Eight Professional Lessons from the Movie Chef
Last week I re-watched Chef – written, directed and starring Jon Favreau – on Netflix. The film is about Carl Casper, the head chef at a high-end Los Angeles restaurant who loses his cool, loses his job, loses a lot of peoples’ respect, but then finds himself on a...
Three Things That Make Cooperatives Different
The cooperative business model advances economic, social, and environmental progress and demonstrates versatility and resilient. Even though nearly two billion people around the world are members and/or directly impacted by cooperative enterprises across virtually...
Six Coaching Streams that Your Organization Needs
Coaching unlocks potential in people and, when applied effectively at scale in an organization, across communities. Not all managers are naturally great coaches (though they can learn) and not every organization is setup to achieve the desired results from investments...
Lululemon’s Kool-Aid is Tasty!
There is an old Hindu saying that you can’t spell culture without cult. I think it was from the Thuggee cult, made popular by the third best Indiana Jones movie, Temple of Doom. Or maybe I just made it up. Whatever the case, the point is that Lululemon is awesome.
Professional hockey and collective ownership
With the actual crisis and the realization that having hockey teams in the American South might not be a great business model after all, Quebec City has started dreaming about a possible return of its beloved Nordiques. In this context, I would like to propose a...
Professional Communities – LinkedIn and Twitter
Editor’s Note: my controversial compassionate conservative of a co-editor, Kurt Heinrich, is not sold on opening a LinkedIn account to manage his professional connections, nor is he eager to use Twitter to build a professionally-minded “micro-brand” (©Copyright John Horn 2009) that will help promote, among other things, this blog. The following 300 words showcase my modest proposal for Kurt, and the rest of you, to embrace these mediums to raise your professional profile as well as grow your network of contacts. Enjoy!
Swear you’re not sick? Employer trust is the real question
The Alberta government has recently announced that all Alberta government employees who have been absent due to sickness for more than three consecutive days will now be required to swear an oath declaring they were sick in front of a commissioner of oaths (read the...
Build Relationships, Build Community – Adding Value
So far in this series we have outlined the profound benefits of relationship-building as well as specifically outlined how it can be done by making a great first impression as well as by doing exceptional research about a contact, associate, mentor, organization,...
Build Relationships, Build Community – Research
Homework and research are always important. And never moreso than when you’re trying to build an important relationship – community-based or otherwise. Because no great thing in history was ever done by just one person. It takes a community of friends, family, colleagues, contacts, mentors, and clients to make real change happen.
Thriving in an Employer’s Market
As it turns out, the recession is effecting the global economy, which, consequently, is negatively impacting the Canadian economy. Shocking, I know. And you heard it here first, from The Potentiality. "What's that? Oh, everyone already knows this? Um, okay, we'll have...
Mentorship Builds Community
We here at The Gumboot are all about planning for the future. For some of us this means canning food - according to The Globe and Mail, this is being done by "hipsters" more than anyone else (in fact, we have a canning-hipster on our staff). For others "planning for...
Harvard and The Gumboot: More than 10 Global Trends to Watch
About a month ago, an up-and-coming business magazine, the Harvard Business Review, released an article called "The 10 Trends You Have To Watch." The article is penned by Eric Beinhocker, a Senior Fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, and also had some help from...
Strength in Community
Sometime back in Classical Greece someone carved “know thyself” on my least favourite god, Apollo’s, temple at Delphi. No one really knows who wrote it, but a quick twitblog of the interscape will tell you that Socrates (or maybe Plato) took credit for the idea. And Alexander Pope wrote a poem about it a few years later. The point is, before you look outward and certainly before you strive out on a life path – career, family, adventures in foreign lands, kidlets, part-altering-operations – you need to look inside and, well, get a sense of yourself.