KEYNOTE:
Marc and Samantha Hurwitz - Leadership Is Half The Story: A Fresh Look at Leadership, Followership, & Collaboration
Can you imagine a choreographer training only one dancer to lead while his or her partner sits in the lobby staring at the wall? Unthinkable? Yet this happens all the time within organizations. Half the partnership is missing!
All of us lead, not just those with the formal title. All of us follow, not just frontline staff. What’s more, leadership and followership are dynamic roles. This empowering perspective opens up leadership to everyone, elevates followership, and enables more productive and innovative collaborations.
University of Waterloo’s own Dr. Marc Hurwitz, and his wife and co-author Samantha Hurwitz, offer a host of new ideas and practical tools for everyone in an organization based on their successful book, Leadership is Half the Story (University of Toronto-Rotman Press, 2015) and across the organization.
Dr. Marc Hurwitz is co-founder and Chief Insight Officer of FliPskills. He holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, an MBA, Masters in Physics and Math, and combines that with many years corporate, executive and entrepreneurial experience in diverse areas from Marketing to HR to Actuarial. He teaches entrepreneurship at University of Waterloo. He has been recognized with numerous awards for teaching, academic achievement, speaking, professional training, acting and poetry.
Marc is known for being engaging, interesting, super insightful and not a woolly-headed academic!
Samantha Hurwitz CPA CMA CHRL is co-founder and Chief Encouragement Officer of FliPskills. She is a leadership and followership coach, consultant, trainer and writer with 25 years corporate and entrepreneurial experience in Finance, Accounting, IT, Operations, HR and large-scale change projects. She enjoys helping people have those “aha” and “ahhh” moments.
Sam is known for being uniquely positive, practical and perceptive!
Steven Page - In Conversation ...
An articulate and mesmerizing speaker, Steven Page is utterly at home on the stage. Page—singer, songwriter, host of The Illegal Eater, and Canadian icon—has made an indelible mark on our country's music scene as well as its cultural landscape. He's spent years entertaining audiences, telling stories, and carving out his place in our national conversation.
David Robertson - Brick by Brick: Lego & Innovation
How Any Company Can Learn From LEGO’s Successful Innovation Management System
Managers are bombarded with dozens of theories about how to manage innovation. These theories all promise growth and profits, but the actual results are less positive. Using the case study of LEGO, David Robertson's keynote explores how to manage innovation across a company.
In 2003, LEGO almost went bankrupt. LEGO’s managers had followed the advice of experts—“head for blue ocean,” “practice disruptive innovation,” “open innovation,” “develop the full spectrum of innovation”—and that advice almost led them to ruin. Challenging their designers to think “out of the box” almost put them out of business! In one of the most successful turnarounds in modern business history, LEGO restructured its innovation management system and saved the company. Today, LEGO is the most profitable and fastest growing company in the toy industry, growing sales at 22% and profits at 38% per year every year for the past six years. In this talk, Robertson reveals the secrets behind LEGO’s success and the lessons to be learned about how to lead and structure innovation. Highly repeatable across a wide range of companies, Robertson shares the "bricks" needed to build innovation management systems—processes, tools, roles, and policies that you can apply in your company to boost your innovation success.
Wharton School professor David Robertson is the host of the weekly radio show Innovation Navigation, where he interviews leaders from around the world about innovation. He is also the author of Brick by Brick, an inside look at LEGO’s near death and spectacular rebirth. In his talks, he shares lessons from LEGO and other leading companies on how to structure and lead innovation.
David Robertson has been a student, teacher, and practitioner of the art of innovation for his entire career. As a Professor of Practice at Wharton School, he teaches Innovation and Product Development in the undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs. From 2002 through 2010, Robertson was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at Switzerland’s Institute for Management Development (IMD), which received the #1 worldwide ranking by the Financial Times for its executive education programs. At IMD he was Program Director for IMD’s largest program, the Program for Executive Development, and co-Director of the Making Business Sense of IT program, a joint program between IMD and MIT Sloan. Robertson also serves as a consultant to companies on innovation and technology management issues.
Colin and Julie Angus - Dynamite Duo: Lessons in Teamwork
Julie and Colin deliver an engaging and entertaining account of the two years they spent circumnavigating the globe by human power, focusing on strategies they used to foster teamwork. The two have completed numerous grueling expeditions together including five months alone in a rowboat crossing the Atlantic Ocean. It doesn’t get more stressful than living, eating, and working within the confines of a rowboat for months on end and this dynamic duo will share their strategies for fostering harmonious and productive dynamics. They dissect the essential components of effective teamwork including conflict resolution, motivation and communication. These two will have you in stitches, but more importantly, will reveal the secrets of making team dynamics work in any situation.
Colin Angus is a leading adventurer, best selling author and Canadian filmmaker. He was awarded National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year award for being the first to circle the world exclusively by human power, and was listed by Outside Magazine as one of the world’s top 25 bold visionaries. Angus’s success in achieving the seemingly impossible relies on a unique strategy he has developed for increasing human potential. He is the author of five books, and his films have been aired around the world on National Geographic television.
Angus’ most spectacular accomplishment – the first human-powered circumnavigation of the planet – is chronicled in his bestseller, Beyond the Horizon: The Great Race to Finish the First Human-Powered Circumnavigation of the Planet. The book details how he walked, biked, skied, paddled, and rowed more then 43,000 kilometres, crossing three continents and two oceans to complete the first human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth. Angus endured the extreme arctic temperatures of Siberia, cycled, and hiked through Russia and across Europe. He survived not one – but two – hurricanes, as well as two tropical storms while floating in a wooden rowboat in the mid-Atlantic Ocean.
Julie Angus is the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean from mainland to mainland. During the worst hurricane season in history, she spent 5 months rowing unsupported across 10,000 km of unforgiving seas. Throughout this challenge, she and her partner rowed through 4 cyclones, encountered great white sharks, and fished for survival.
Julie is a molecular biologist, adventurer, writer, filmmaker, and motivational speaker. She has two undergraduate degrees with honours from McMaster University (Biology and Psychology) and a graduate degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Victoria. She spent over a decade studying and developing treatments for heart disease, cancer and genetic ailments.
She has been lauded for her work on environmental awareness and has written for publications including The Globe & Mail, National Post and enRoute. Her photography has appeared in Outside Magazine, Explore Magazine, Reader’s Digest, National Geographic Adventure and The Guardian, among others. Julie’s book Rowboat in a Hurricane, which details her Atlantic row and the changing state of our oceans, is a national bestseller. Julie and Colin’s most recent book,Rowed Trip, is co-written and covers their rowing and cycling journey from Scotland to Syria.