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Captain Phillips: In a Different Course
I saw the movie Captain Phillips a few days ago, curious about whether it would be appropriate for my narrative and management course. It’s a great movie, telling a true story of survival with drama and suspense. The movie portrays each of three interacting organizations – the crew of the container ship Maersk Alabama, the…
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Susan Delacourt’s Shopping for Votes
Over the last few nights, I devoured Susan Delacourt’s well-written and thoughtful history of political marketing in Canadian federal politics. The title makes the important point that marketing ideas have now moved into the political realm through election campaigning and the communications function of government. Delacourt traces the history of political marketing back to the…
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Our Man in Tehran: A Revised Story
The original story of the rescue of six US diplomats from Tehran in 1980, recounted in the media at the time and a year later in Jean Pelletier and Claude Adams’s book The Canadian Caper, heroicized the Canadian embassy officials, most notably Ambassador Ken Taylor, who sheltered the diplomats and helped them escape. These accounts…
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Canadian Cialis Ads: Minimalist Narrative
I’ve been presenting ads that use narrative in my management and narratives course. Canadian Cialis ads are an interesting example of minimalist narrative, in which the ad tells only part of the story. For the story to make sense, the audience must supply the rest. Ads for treatments for erectile dysfunction are necessarily inexplicit, because…
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Remembering Myer Brody’s Contribution
Myer Brody passed away a few days ago. He made a major contribution to the Department of Management at UTSC during the period I was chair. I knew something about his contribution from my interactions with him over the years, but learned more at his funeral and Shivah. Myer earned his Ph.D. in Economics at…
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Frank Lloyd Wright vs. Modern Kitsch
Recently I visited both Toronto’s Spadina House and Buffalo’s Darwin Martin House National Historic Landmark. The Globe and Mail’s brilliant urban affairs columnist Marcus Gee lavished praise on Spadina House in his column of August 17, calling it an “overlooked Toronto jewel.” The house has been restored to its appearance in the Twenties and the…
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Sammy Yatim Article
The Toronto Star has just published an op-ed piece I did about an innovation – cooperation between the police and public health departments – that could have averted the police killing of Sammy Yatim. Here is a link to the article: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/08/08/sammy_yatim_innovation_that_could_have_saved_his_life.html Canadian readers of my blog will be familiar with the back story. For…
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Clay Christensen on Government Innovation
During the last few decades, there have been communities of scholars studying innovation in the private sector and innovation in the public sector, but – regrettably – there hasn’t been a great deal of interaction between the two groups. The entrepreneurial vibrancy of several sectors of the US economy, particularly IT, has attracted the attention…
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Argo and The Canadian Caper
I‘ve just read two earlier versions of the story told by the recent movie Argo. CIA agent Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio’s 2012 book Argo is subtitled “How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled off the Most Audacious Rescue in History.” Jean Pelletier and Claude Adam’s 1981 book The Canadian Caper is subtitled “the inside story…
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Challenging Real-World Public Management Problems
I’ve always believed that the questions on a final exam should be as challenging as the problems managers face in the real world. This year in my public management course, I came up with five such problems, and asked the students to solve any four. Here are the questions and my comments. First, how would…
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The Liberals Strike Back … Finally
The night before last, I watched the Conservatives one-two advertising punch during a Jays’ game: their Justin Trudeau attack ad as well as an Economic Action Plan ad, the latter being nothing more than taxpayer-supported political advertising. Yesterday I saw Justin Trudeau’s reply to the attack ad, and I consider it a good first step.…
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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…
- I am Professor of Public Management Emeritus at the University of Toronto, having retired in July 2020 after a 45-year academic career.
- My latest book, Public Representations: Screen Stories, Narrative, and the Public Sphere, co-authored with Beth Herst, was published in April 2026 by University of Toronto Press (open access).
- On this website I post blogs about politics, narrative, and my life experiences.
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