Posted on Seasoned Posts

Shut Doors and Improve PR

Humans are bad at eliminating options, and it costs us dearly in job performance, relationships and effectiveness, says an article in today’s International Herald Tribune that reviews a book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. According to experiments carried out by Ariely, a professor of bahavioural economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), people will go to great lengths to avoid narrowing their choices, and will pay dearly to do so. The theory is that eliminating...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Entertaining the “R” word. Will you embrace, spin or hide from that elephant in the room?

“Entertaining the ‘R’ word” is rather poetic, isn’t it? Would it surprise you to know that it was economist Derek Holt (assistant chief economist, RBC Economics Research) who came up with that phrase? Derek is providing the (opening keynote) Economic Update 2008 at my organization’s annual Controllers’ Congress, which begins on Thursday, February 21st. For a third year, we’re also offering the Economic Update as a free webcast to the general public. Derek and I...

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Public Relations and Social Media: impact sofar and what next? Look at this program for the Euprera-Edelman EuroAtlantic summit in Bruxelles from 13 to 15 of March and make sure you don’t miss it!

An EuroAtlantic summit of senior social media and public relations academics and practitioners will take place, as already indicated in this and other blogs (www.euroblog2008.org) , in Bruxelles from March 13 to 15. The still preliminary, but almost definite, (I am a member of the organizing committee) seems to me rather juicy, as it combines the theoretical thinking of academics and scholars with the practice-oriented approach of senior practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic.

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Peer-to-peer roundtable discusses “How effective is corporate governance in Canada?”

On Tuesday, February 5th Direct Engagement Inc. is sponsoring a peer-to-peer roundtable discussion on corporate governance in Canada, “Capital markets in Canada compete globally for issuers and investors. Scandals in the US demonstrated their fragility. Statistics show Canadian regulators devote a smaller percentage of their total budget to enforcement than the US. Is the present corporate governance system working? Why are some organizations better than others in corporate governance?” Although this is a paid-attendance event,...