In this intriguing “fireside chat”, author Terrance Power explores how Canadian businesses can more aggressively establish themselves in foreign markets, focus their marketing strategies, and find a place in the global economy. His carefully crafted theoretical and conceptual foundation is supported by practical, real-world, applied knowledge – ideal for potential Canadian entrepreneurs and managers who must be prepared for the challenges of ‘going global’.

Power’s Case Study Analysis and Writer’s Handbook gives you the tricks of the trade to assist in communicating and analyzing cases in business courses. This handbook provides the “must knows” to get started on case analysis assignments and helps preparations for reports and presentations. This handbook provides the frameworks, templates and other guidance to help students work smarter, and get in the game even quicker!

What are the threats to Canada’s Arctic sovereignty? Does Canada need to be a junior partner in some form of alliance to protect its Arctic interests? From where are the threats of today and tomorrow likely to emerge? Do we have the military assets and the political intestinal fortitude to hold this portion of the second largest land mass in the world? What solutions might Canadian decision makers turn their minds to? These questions and others are raised in this publication, that comes recommended by leading international strategists, to include Major General Christie CMM, CD and Dr. Detelin Elenkov, President of the Institute of Strategic  and International Studies. A good primer on the topic.

Your Passport to International Business Etiquette. The most authoritative and comprehensive text of its kind, Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands, 2nd Edition is your must-have guide to proper international business protocol. With countries such as China and India taking on a more significant role in the global business landscape, you can’t afford not to know the practices, customs, and philosophies of other countries. Now fully revised, updated, and expanded with over sixty country profiles, Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands, 2nd Edition provides invaluable information on how to handle common business interactions with grace, respect, and an appreciation for different cultures.

Dr. Bonnie Henry is a super star… What you need to know about the pandemic… Dr. Henry’s transparency, humility, and humanity is a beacon for millions of Canadians.

Most recent book avail on Amazon — ‘Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe: Four Weeks that Shaped a Pandemic” (link) ENJOY!

Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe: Four Weeks that Shaped a Pandemic: Henry, Dr. Bonnie, Henry, Lynn: 9780735241855: Books – Amazon.ca

For the first time in history, the secrets of the living brain are being revealed by a battery of high tech brain scans devised by physicists. Now what was once solely the province of science fiction has become a startling reality. Recording memories, telepathy, videotaping our dreams, mind control, avatars, and telekinesis are not only possible; they already exist. 
 
THE FUTURE OF THE MIND gives us an authoritative and compelling look at the astonishing research being done in top laboratories around the world—all based on the latest advancements in neuroscience and physics.  One day we might have a “smart pill” that can enhance our cognition; be able to upload our brain to a computer, neuron for neuron; send thoughts and emotions around the world on a “brain-net”; control computers and robots with our mind; push the very limits of immortality; and perhaps even send our consciousness across the universe. 
          
Dr. Kaku takes us on a grand tour of what the future might hold, giving us not only a solid sense of how the brain functions but also how these technologies will change our daily lives. He even presents a radically new way to think about “consciousness” and applies it to provide fresh insight into mental illness, artificial intelligence and alien consciousness.  

With Dr. Kaku’s deep understanding of modern science and keen eye for future developments, THE FUTURE OF THE MIND is a scientific tour de force–an extraordinary, mind-boggling exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience.

Discusses…

• Artificial Intelligence, …
• Soon able to upload our brains to a computer, neuron for neuron…
• Send your thoughts and emotions on a “brain-net”.
• Control computers with our minds…
• Push the limited of immortality

Fascinating… He has several out… this was my favorite…

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think opens our eyes how the world is going to change and also how fast is going to change. Those changes are going to be unstoppable. Most of us are going to benefit but also some of us who are unable or unwilling to accept new ways of competition and tolerance among us are going to suffer.

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think: Diamandis, Peter H., Kotler, Steven: 9781451614213: Books – Amazon.ca

Thoughts…

• Over the last 30 years, solar module prices have dropped by a factor of 100.
• Critically — a new solar price record was set in Chile just a few weeks ago (Summer 2016) at $0.0291 per kWh – 58 percent less than the price of natural gas from a new plant!

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of platform capitalism.

This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the 1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global economy.”

Thoughts…
• For the past century, the job was the way we redistributed wealth and protected workers from the negative aspects of early capitalism. As the information economy disappears, we need to re-think our concepts of work, income, employment, and most importantly education. If we do not find ways to help citizens lead productive lives, our society will face increasing destabilization.
• The old jobs are not coming back. There will no longer be high paying jobs for routine physical or cognitive work. In addition, the new world of work, particularly “platform capitalism”, requires fewer people and creates fewer jobs. See Blog (LINK I of E Where will the jobs be)

In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin describes how the emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism.

Rifkin uncovers a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death—the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down, enabling businesses to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to win over consumers and market share. (Marginal cost is the cost of producing additional units of a good or service, if fixed costs are not counted.) While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services priceless, nearly free, and abundant, and no longer subject to market forces.

Now, a formidable new technology infrastructure—the Internet of things (IoT)—is emerging with the potential of pushing large segments of economic life to near zero marginal cost in the years ahead. Rifkin describes how the Communication Internet is converging with a nascent Energy Internet and Logistics Internet to create a new technology platform that connects everything and everyone. Billions of sensors are being attached to natural resources, production lines, the electricity grid, logistics networks, recycling flows, and implanted in homes, offices, stores, vehicles, and even human beings, feeding Big Data into an IoT global neural network. Prosumers can connect to the network and use Big Data, analytics, and algorithms to accelerate efficiency, dramatically increase productivity, and lower the marginal cost of producing and sharing a wide range of products and services to near zero, just like they now do with information goods.

The plummeting of marginal costs is spawning a hybrid economy—part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons—with far reaching implications for society, according to Rifkin. Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives to the global Collaborative Commons. Prosumers are plugging into the fledgling IoT and making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D-printed products at near zero marginal cost. They are also sharing cars, homes, clothes and other items via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, and cooperatives at low or near zero marginal cost. Meanwhile, students are enrolling in free massive open online courses (MOOCs) that operate at near zero marginal cost. Social entrepreneurs are even bypassing the banking establishment and using crowdfunding to finance start-up businesses as well as creating alternative currencies in the fledgling sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, sustainability supersedes consumerism, cooperation ousts competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “sharable value” on the Collaborative Commons.

Rifkin concludes that capitalism will remain with us, albeit in an increasingly streamlined role, primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions, allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player in the coming era. We are, however, says Rifkin, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons.

In 2011, Jeremy Rifkin published the New York Times bestseller, The Third Industrial Revolution, which captured the attention of the world. His vision of a sustainable, post carbon economic era has been endorsed by the European Union and the United Nations and embraced by world leaders including

Thios is a ket thought… “The emerging of the global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism” “So what”: – – new business models must be found… old industrial age models will have far less application.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, in his bestselling book The Mystery of Capital, identified with clarity that citizens of developing and under developing countries remain poor because they cannot access capital. Among other things, these countries do not have property law infrastructure. An inflection point for me.

A renowned economist’s classic book on capitalism in the developing world, showing how property rights are the key to overcoming poverty

“The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph,” writes Hernando de Soto, “is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis.” In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail? ( Also read Dan Breznitz book below…They fit..)

In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights.

Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly extralegal property arrangements, such as squatting on large estates, to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we’ve forgotten that creating this system is what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book revolutionized our understanding of capital and points the way to a major transformation of the world economy.

A challenge to prevailing ideas about innovation and a guide to identifying the best growth strategy for your community. Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars on blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. Since the early years of the information age, we’ve been told that economic growth derives from harnessing technological innovation. To do this, places must create good education systems, partner with local research universities, and attract innovative hi-tech firms. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities at the top of the high-tech industry but many more fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism.

But are there other models that don’t rely on a flourishing high-tech industry?

In Innovation in Real Places, Dan Breznitz argues that there are. The purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation. They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere.

Breznitz proposes that communities instead focus on where they fit in the four stages in the global production process. Some are at the highest end, and that is where the Clevelands, Sheffields, and Baltimores are being pushed toward. But that is bad advice. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation.

As he stresses, all localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it. Leaders might think the answer lies in high-tech or high-end manufacturing, but more often than not, they’re wrong. Innovation in Real Places is an essential corrective to a mythology of innovation and growth that too many places have bought into in recent years. Best of all, it has the potential to prod local leaders into pursuing realistic and regionally appropriate models for growth and innovation.

This reissue of Understanding Media marks the thirtieth anniversary (1964-1994) of Marshall McLuhan’s classic expose on the state of the then emerging phenomenon of mass media. Terms and phrases such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message” are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan’s theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.

There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan’s work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as Wired, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT’s Media Lab.

In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham revaluates McLuhan’s work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

Discuss the Iof E.. 4th Industrial Revolution… Media has changes, social media is a must… old industrial age thinking re media is collapsing.  Every sector… Trump adopts Twitter…r understood this… new mental models required… Press dying… New dark side to consider… See Blog for discussion.

One of the world’s preeminent business thinkers and co-author of the bestseller, competing for the Future, Gary Hamel has helped set the management agenda for three decades. Now, he brings us into the twenty-first century with leading the Revolution, which spent time on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Business Week bestseller lists, among others.

Hamel lays out an innovative action plan for any company or individual intent on becoming—and staying—an industry revolutionary, for years to come. By drawing on the success of “gray haired revolutionaries” like Charles Schwab, Virgin, and GE Capital—companies that are always thinking ahead of the game and growing in new directions—and profiling individuals such as Ken Kutaragi, one of the pioneers of Sony Playstation, Hamel explains how companies can continue to grow, innovate, and achieve success, even in a chaotic world market. With insight culled from years of experience, Hamel:

   •  Explores where revolutionary new business concepts come from
   •  Identifies the key design criteria for building companies that are activist-friendly and revolution-ready
   •  Shows how to avoid becoming “one-vision wonders”
   •  Demonstrates how to harness the imagination of every employee
   •  Explains how to develop new financial measures that focus on creating new wealth

Packed with practical advice, Leading the Revolution is an accessible read, perfect for both businesses and individuals that don’t want to get caught in the slow lane in the race for success in the twenty-first century.

One of my favorite books… It provides guidance to make your organization innovative. Applied and practical tips some of which are still relevant today. See Blog STC  Innovation

I have a number of Sun Tzu books in my library. This is one of my favourites. Applied, practical and provides real business examples of many Sun Tzu  quotes. I refer Mc Neilly often as you may have noticed in my classes…

More than two millennia ago the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote the classic work on military strategy, The Art of War. Now, in Sun Tzu and the Art of Business, Mark R. McNeilly shows how Sun Tzu’s strategic principles can be successfully applied to modern business situations. Here are
really two books in one: McNeilly’s synthesis of Sun Tzu’s ideas into six strategic principles for the business executive, plus the entire text of Samuel B. Griffith’s popular translation of The Art of War. Within, McNeilly explains how to gain market share without inciting competitive retaliation,
how to attack a competitor’s weak points, and how to maximize the power of market information for competitive advantage. He also demonstrates the value of speed, preparation, and secrecy in throwing the competition off-balance, employing strategy to beat the competition, and the need for character
in successful leaders. In his final chapter, McNeilly presents a practical method to put Sun Tzu and The Art of Business into practice. By using modern examples throughout the book from GE, Microsoft, AT&T, BMW, Southwest Airlines, FedEx, and many others, he illustrates how, by following the wisdom
of history’s most respected strategist, executives can avoid the pitfalls of management fads and achieve lasting competitive advantage.