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Past Editions

2001

Speakers 2001

Bob Young, Chairman and Co-Founder, Red Hat
How do you take an idea hatched in your wife's sewing closet and turn it into an international business worth Billions in 6 years?

While there is no one single road map to success, there are a variety of patterns common to the more successful Canadian businesses that helped Hamilton Ont native Bob Young develop Red Hat into a household name in the worldwide technology industry. From staying close to your customers, to partnering with only the strongest partners, to having high recruiting standards, to having a strategy that undermines your larger established competitors market strengths, Bob will informally discuss some of the techniques common to most successful companies.

As Chairman and Co-Founder of Red Hat Inc., Mr. Young is very active in determining the company's strategic and creative direction and driving the global, industry-wide adoption of open source development practice. A true open source visionary, Mr. Young's efforts developing Red Hat into a household name have won him prestigious honors such as Business Week's "Top Entrepreneurs" and Smart Reseller's "50 Smart People." Mr. Young graduated with honors from the University of Toronto prior to beginning his high tech career in the computer finance arena. His 20 years of computer industry finance and marketing experience at the head of two computer leasing companies, combined with his innate marketing savvy are a core strength of Red Hat Inc. His determination to preserve the next generation's access to free and accessible information in the public domain for the purpose of innovation provides the basis and the vision for taking his entrepreneurial success and founding the Center for the Public Domain.

John Hull, Director, Intel Communications Fund IntelCapital, INTEL CORPORATION
Corporate Venturing and Intel Capital

John Hull exposera la stratégie de Intel Communications Fund. Intel Communications Fund fait des investissements en équité de moins de 10 millions $. Le Fonds supporte le développement des technologies et les compagnies qui sont complémentaires à Intel® Internet Exchange™ Architecture, CT Media™ software, Intel® Personal Internet Client Architecture et Intel® Xscale™ Microarchitecture. Le Fonds est dirigé et contrôlé par Intel.

John Hull is Director of the Intel Communications Fund, a $500 million equity investment fund that invests in companies supporting Intel's key programs and initiatives in voice and data communications.

Hull joined Intel in 1994. Prior to joining Intel Capital in 1999, Hull worked in both the Intel Enterprise Server Group and Communications Products Group reporting directly to John Miner, an Intel Vice President. Prior to that assignment, he worked in Intel's Treasury organization as Investor Relations Manager for the Eastern United States, where he built relationships with Intel's largest institutional investors.
Hull received his MBA from the University of Michigan Business School in 1994, and his B.S. in Biotechnologies Management from the University of California at Davis in 1988.

Bernard Hamel GTI Capital
The Great Debate - Does the investors' role correspond to business people's expectations?

GTI Capital is an early stage capital investment group whose mission is to deliver a superior return on capital investments by providing the necessary financing and management support to selected businesses that allows them torealize the full potential of their business plan.
* Presentation in French

Bernard Hamel has a degree in Industrial Engineering from the "École Polytechnique de Montréal" and an MBA from McGill University. Mr. Hamel has built up solid industrial, corporate and financial experience on both domestic and international markets.

Mr. Hamel has, in turn, worked at Coca-Cola Limited, at Price Waterhouse as Manager of Management Consulting Services and served as Vice-President and Director of U.S. based Ligma Corporation. He also acted as the President of Devma Industries Inc. while he was at the "Société Générale de Financement du Québec". He then founded GTI Capital in 1992.

Mr. Hamel has gained extensive experience on numerous Boards of Directors of industrial firms in Canada and Europe. In addition, he is a Former President and a Governor of "Réseau Capital", an association representing venture capital funds in the Province of Quebec. He is also the Chairman of the National Bank of Canada's High Technology Advisory Committee.

Pierre Pharand, VP, Information Technology Sector, SOFINOV

The leading Canadian fund manager with more than C$105 billion of assets under management, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDP) offers a complete range of fund management services worldwide.

Its subsidiary CDP Sofinov offers strategic financing to innovative companies with superior growth and performance potential based on leading-edge technologies. The Company is also developing partnerships with venture capital funds in Canada, the United States and Europe. CDP Sofinov has a portfolio of 159 investments valued at more than $1.6 billion.

Debra A. Benton, Executive Coach, Benton Management Resources Inc.
How To Think and Act Like the Best CEOs

Effective leaders have a confident, competent, comfortable style in producing results that causes them to be memorable, impressive, credible, genuine, trusted, and liked up and down the ladder, in and outside of the organization. In this session Benton will discuss how the best CEOs combine attitude management, physical presence and personal bonding to get followership.

Debra Benton has consulted with and spoken in front of hundreds of the most successful executives this generation has seen come into power. Her clientele list spans over seventeen countries and includes companies such as NASA, Pepsi, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Nabisco. She is an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, a highly recognized one-on-one executive consultant and a best-selling author.

Debra's work has been written about in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, as well as featured on CNN, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and CBS News with Diane Sawyer. Debra has coached people to: meet and work with Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton; job interview with Donald Trump; present at the Academy Awards; testify before Congressional committee meetings and Senate hearings; give expert witness testimony in court; successfully vie for positions inside and outside of their company; and build successful professional practices.

Jim Tobin, President and CEO, itemus inc.
Leadership challenges in the rapidly changing tech environment

Jim Tobin is widely recognized as an Internet visionary. Mr. Tobin was previously the Executive Vice President of BCE Inc., where, as the company's youngest-ever senior executive, he founded BCE Emergis. Mr. Tobin's responsibilities at BCE included investments in new technology and Internet start-ups, as well as incubating new businesses and applications within Emergis or together with universities and private sector partners like Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, Cisco and Novell.

Mr. Tobin is also the former President and COO of Hummingbird Communications, one of the world's largest enterprise software companies. For seven years, he was with the Canadian office of the world's leading strategy firm, McKinsey & Company, where he led major IT-based renewal efforts for companies and government bodies. Mr. Tobin is a graduate of Yale University and received his MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Suzanne C. Francis, RHS&A
Making the Deal Work: Integration Strategies for Successful Acquisition

Robert H. Schaffer & Associates is a management consulting firm with offices in Stamford, Connecticut and Toronto, Ontario. Founded in 1960, we help organizations to carry out major strategic and operational changes in ways that generate measurable performance improvements and also develop management's capacity to lead change effectively.
They are well known for our development of the "breakthrough strategy," which uses short-term, results-producing projects as vehicles for learning about and accelerating change. They have applied this approach to organizational design, performance turnarounds, strategic shifts, cultural change, IT introductions, acquisition integration, and customer-supplier partnerships.
The firm's clients have included many prominent corporations, including Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, Deutschebank, Allied Signal Corporation, Consolidated Edison, SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals, Fidelity Investments, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Siemens, and many others.
RHS&A consultants are well-known for their work in the area of acquisition integration, where they have helped a number of corporations that are "frequent acquirers" to develop practical, flexible and replicable processes for integrating their deals successfully. Ron Ashkenas and Suzanne Francis are the authors of two Harvard Business Review articles: "Making the Deal Real: How GE Capital Integrates Acquisitions", and a follow-up article titled "Integration Managers: Special Leaders For Special Times".

Suzanne C. Francis is a managing partner in the management consulting firm of Robert H. Schaffer & Associates. For more than 40 years, RHS&A has pioneered the development and practice of "results-directed" change efforts for leading organizations around the world. Over the past five years, Suzanne has worked with GE Capital to develop and apply its acquisition integration process.
She is co-author of "Making the Deal Real: How GE Capital Integrates Acquisitions," Harvard Business Review, January-February, 1998. Suzanne has also co-authored a follow-up article titled "Integration Managers: Special Leaders for Special Times", Harvard Business Review, November-December, 2000.
Prior to joining RHS&A, Suzanne worked for Xerox, as well as other corporate, government and non-profit organizations. She holds a master's degree from Yale University, School of Management.

Brian Edwards, Vice Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of BCE Emergis
Transforming Commerce

BCE Emergis delivers network-centric e-commerce services that significantly improve customer processes through secure B2B exchanges. Combining e-commerce, e-payment and security services, BCE Emergis offers clients in the healthcare, financial services, telecommunications and transportation industries a full suite of core and vertical-specific services that are the essential building blocks and infrastructure required for e-commerce.

BCE Emergis is one of the top e-commerce providers in North America and its shares are included in the TSE 100 Composite Index.

Brian Edwards is President & Chief Executive Officer of BCE Emergis and held the same position at MPACT Immedia since its inception in 1988. He is responsible for the strategic direction of BCE Emergis, which was named one of the 50 fastest growing Canadian companies in 1999 by Deloitte and Touche. Prior to this post, Mr. Edwards was Senior Vice President with IST computer services in Montreal and also held a number of senior executive positions with Burroughs Corporation, currently re-organized as Unisys.

Brian Edwards was recently named one of the 23 Canadian leaders who will impact the way we live, work and play in the 21st Century, by Canadian Technology Magazine.

Brian Edwards is a member of a number of boards of directors in the Information Technology field including the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATAAlliance). He is also active in several community associations and is Chairman of the funding campaign of the Douglas Hospital Foundation. Mr. Edwards holds a commerce degree from Concordia University.

Stephen P. Bradley, Harvard Business School
Case Study : E-Bay and Lecture : Sense & Respond: Capturing Value in the Network Era

William Ziegler Professor, Chairman of the Executive Program in Competition and Strategy. Chairman of the Program for Management Development.
Case: eBay, Inc.
This case deals with the exploding growth of the online auction format. In particular, it focuses on the sustainability of the strategy created by one of the early movers eBay - as it takes on a serious competitive rival Amazon.com.
Reading: Sense and Respond: Capturing Value in the Network Era, “Capturing Value in the Network Era” Chapter 1
This session provides an overview of how the revolution in networking and especially the Internet will dramatically affect most industries retailing, manufacturing, banking, insurance, brokerage, education, etc. and how companies will have to develop new capabilities and transform their organizations to compete in the information age.

His earlier book, Globalization, Technology, and Competition, Harvard Business School Press (1993), deals with the fusion of computers and telecommunications in the 1990s. He is also the co-editor of the book Future Competition in Telecommunications, Harvard Business School Press (1989).

He has written numerous articles for academic journals and three other books: Quantitative Methods in Management, Richard D. Irwin, Inc., Applied Mathematical Programming, Addison-Wesley, Inc., and Management of Bank Portfolios, John Wiley and Sons. Recent research includes "The Light at the End of the Pipe" Scientific American, October 1999 and "Strategic Uncertainty and the Future of Consumer Driven e-Commerce" to appear in Digital Marketing, John Wiley & Sons.
Professor Bradley is a member of the board of directors of CIENA Corporation and the Risk Management Foundation, Inc. In the past, he was a member of the board of directors of Roadmaster Industries, Inc. and XcelleNet, Inc.

Professor Bradley received his BE in Electrical Engineering from Yale University where he was elected to TAU BETA PI, and his MS and PhD in Operations Research from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was with the Center for Exploratory Studies of the IBM Corporation.

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