Straight Talk on Leadership: Solving Canada's Business Crisis Solving Canada's Business Crisis

Great leadership is a scarce and precious natural resource and in Canada--such a well-educated and well-endowed country--our leadership pipeline--our dependable, renewable supply of globally oriented, creative and determined future leaders--is dry. Complacency, comfort, lack of sophistication and an inward focus amongst our current business leaders, are serving to put Canada at risk of falling dangerously behind in terms of competitiveness and relevance in the global marketplace of the future. Doug Williamson has worked with companies around the world and sits in some of Canadas most elite boardrooms. He is shocked and concerned that Canadian business is being outworked, outmaneuvered and outthought by business leaders from emerging economies as well as by more entrepreneurial, more focused, and more experienced leaders in the developed world. We are being squeezed from all sides and, yet, we have not awakened to the threat this poses to our businesses and our future. Canadian businesses have a rapidly closing window of opportunity to turn this situation around, but it will only happen if we wake up and begin to produce the kind of leaders who are in demand and who are needed for us to compete successfully on the world stage. This book will combine practical advice and useable tools with a controversial and impassioned call to action for leaders everywhere to take up the challenge, shake off the dust and enter the new global economic frontier with unique Canadian products, services and solutions, marketed under a reinvigorated Canada Inc. brand.

An urgent wake-up call--and radical action plan--for business leaders everywhereWhile it focuses primarily on Canadian business, this important book shares valuable insights of benefit to transformational business leaders everywhere. Without sugar coating his message, author R. Douglas Williamson, head of the prestigious consultancy, The Beacon Group, points to complacency, lack of leadership sophistication, and an inward focus as the chief reasons why Canadian companies are at risk of falling behind the rest of the world. Issuing an urgent call to action, Williamson helps leaders understand the four principle challenges facing the modern leader and describes the eight essential leadership competencies required to navigate the future. He provides powerful strategies, tools and techniques for how to reframe thinking about leadership and reform leadership strategies. Case Studies from The Beacon Groups wide and diversified client base include The Four Seasons, Scotiabank, Nortel Networks, Research in Motion, The Hudsons Bay Company, Export Development Canada, Holt Renfrew, and many others. An impassioned call to action for leaders everywhere combined with practical advice and tools to help leaders take up the responsibility of transformational leadership during a period of unprecedented change and monumental global challenges. One of the rare books to focus on Canadian business and business leadership, it explains why that country's competitiveness is in serious jeopardy and what can be done about it.