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I am reading this article in the National Post called, RED TAPE: The silent killer of jobs written by Laura Jones. The article talks about how Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledges the destructive impact of excessive regulation in 2011 and wants to do something about it. The article actually is a comparison between the U.S. and Canada — saying that President Barack Obama feels the same way however Canada’s approach seems more promising in getting results and the P.M. is acting on this.

For this article, I want to focus on Canada rather than compare. What I find most amazing is how long it has taken our P.M. to do something about this. With nearly 98% of Canada made up of small-to-medium size businesses, the impact of red tape on these businesses has been paramount — just ask. All Stephen Harper had to do was ask. Any small business owner that I talk to says the same thing … “The paper work is killing us. There is duplication of rules and regulations in the municipal, provincial and federal requirements. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business estimates that regulation costs Canadian businesses more than $30 billion a year. Canadian business owners estimate regulatory costs could be reduced by about 25% – or $7.5 billion – without affecting legitimate health, safety and environmental regulatory objectives.

Thank goodness Stephen Harper is acting now. He created the Red Tape Reduction Committee to consult with small business owners across the country, collecting more than 2,300 examples of regulatory irritants. They complained about everything from bad customer service with Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) to capricious enforcement of questionable rules that threaten the existence of some businesses. What I find astounding is that the Harper government has been part of the actual problem – growing the government to the largest it has ever been. That in itself creates inefficiencies. So what to do??? Committees? Interviews? I guess it’s a good start. I say it is time to JUST DO IT. Cut the red tape so that we can begin to be competitive and innovative and creative in the Canadian market and the world at large!

The first paper came out, What Was Heard, and this paper did not hold anything back. This paper asked for accountability from the regulators and government; to change the culture in the government to one that is more customer-centered. Stephen Harper says he is prepared to act — it is time to put your money where you mouth is. We can learn something from B.C. – they have reduced their red tape by 42% over the last 10 years and its reforms are widely credited with a dramatic improvement in the province’s economy.

It is good to see movement toward change in a positive direction for small business!

Tags: Canadian revenue agency, getting rid of red tape, making our government more responsible, reducing red tape, regulations, Stephen Harper, What Was Heard report

Trustiness

We’re all looking for someone to trust. People and institutions that will do what they say and say what they mean.

Banks used to use marble pillars and armed guards to make it clear that our money was safe. Doctors put diplomas on the wall and wear white smocks. Institutions and relationships don’t work without trust. It’s not an accident that a gold standard in business is being able to do business on a handshake.

Today, though, it’s easier than ever to build a facade of trust but not actually deliver. “Read the fine print,” the financial institutions, cruise ship operators and business partners tell us after they’ve failed to honor what we thought they promised.

It’s incredibily difficult to build a civil society on the back of “read the fine print.” Emptor fidem works so much better than caveat emptor. When we have to spend all our time watching our back and working with lawyers, it’s far more challenging to get anything done–and it makes building a business and a brand infinitely more difficult.

The question that needs to be asked by the marketer is, “are we doing this to create the appearance of trust, or is this actually something trustworthy, something we’re proud to do?”

Building trust is expensive. You can call it an expense or an investment, or merely cut corners and work on trustiness instead.

Trust is built when no one is looking, when you think you have the option of cutting corners and when you find a loophole. Trustiness is what happens when you use trust as a PR tool.

The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable, trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers.

The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.

Tags: authenticity, inauthentic, listening to your client, Seth Godin, tribes, trust

With a labour shortage of highly skilled workers particularly in certain industries, recruiters are looking outside of their normal spheres of influence. Jamie Rogers is a recruitment specialist at Calgary-based engineering firm Hatch. He is a firm believer that international experience is a terrific advantage in the Canadian workplace. That’s why he spends a lot of time working with immigration agencies, colleges and other associations to meet, greet and mentor new Canadians.

Mr. Rogers considers it an important opportunity to find talent that might otherwise be overlooked. Having Canadian experience is not necessarily needed first. Canada is a country of diverse cultures and bringing someone in who has worked in an other part of the world, with different cultures or background, is not hard to overcome. It is something that companies are dealing with right now.

Tapping into this work pool is quickly becoming a business imperative especially when you consider the trends – older workers retiring, lower birth-rates. etc. We are depending more and more on immigration to sustain our corporate growth. Some experts say that immigrants are expected to account for all of Canada’s labour force growth this year. For this reason alone, access to this pool of talent has become a pressing issue for employers. The real issue for employers is knowing where to find the right qualifications and talent for the job.

You can look to CCIS and colleges that offer a range of networking, professional development and placement services designed to encourage business leaders to connect with new immigrants. CCIS alone has placed 105 engineers in the oil and gas industry. Aside from the technical skills companies will look at the softer skills like communication, critical thinking and analytical skills along with leadership skills.

Some of the universities, like Ryerson, are building bridging programs in collaboration with industry stake-holders to ensure new Canadians develop right skills to fast track into the workplace.

Networking is also a focus, using social media to reach out to these people before they immigrate here. As a company be clear on your “why” and the people who align will want to join.

Tags: how to attract immigrants to workforce, interanational workers, labour shortage

No choice

“I had no choice, I just couldn’t get out of bed.”

“I had no choice, it was the best program I could get into.”

“I had no choice, he told me to do it…”

Really?

It’s probably more accurate to say, “the short-term benefit/satisfaction/risk avoidance was a lot higher than anything else, so I chose to do what I did.”

Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice. Difficult choices involve painful sacrifices, advance planning or just plain guts.

Saying you have no choice cuts off all options, absolves responsibility and is the dream killer.

Tags: accountability, responsibility, Seth Godin

Here is a movie from Simple Truths by Mac Anderson.

When thinking about your future, start today with your passion and ideas.

What’s The Big Idea movie

Tags: business inspiration, Mac Anderson, simple truths movie

After you’ve done your best

(and it didn’t work)

…then what do you do?

Slamming your six iron into the ground, yelling at yourself, cursing out your staff, second-guessing, berating bystanders—there are plenty of ways we demonstrate our frustration that our best didn’t work this time.

But is it helpful?

Learning from a failure is critical. Connecting effort with failure at an emotional level is crippling. After all, we’ve already agreed you did your best.

Early in our careers, we’re encouraged to avoid failure, and one way we do that is by building up a set of emotions around failure, emotions we try to avoid, and emotions that we associate with the effort of people who fail. It turns out that this is precisely the opposite of the approach of people who end up succeeding.

If you believe that righteous effort leads to the shame of personal failure, you’ll seek to avoid righteous effort.

Successful people analytically figure out what didn’t work and redefine what their best work will be in the future. And then they get back to work.

Let the guys at ESPN do the racket throwing.

Tags: business success, learning from failure, Seth Godin

This is so profound that I wanted to share this with you.

Seth Godin says, There is nothing wrong with having a plan

Plans are great.

But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.

See the articles by Seth Godin

Many CEOs and companies do not get this. They work on the premise of What and features and Benefits – the plan to bring their product or service to the market.

When you understand the WHY of your business then your mission follows that – how you will make it happen. People buy your product because they buy into your belief system of “why you exist” and not because of the feature and benefits – the “what”.

Tags: having a mission, having a plan, Seth Godin, why plans fail?

There are some people who believe that government should not be involved in business. In Canada, this is not the case – our government is very involved in some of our largest businesses: energy, communications, banking, lotteries, gas and oil to name only a few. They reap the benefits of these industries, particularly from the taxes levied on these items.

The question becomes, if the government is involved, do we have a checks and balance in place to monitor the involvement, especially at the leader role, our Prime Minister. You have to look at the structure of how our government is set up to really understand if this does exist. I came across a great article in the National Post, by Andrew Coyne, entitled, “If our leaders were corrupt would we know it?” that gave me some insight. I want to share this article with you:

The author, Andrew Coyne, starts his article with examples of corruption that has taken place over time with our leaders. He notes that, ” Prime ministers in any Westminster system have always been powerful, but ours (Canadian) have amassed powers that are quite without parallel, if not without limit.” He goes to say that in other countries , executive powers is subject to various checks and balances. The question becomes, who or what prevents a primer minister of Canada from doing as he/she pleases?

Let’s look at our system in Canada:

Is it the governor general who does this checks and balance – no, because he/she is appointed by the queen.
Is it through our senate? No, because our senators are appointed by the PM.
Is it through the courts? No, because the PM appoints every member of the Supreme Court, and all federal court judges too.
Is it through the bureaucracy? No, the PM appoints the clerk of the privacy council, every deputy minister, the heads of all Crown corporations and even the ambassadors.
Is it through the police? No, the PM appoints the chief of the RCMP.
Is it through the House of Commons where the PM must command their confidence? No, the PM appoints all the committee chairs (those in which the government has a majority). He/she appoints not only the cabinet ministers, but the parliamentary secretaries and the whips. So members of the governing caucus has every incentive to seek his favour and fear his/her wrath. For that matter the PM appoints the caucus, since without the PM’s signature on their nomination papers, they cannot run. Yet they have no similar power over the PM.

Since 1919, party leaders in Canada have been elected, not by the caucus, as in the classical Westminster model, but by the party at large.

The author goes on to say, “In consequence, Parliament has become a kind of electoral college, its sole purpose to translate the votes of perhaps 40% of the electorate into a majority. A PM in possession of such a “mandate” decides what will be debated, and, for how long. He decides when Parliament shall be convened, when it should be prorogued, and when dissolved. And if he has to, he has the nuclear option: the power to declare any vote of matter of confidence, and to insist on fresh elections if MPs are so foolish as to defeat him.”

I think you are getting the point. When you sit down to look at all the appointments, large and small, nearly all are without any independent oversight. That is scary and very undemocratic. The author writes, “Have the powers been abused? Yes, all of them. In past, decisions to place people in position of power by the PM were not necessarily in the best interest of the country (Mulroney appointed his wife’s hairdresser to the Federal Business Development Bank). The cabinet today is so bloated in size as to be more than a ceremonial body. Worse has been the continual whittling away of Parliament’s ability to hold the prime ministers to account. Closure of government, prorogue the House rather than face a confidence vote, loss of confidence without the consequence of resigning — these are the actions of our past and present PM.”

Where it was once thought that Canada could never have a Watergate situation because the PM would be accountable to the House, he/she would be compelled to resign long before things progressed to a cover-up and obstruction of justice stages. Today, there has been a decline in our institutions of accountability, the noted absence of checks and balances, formal or informal.

For the business world what does this all mean? Canada is comprised of 98% small to medium businesses yet our government tends to put focus to the larger corporations. If the PM holds so much power and there is little to no checks and balance how can the “little guy” come up against and question business practices that are hurting our very businesses? Is the CFIB effective in this area? I say no.

Is it not time to band together and start to question the structure of how our government is set up for this surely impacts businesses, innovation, creativity and our ability to trade and work in the global market. Now is the time to do so — all systems around the world are being questioned, why not ours?!

There has been talk of reform and change, reducing the “red tape” that impacts productivity and innovation yet there has been little movement, if at all. Thank goodness for the youth who are willing to question and challenge systems. Yes, it comes from frustration; years of attending universtiy with large debt loads at the end and no jobs in their field to be hire for (14% unemployment); seeing the amount of greed and manipulation that has been allowed to happen at the benefit of few.

Start being the lead player in your own life. Like every relationship we have, personal or professioanl, it is built on trust and mutual respect; It is in the best interest of all, not self-interest and self-motivation.

Canada is a great country, wake up Canadians and demand you are treated with the respect you deserve!

Tags: Andrew Coyne, checks and balance of powers, government and business, powers of the Prime mnister, The National Post

The trend by the government to go more lean is impacting Canada’s non-profit sector, which includes more than 160,000 organizations. Their revenue account for an estimated 10% of GDP, and will grow over the next 10 years as government programs contract.

Some believe that non-profits are following sub par or outdated governance practices. It may be time to reform non-profit governance in Canada.

Here are a suggestion of 10 questions that non-profit directors should ask at their next board meeting:

1. Why is our board so big?
The optimal size of a board is 9. This allows for governance to be positive, effective and allow for better financial performance.

2. Is this an oversight board or a fund-raising committee?
The board’s purpose is oversight, not fund-raising. Too many boards forget this. The result is a proper focus on oversight is lost. It is important to separate the donor’s and the board – one is for fund-raising initiative and the other is for oversight.

3. Has every director reviewed the executive director’s contract?
There is a contract that exists between the organization and its executive director or chief executive. Unfortunately many directors fail to review this document. In some cases, when a director has asked for a copy they are told it is confidential. This is unwise and improper. As for the director who does not review, he/she could end up being guilty of a breach of fiduciary duty.

4. Has the board reviewed the organization’s detailed expense policies?
Transparency – everyone needs to be on the same page and understand/know what is covered, who is covered for what and so on. Here are some of the tough questions you need to ask: Who gets reimbursed for what? Who signs off? Is the organization buying gifts for members? Under whose authorization? Failing to be transparent can lead to systemic abuse of the system.

5. Is our chair transparently and openly elected by the full board?
Too many non-profit boards allow their current chairs to select or influence the nomination of their successors. Also, too many chairs unilaterally select committee heads and members. This needs to be the decision of the full board – to elect chair, committee heads and committee members.

6. Are our committees presenting all of their work to the full board?
Many boards allow the organization’s oversight, strategy and goals to be decided by sub-committees, leaving many directors out of the loop. Governance dictates that directors cannot delegate their material responsibilities to any committee. For example, the finance committee is not able to create the budget and simply have the board approve it. There must be a full presentation from the finance committee to all directors.

7. Have we set clear expectations about attendance and preparation and are we calling out poor performers?
Pubic companies publish attendance records for every director; non-profits should do the same. Maybe public pressure will ensure that these directors take their responsibilities seriously. Likewise, too many directors come to meetings without performing any serious review of the agenda or meeting materials. Poor attendance and lack of preparation should be called out by the chair or other directors. There also should be a consequence for this behaviour or lack of.

8. Have we created a board culture that’s hospitable to tough questions and maverick viewpoints?
Are you stacking your team to be “friendlies” and not ask the tough questions and challenge the management? A culture that values harmony over substantive, controversial/questioning discussion is a certain sign of bad board. There needs to be those that challenge, if only to provide a different thought pattern.

9. Are we spending enough time together as a board without the presence of management?
In many non-profits, the executive director attends every board meeting. From experience, directors are less likely to ask tough questions when the executive director is present. It is appropriate for the board to ask the executive director to attend some of the meeting however not all. There needs to be that “space” for the board to do their work without worrying about the executive director.

10. When was the last time the board candidly evaluated its performance in a confidential session?
Many non-profit boards fail to evaluate themselves. On a survey, 52% of Canadian boards failed to conduct self-evaluations. This is not good. After every board meeting conclude the meeting with a confidential session where the board candidly evaluates its own performance. A formal evaluation also should be done annually with the assistance of a third party. Some directors will not like this however your duty is to the position and your role – not gaining friends.

Real oversight requires leadership. This may mean making some uncomfortable yet accountable and responsible for their actions.

Tags: non-profits, role of the non-profit, role of the non-profit board

Sprouter.com is a two-year old Toronto-based resource site for entrepreneurs in Canada’s largest city to connect with like-minded peers around the world. Sprouter’s monthly gatherings have allowed aspiring and established company founders to mingle with some of Canada’s top players in startup capital.

Sarah Prevette, Sprouter’s founder made the decision to shut down and received overwhelming response from the community. Instead, she reached out to a variety of companies that were interested in continuing the community. In the end she the company Sprouter Inc. chose Postmedia to merge/sell to. Postmedia owns, the National Post and other major metropolitan daily newspapers. According to Paul Godfrey, Postmedia’s chief executive, he feels this is a great addition to the Postmedia family, “Sprouter complements our Digital First strategy and brings a spark of digital entrepreneurship to our family of brands.”

Here are some of the things entrepreneurs can do with the new Postmedia-owned Sprouter.com:

1. Ask start-up questions: submit small business questions on the general form or to a specific expert.
2. Connect with startup experts: Discover experts in various fields and see the advice they’ve provided.
3. Search Relevant content: Find answers related to your area of interest, and see similar answers while you wait for your questions to be answered.
3. Comment on Answers: add valuable nformation to an expert’s answer by sharing your thoughts, or clarify a question you’ve been asked by adding a follow-up thought.
4. Create your own hub of knowledge on Sprouter: Your questions and answers, and the answers you find useful, are stored on a devoted page so you can refer back to them at any time.
5. Keep up with your startup news.
6. Meet and network with entrepreneurs in your community.

Tags: . sprouter.com, connect with like-minded people, merger and aquisitions, postmedia, sarah prevette, sprouter inc, The National Post, tools for entrepreneurs

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