Being In-Charge Means Being An Umbrella TL;DR - Leaders can't stop the rain, but they can keep their teams from getting soaked by staying calm, being honest about the problems and having a plan. Businesses are never short on problems. What separates good leaders from bad ones is not the problems they face, but how they react when those problems arise. As many of you know, I was an entrepreneur and business leader for 35 years. Throughout my career, whenever I led organization

Like Any Entrepreneur, There’s A Product To Get People Interested In. Published authors don’t like to think of their books as products, but instead think of them as works of art, or creative work. That's fair, but writing/recording/painting alone won’t get your books, music or art in front of an audience, and if no one sees your work, what was the point of producing it? Regardless of the income-generating side of writing a book, creative people produce their work to share

Where Did Our Patience Go? In many of the email newsletters I receive, immediately after the title or subtitle, I keep seeing a section entitled, “TL;DR”, which I learned is an acronym for “Too Long; Didn’t Read”. The use of this acronym/reference is now commonplace in online journalism, and intuitively you can understand why. But, sometimes this is used by readers as a minor insult, to say the article/newsletter seems too long and they couldn’t be bothered to read the enti

The Three Bucket Approach To Money When I was in my twenties I never had more than a few thousand dollars in the bank. My chequing account peaked on payday and dwindled from there until the next payday. I was working towards my CPA designation, making less than $30K per annum (yes, this was a long time ago!), but I did live at home where my housing and food costs were zero (thanks Mom!). I did what a lot of young people would do back then, and do now, which is spend money fo

Some Effects Of COVID-19 Still Linger The City of Ottawa is holding a municipal election later this month. There were rumours circulating that three of the mayoral candidates were campaigning on a promise to overturn the Return-To-Office (“RTO”) mandate for civil servants, among other policy promises they were making. According to Treasury Board statistics, there are approximately 146,000 federal civil servants that live in the Ottawa-Gatineau area. This makes up almost 20%

And, They’re Not All The Same In my Instagram feed I’ve seen a series of videos mocking Gen Z behaviour in the workplace. While I did find the videos amusing, I thought of my two sons (aged 27 and 25), and their friends that I know (all of whom are Gen Z), and my nephews (aged 27 and 26), and proudly concluded that none of these people behave in the manner that these videos are depicting Gen Z. I based my conclusion on many conversations I've had with this group (my inform

Can’t We Simply Pull The Plug? A.I. is just software running on computer servers. So, if something goes wrong, can’t we simply turn it off? Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of discussion about the potential dangers arising from humans losing control of A.I. and as a result A.I. causing the end of humanity. My last two articles discussed various aspects of this topic, in this article on P(Doom) and this article on pacing the future development of A.I. (click h

Everyone Has To Be All-In Those building the applications are telling us that A.I. may be advancing too quickly. The people competing with them are telling us that slowing down could be even more dangerous. This is why A.I. development today seems like a Prisoner's Dilemma. Last week there was lots of discussion regarding the likelihood that A.I. could cause catastrophic events for humanity. My last article covered this (read here). This discussion was triggered by warnings

Everyone Should Know What It Means P(Doom) is short for the probability of doom, which is the estimated likelihood that A.I. will cause the extinction of humanity, or the permanent catastrophic collapse of human civilization, at some time in the future. P(Doom) is a term commonly used by A.I. researchers and observers/commentators of all things A.I., to describe the potential dangers to society arising from artificial intelligence going rogue. This terminology and sentimen

Uber Is Fighting Back, But Keep An Eye on Tesla In The Rearview Mirror The ongoing battle for driverless ride-sharing became a lot more interesting this week. Uber launched its first robotaxi service in London and Tesla launched the Cybercab in Austin. Meanwhile Waymo continues to lead the way in driverless ride-sharing by operating 4,000 driverless vehicles across 14 cities. This week I read an article in TNW from Darius Popa that described Uber launching its robotaxi serv

Do Bot Profs Lead To Bot Students? I recently read an article in the New York Times about Harvard Business School (“HBS”) delivering an online entrepreneurship bootcamp where A.I.- generated avatars or digital clones of HBS faculty or senior lecturers were interacting with the bootcamp participants. This had me wondering if delivering lectures/classes with A.I. avatars was now a common practice at universities and colleges. And, that got me thinking about how students would

Getting Started Is The Hardest Part - Shake Off Those Doubts If you’ve had thoughts of writing a book, but weren’t sure if your book idea was good enough, or if anyone would read it, I encourage you to simply start writing. That’s what I did a couple of months ago, when I first started writing a book manuscript. On September 1st, 2026, my first book will be published and will be available on Amazon. I’m not a journalist, or a professional writer, but I have been writing

If Servant Leadership Works, Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It? Every employee in every company should hope to have a servant leader, ideally both as their immediate supervisor as well as the person leading the organization. A servant leader aims to make it easier for the team members to do their respective jobs, which develops a heightened amount of trust, job satisfaction and company loyalty. Given this, why isn’t this leadership style more prevalent? In my 35 year career, most o

Don’t Miss The Opportunity To Learn The objective of this article is to create FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) in those of you who don’t make reading a part of their daily routine. By reading you can learn about anything you want. To be a productive employee or a strong business leader, a successful entrepreneur or a good student, or be a better informed person in general, you have to be curious, you must thirst for knowledge. You always have to be learning. And, the best way to

What Did I Learn About Writing and This Platform I’ve been publishing articles on Substack for just over a year now. I haven’t got everything figured out yet. My subscriber base is at 111 people and my follower count sits at 264, so 375 people have shown some interest in what I have to say. It’s a start. But, I publish articles every week, post Notes and Restack other writers’ articles on a regular basis, with the hope of reaching a broader audience. This article shares my

Our Critical Thinking Skills Need To Be Developed First As I thought through this question, my first inclination was to argue in favour of age limitations on the use of A.I. applications. My thinking was that if A.I. tools were used as a crutch, that would impede our youth’s ability to develop valuable critical thinking skills (reasoning and judgement). Too much A.I. used too early would also impair the development of executive function (planning, self-control, decision-makin

It’s a dependency that can be overcome Last week on Canada Day we had a full day's plans, starting with attending a concert at the National Arts Centre, followed by going to a friend’s Canada Day party. We left the house at around 1:00 pm and were going to be out until the evening. As we were taking an Uber to the concert, I realized I had left my phone at home. My first thought was “Damn, I need my phone and can’t be without it for the whole day!” But, I quickly conclude

She’s Certainly In The Top Two Or Three Earlier this week Serena Williams competed in the 2026 Wimbledon tennis tournament, for the first time in four years. While she lost her opening round match to 20 year old, 87th ranked American, Maya Joint, I was impressed that Williams returned to complete in a Grand Slam tennis tournament at the age of 44, and after a four absence. This got me thinking about Williams’ accomplishments in pro tennis, and if she should be considered th

For Gen Z, A Healthy Bank Account Ranks Above Looks and Personality, When Dating In the 1996 Wimbledon tournament semifinal, a fan shouted from the stands to tennis star Steffi Graf, "Steffi, will you marry me?". Graf paused, smiled, and replied: "How much money do you have?" The crowd broke out in laughter, and that exchange has become one of the most memorable moments in Wimbledon history. Graf was 27 at the time, which made her the equivalent of a Gen Z person, in today’s

This Is Why The World Endured A Four-Month War?! The book, The Art of the Deal, was “written” by Donald Trump and published in November 1987. It spent 48 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, 13 of them at No. 1, and it became one of the best-selling business books of the 1980s. The story told within this writing helped establish Trump's public persona as a dealmaker and “savvy” businessman. It was this reputation that Trump utilized to formulate his political bran