Why I Oughta...

I was sitting in these internal meetings for Edelman in Toronto a few weeks back and my past hit me square between the eyes.  One of the speakers was Joshua Gans , a professor at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto who speaks widely on the concept of disruption.  It was an appropriate topic for us at Edelman because our agency is undergoing a transformation of sorts as we head away from pure Public Relations to becoming a Communications Marketing organization.    He runs a blog called Digitopoly and covers disruption and economics. Welp, during his talk, he cited a few examples of organizations that made moves based on the marketplace and talked about their being three factors in disruption: 1.  First...can you guys see the disruption coming? 2.  Can you identify and organize a response?  And... 3.  Can you execute on the response and adopt it to your organization. He also talked about the three type of responses: 1.  Beat them. 2.  Join them. 3

I don't know about you, but this just blew my mind.  Up in Canada, Smarties are called Rockets.  And something that is like a cheap M&M are called a Smarties. Weird, right?

I am back this week from a week long visit to Canada at some internal meetings.  And, although this was the first time I'd flown into Canada, I came away liking everything about the experience.  I have been a couple of times including a few road trips to Windsor in my college days (with some Fraternity brothers) and right after (with the Pawlak brothers) and my parents took us to see the Niagara Falls back when I was a kid.  But, this time was different:  it was for work and I was on my own.   We stayed in the Yorkville neighborhood and had a bunch of great meals and walked everywhere during the full week.  I did, even, eat poutine and drank a Labatt's Blue, in addition to a few other Canadian treats.  I'll post about the poutine and candy and such later this week once I dig through my email inbox and have some time!