays in what is rapidly becoming a borderless world.  Through her work as a magazine and newspaper columnist and editor and television commentator, she prompts Canadians to ask themselves where we are heading as a nation, how competitive are we in the global markets, and what does this mean to our business climate as we head into the new millennium.  Diane Francis provides audiences with a timely analysis of the prevailing economic and political currents shaping business today, both in Canada and internationally. Deirdre McMurdy Business Editor for Canada AM and contributing editor for Maclean's magazine, Deirdre McMurdy is rapidly gaining both respect and fame for her frank opinions, insightful interviews and hard hitting articles. Her bi-weekly business column, "The Bottom Line" in Maclean’s, is one of the widest read business forums in Canada.  Deirdre covers topics such as:  the New Economy and the post-recessionary re-invention of Canada's economy, NAFTA, federal macroeconomic policy, emerging markets and growing continental trade. With her controversial take on these and other up-to-the-minute finance topics, Deirdre McMurdy is always informative, challenging and entertaining.  Richard Worzel Richard Worzel is Canada’s leading futurist and one of the country’s most sought-after speakers. He is a feet-on-the-ground visionary whose discipline is shaped by his background as an investment professional with a Chartered Financial Analyst designation. Richard has had real-world experience advising start-ups and fast-growing companies, especially in the hi-tech sector. A visionary with a track record, Richard predicted the rise of the global economy... 20 years ago, and the rise of the record-breaking bull market of the ’90s.  A dynamic, compelling speaker, Richard Worzel can point any organization to the future and show it what to expect, what to plan for, and how to succeed. Michael Alexander For the first time in North American history, inheritance is becoming a general fact of life, and Michael Alexander’s riveting presentation, aptly dubbed The Inheritance Revolution, has proved tremendously valuable to both advisors and their clients throughout Canada.   Baby boomers are expected to inherit close to 11 trillion dollars from their parents over the next thirty years.  A startling figure, but  even more startling is what that means to the average individual in the Canadian landscape.    As the author of the best-selling book, How to Inherit Money: A Guide to Making Good Financial Decisions After Losing Someone You Love, Michael’s personal experiences have guided thousands of Canadians through the muddle of archaic information and confusing laws.  Far more than a discussion focused on the financial implications of retirement, Michael offers audiences an insightful and thorough journey into both the emotional and financial pitfalls of inheritance and estate planning. Tod Maffin Tod Maffin is that rare combination of visionary, maven and pragmatist.  His cutting-edge Internet consultancy advises many of North America’s leading corporations on how to most effectively capitalize on new media and technology.   Having lived the majority of his life in the rapidly changing environs of cyberspace, he is well-aware of the immediate and far-reaching implications of new media and technologies.   Most recently, Tod has been called upon by his clients to present his viewpoints on the myths and realities surrounding the Y2K Bug and technology of the future.  Y2K is the one question that all businesses and individuals in the next 7 months will have in common and as a result, Tod has developed a fast-paced, delightfully perceptive and jargon-free exploration of the bug’s myths and provides a step-by-step plan of attack to mitigate risk. Hot Off The Press Dr. Moshe Milevsky, Money Logic Dr. Moshe Milevsky is one of the world’s most respected financial experts.  An Associate Professor of Finance at York University, Dr. Milevsky has won numerous awards and research grants for his studies on  Investment Management, Derivative Securities, Personal Finance and Insurance.  His theories on investing have been featured in The Globe and Mail, The Financial  Post and other investment publications.  In his highly acclaimed book, Money Logic, Dr. Milevsky has developed a whole new way of looking at investing.  As an investor, he knows the anxieties all of us face in making investment decisions.  He also knows that in order to make sound decisions you have to look at risk  -  not just the performance risk of your investment, but the even greater risk that the safer, less volatile route will disappoint you. With this in mind, Dr. Milevsky has developed an intuitive approach to financial risk – a method based on mathematics and computer simulation models – that can easily be applied to any number of investment decisions. Sound complicated? Money Logic answers many questions that investors face in a clear, concise and practical manner.    It’s message is simple but powerful:  Weigh the odds.  Then put them to work for you.   David Cork, When the Pig Goes to Market:  How to Achieve Long-Term Investing Success An investment adviser with ScotiaMcLeod, David Cork specializes in the baby boom phenomenon.  He has written a best-selling, highly informative analysis of it, "The Pig and the Python:  How to prosper from the ageing baby boom."  The Pig and the Python demonstrated to Canadians why they should invest in the stock market.  Now in When the Pig Goes to Market, the adventure continues with the DeMarco’s and Hazen (the wealthy demographer)  as they learn how they should invest in the stock market.  When the Pig Goes to Market shows readers how to find market sectors that will withstand any economic storm - very important with today’s volatile markets.  Readers learn how to home in on investment opportunities by studying those areas that cater to boomers and the echo kids.  When the Pig Goes to Market also tackles Y2K hysteria.  Can we survive and thrive?  David Cork knows the importance of evaluating pre-dominant demographic trends such as the baby boomers.  He has long ago realized the growing influence that the ageing boomers would have on the markets and society.  And he can show you how to position your investments wisely and profit from the baby boom.