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Responding to the Bob Rae Attack Ads: A Teachable Moment?
In recent months, there have been two similar, but not identical, ads attacking Liberal Party leader Bob Rae. The Conservative Party’s ad (“Bob Rae wants to be prime minister”) has been broadcast, especially during sports events, and is still available on YouTube. I don’t know if the National Citizens’ Coalition’s ad (“Bob Rae is back”)…
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A Tale of Two Budgets
To prepare a briefing for my public management students about the federal and Ontario budgets, I diligently scrolled through both. Two similarities became apparent. First, both led off with good news. The federal government used the rubric of Jobs, Growth, and Long Term Prosperity, and is continuing to use the Economic Action Plan brand, over…
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Footnote: A Moral Tale in Academe
Writer-director Joseph Cedar’s Academy Award-nominated film Footnote brought to mind the Swiss director Eric Rohmer’s “moral tales”: movies in which intelligent and articulate characters confront ethical dilemmas. In Footnote, Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnick are both Talmudic scholars at The Hebrew University. The son (Uriel), a far more distinguished academic than the father (Eliezer), is selected…
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Lords on Safari: A Review of the Books used in my Capstone Strategic Management Seminar
Now that the semester is almost over, I will assess the two books I assigned in my capstone strategic management seminar for fourth year UTSC undergraduate management majors. The textbook was Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph Lampel’s Strategy Safari, 2nd edition (Financial Times Prentice Hall UK, 2009) and it was accompanied by Walter Kiechel’s…
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Severely Conservative: Simulating the Deficit Reduction Action Plan
Shortly after the 2011 election, the Harper Government established a subcommittee of the Treasury Board, tasked with making, to use Mitt Romney’s neologism, severely conservative budget cuts (up to $8 billion) in departmental base budgets. The result of their work would be called the Deficit Reduction Action Plan, thus emulating the high profile Economic Action…
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The Consequences of Speaking Truth to Power
Two recent separations of senior public servants, one a resignation and the other a dismissal, raise some important issues regarding the consequences of the key responsibility of senior public servants acting as advisors, namely speaking truth to power. In 2010, Munir Sheikh, Chief Statistician of Canada, resigned over the cancellation of the compulsory long-form census.…
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When they say it’s not about the money, what they mean is ….
Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize winning 1981 book The Soul of a New Machine and a much less heralded 2008 film Flash of Genius both raised the question of the fraught relationship between the hard work of invention and the uncertain financial rewards for inventors. Flash of Genius tells the story of Robert Kearns, a Detroit…
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Professors’ Lives: Writing History or Doing Social Science?
My mother-in-law, Dr. Roslyn Herst, lent me the recent autobiography of Michael Bliss, her fellow member of the Toronto Medical History Club. Bliss has had a stellar career as a Canadian and medical historian and political commentator. The autobiography makes clear the secrets of his success: a powerful work ethic, a strong entrepreneurial streak that…
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A Look Ahead for Premier McGuinty
I was asked by iPolitics.ca to put myself in Premier McGuinty’s shoes to think about priorities and problems at the start of his new mandate. While the iPolitics article, with contributions from a variety of pundits, will be coming out early in January, here are my un-media-ted views now. The leadership of the federal Liberals…
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A Tale of Three Steves and a Bill
This week I watched an almost-forgotten 1999 made-for-television docudrama, Pirates of Silicon Valley, about the origins of Apple and Microsoft. The movie focuses its attention on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with Steve Wozniak and Steve Ballmer both acting as narrators. Neither Gates nor Jobs was portrayed very attractively. While Jobs was a visionary who…
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Depicting Dot-com Disasters
In attempting to identify entrepreneurship fables, one place to look is the dot-com boom that began in the Nineties. If the dominant fable is the entrepreneurial success story, as most recently depicted in The Social Network, then the counter-fable would be the disaster story. The disaster story looks at a dot-com startup that began with…
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Cinematic Defenders of the Free Market Faith
At the end of “Wall Street and Vine,” his essay published in 2005 attempting to explain why he feels Hollywood is critical of business, University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein concludes that “the best way to counteract [Hollywood] films’ misleading message about business is to let business speak for itself.” The Acton Institute, a…
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Stephen Denning and Management Narrative
In writing the literature review for Enterprising Fables, one name that demands serious attention is Stephen Denning, who has written several practitioner-oriented books about how managers can enhance their persuasiveness through the strategic use of simple stories. Denning’s own story is a compelling one. Initial success as a lawyer – winning a case for an…
- 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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