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Doug Ford Will Devastate Ontario Universities
What will be the fate of Ontario universities under a Ford Government? Here is my best guess. The Conservatives have not yet produced a detailed platform. We know that they want to balance the budget and do it by cutting spending. Ford talks about “finding efficiencies.” This based on the dubious assumption that there is…
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Thank You RightTime
I have a wonderful 50 year old Omega Seamaster watch my father left to me that I posted about last July. As everything becomes digital, finding skillful service for vintage watches is becoming more difficult. Two years ago I had it serviced by RightTime, a watch shop in the Atrium on Bay in downtown Toronto.…
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The Ontario Election Campaign on Social Media
With the official start of the Ontario election campaign two weeks away, I’ve been looking at what each of the three major parties are doing on social media. Underlying my casual empiricism is the hypothesis, supported by a growing body of evidence, that a party’s online popularity measured by indicators such as viewcounts and page…
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New Book on Business Narratives
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new book on business narratives Negotiating Business Narratives: Fables of the Information Technology, Automobile Manufacturing, and Financial Trading Industries, co-authored with Beth Herst, published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book develops an analytical model of business narrative and applies it to 63 recent narrative texts (movies, histories, biographies)…
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Questioning Doug Ford’s Resume
After looking at Doug Ford’s Wikipedia page and reading his 2016 book Ford Nation, I have questions about three areas of his resume: his role in the family business, his lack of post-secondary education, and his approach to politics. Doug Ford describes himself in the book as an “independent Canadian business leader,” and has claimed…
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Storynomics, the Book: Truth in Marketing?
After several years of teaching a one-day seminar on “story-driven marketing,” screenplay writing coach Robert McKee (together with digital marketer Thomas Gerace) has just published a book: Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post Advertising World (Hachette Book Group, $19.49 on Amazon.com). The essence of the book is the application of McKee’s model of Hollywood film…
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Plagues of the New American Pharaoh
Our family uses the Reform Jewish Haggadah, written by a committee of Reform rabbis in the mid-Seventies. Before the recounting of the ten plagues on Egypt, the haggadah has a passage that discusses the plagues that “threaten everyone everywhere.” I’ll quote it in full: The making of war, The teaching of hate and violence, Despoliation…
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Should an Alleged Drug Dealer Serve Time – As Premier?
More than a few people have observed the irony of Ontario Progressive Conservative (PC) Party leader Doug Ford urging Premier Wynne to leave the distribution of cannabis, when it is legalized, to the private sector. This, allegedly, is his area of expertise. Let’s look at the history of these allegations. In an investigative article, published…
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Hillary Clinton’s Prophetic Final Ad
While working on my chapter about election advertising narratives in the 2016 presidential campaign, I happened to play an ad the Clinton campaign posted on November 4. It is titled Rewind and still available on YouTube. Using the image of screen static when a video tape rewinds, we see a series of CNN headlines…
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Just Published: Populism Kneecaps Public Sector Innovation
I’ve just published a paper in the leading academic journal Public Management Review entitled “Public Sector Innovation in a Context of Radical Populism.” In it I discuss the key characteristics of both radical populism (xenophobia, anti-elitism) and public sector innovation (a much longer list). Getting down to cases, I show how the Trump Administration’s practices…
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When They Go Low, We Go High
Michelle Obama coined this personal motto in her speech to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, referring to how she and her husband chose to respond to those “who question [his] citizenship and his faith” and to “the hateful language [we] hear on TV.” In the new book on public sector narrative I’m working on, I’ve…
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My Journey from Sage to Guide
I’ve just completed the first draft of the chapter about my narrative pedagogy for my new book. I started by gathering student evaluations and course outlines for 16 times I taught my undergraduate Narrative and Management course between 1991 and 2017. (There might have been more in the early years, but that’s all I found.)…
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Tosca: MeToo
I saw the broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s superb production of Tosca last Saturday. What I found most thought-provoking was the character of Baron Scarpia, the villain. Scarpia is chief of police in Rome in 1800. The Kingdom of Naples has just recaptured Rome from the Bonapartist Roman Republic. Scarpia is using any and all…
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Participant Media Comes to Canada: A Creative Management Narrative Exam
Following from the post about my public management exam, here are the questions I asked in my Narrative and Management course last semester that demanded creative answers from my students. In my post of December 10 I discussed the relevance of the 2003 movie The Fog of War in 2017. I had also mentioned this…
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Darkest Hour and Alternative Facts
I’ve been pleasantly surprised that since Darkest Hour was released in late November last year, my review has had between 100 and 200 visits daily, even on the holidays. My discussion of the major historical inaccuracies of the film has also stimulated lively debate among those who have commented. Consider, first, my critics. Lynn Thompson,…