Archived Posts

CEO activism has arrived in corporate Canada. Three years after the trend took hold in the U.S., 2020 has delivered three clear examples of CEOs banding together to use their power and influence to make change, fundamentally changing the expectations placed on successors to those CEOs, and executives more broadly.

Have you been asked to sign the BlackNorth Initiative CEO Pledge? Wes Hall, founder and chairman of Kingsdale Advisors, joined forces with the CEOs of CIBC, Fairfax Financial Holdings and Cisco Systems Canada after the death of George Floyd to push their peers to address systemic anti-Black racism in corporate Canada. The starting point is […]

CEOs have three kinds of power to make change: inside the company, within the corporate ecosystem, and personal power.

I recently did an online lecture on CEO activism for HBA students at Ivey Business School. In my last post I shared the video of my discussion with Ivey HBA Program Faculty Director Mary Weil. In this and the next few, I’ll answer a few more of the great questions that students submitted.

In the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to guest lecture at Ivey Business School. This year, I was invited to talk about CEO activism. With the pandemic forcing classes online, Mary Weil and I moved our class to a video chat, discussing questions submitted from her HBA students.

A friend sent me a link to this open letter from Canadian CEOs, calling on their peers to support efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19. I’m not sure whether he expected me to be pleased that CEOs were speaking out, or anticipated that I would have a lot of “feedback.” Probably both.