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If He Says You’re Fat, You Say He’s Bald
This is a maxim about negative campaigning that Jim Coutts, former Liberal party strategist and principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau, told my public management class decades ago. I quoted it in a blog post on March 12, 2011 in which I questioned then Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff’s unwillingness to respond to Conservative Party attack…
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A Hedgie Prince of Darkness Brought to Justice?
One of the long-standing business fables – particularly in the financial services sector – is that of bringing the prince of darkness to justice. By prince of darkness I mean the CEO, and usually entrepreneurial founder, of a financial services firm who is breaking the law: insider trading, fraud, or perhaps a Ponzi scheme. Justice…
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Hello Stephen, this is Barack, I’m Cancelling Keystone
So began this year’s crisis management exercise for my public administration students. I always start our discussion of crisis management and government communications by giving the students an exercise. This year’s exercise imagined that President Obama, responding to environmentalist pressure, decides to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and announce his decision on Earth Day, Monday,…
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Saying “Si” to “No”
I just saw director Pablo Lorrain’s movie “No,” about the unexpectedly successful referendum campaign in Chile that unseated dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. The movie focuses its attention on Rene Saavedra, a fictional young ad man, to whom it attributed many of the ads used by the “No” side. (They were the “No” side because…
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Getting off Lightly
It was a beautiful Sunday morning, cold, calm, sunny, and with a cloudless blue sky – perfect for skating. At 10 in the morning, there weren’t many skaters at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square rink, and as my brother and I skated and talked I observed a few of them: the couple on a date, the…
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Lincoln’s Leadership Lessons
The Sunday New York Times business section recently (January 26, 2013) ran a piece by Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn entitled “Lincoln’s School of Management. “. Prof. Koehn has developed a teaching case on President Lincoln that she uses with mid-career students. In the Times article, in addition to her own discussion of Lincoln’s…
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Zero Dark Thirty: An “Heroic” Narrative?
Structurally, Zero Dark Thirty rigorously follows the heroic fable pattern. It begins by replaying, over a dark screen, voices of people trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and it ends with a real-time reenactment of the moment of vengeance, the successful raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. But it takes a…
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Canada’s Government Advertising Addiction
I’ve recently read two papers that, together, make the case that the Government of Canada has an addiction to advocacy advertising. Christopher Stoney and Tamara Krawchenko’s “Transparency and accountability in infrastructure stimulus spending: a comparison of Canadian, Australian, and US programs” is the lead article in the December 2012 issue of Canadian Public Administration (volume…
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Lincoln: A Roll-Call Vote as High Art
In his review of “Lincoln” last weekend, New York Times critic A.O. Scott began by noting the “paradox that American movies – a great democratic art form, if ever there was one – have not done a very good job of representing American democracy … The squalor and vigor, the glory and corruption of the…
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Argo: A Story of Heroic Public Servants
When my twelve year old son and I entered the theater for the matinee showing of Argo last Saturday, his immediate observation was that “everyone here is probably old enough to remember the hostage crisis.” Despite his ageist attitude, he enjoyed Argo tremendously. So did I. In its essence, Argo is a story of heroic…
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Arbitrage: Actually, it was Fraud
I continue scanning the cinema for new films about private sector managers, to be analyzed in the book I’m writing or discussed in my course on narratives. There have been more than a few inspired by the economic crisis, the most compelling of which is Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary Inside Job. The latest to hit…
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Dr. Bernard Ludwig has Passed Away
This post is about Dr. Bernard Ludwig, my uncle (mother’s brother) who, passed away on Sunday, Sept. 16 at the age of 90. His funeral will be Wednesday, Sept. 19 1 p.m. at Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel (2401 Steeles Ave West). What is best known about him is that during his long career as an…
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The Sovereigntists Meet the Bond Vigilantes
With the prospect of a PQ Government in Quebec after next Tuesday’s election and a third referendum (a syndrome called the “neverendum”) on the horizon, I will reflect a bit on how global capital markets – the bond vigilantes – might respond. There is some relevant historical precedent. In the run-up to the too-close-to-call 1995…
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Swiss Bank Accounts or a One-Term Proposition: Attack Ads, Round Two
After some vacation time, I’m now back to the blog. The latest round in advertising for the US presidential campaign features attack ads by the Obama campaign and by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative superpac. The Obama campaign’s attack ad starts with Barack Obama’s affirmation – in his voice accompanied by his physical presence –…
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Peter Aucoin’s Yahrtzeit
Our colleague Peter Aucoin passed away on July 7, 2011, almost a year ago. Yahrtzeit is a Yiddish word meaning anniversary (literally, time of year), and Jews are obligated to observe the Yahrtzeit of the deaths of members of their immediate family (parents, siblings, children). Within Judaism, it is a way of ensuring that everyone…