February 2017
In this issue
Want to make friends and influence people? Don’t just stand there—be engaging. The same goes for the frontrunners in our fourth annual ranking of B.C.’s top brands, which sees a few names surge and others take a tumble. In its survey for this year’s list, research partner Ipsos found that engagement was the most powerful driver of brand influence. “Engagement is...
There have been three stages to tech veteran Laurie Schultz’s career: product management, general management and now, at ACL, change management. After starting off as a product manager with Telus Corp., where she learned how to balance the economics of technology, she moved into general management, running 13 different profit-and-loss software businesses and managing functions from support and R&D to...
Late last November, a video shot at a Best Buy store in Halifax went big on Twitter. The scene: staff lined up near the front door, applauding, as dozens of customers strolled in to kick off Black Friday. That week on The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon used the footage to illustrate the difference between Americans and Canadians. After playing...
“How close was it?” I ask. “Pretty close,” he says. “They were really going to axe the football team?” David Sidoo shrugs. He’s sporting a half-grin, the mischievous kind that kids flash before they reveal a secret. “It was costing UBC about a million a year to operate the team,” says the businessman, philanthropist and former professional football player. “And all the...
$24,100 That’s the average amount withdrawn by British Columbians who have taken money out of their RRSPs before retirement, according to a 2016 BMO study—51 per cent more than the national average. As Canadians scramble this month to make tax-year deposits before the RRSP cutoff, people here will be contributing less, borrowing more and paying back withdrawn funds at a...
"The legal profession is changing so quickly,” says Matthew Peters, national innovation leader at McCarthy Tétrault. “The profession is going to look very different 10 to 20 years from now. We can’t, like the old days, design and assume that the same space is going to work and be used the same way.” Moving its Vancouver office allowed the firm to...
Kelly Hoey, a networking expert, business columnist, angel investor and startup mentor, says networking is everywhere. It’s in your email signature line, voice mail message, head shot in a social media profile and your invoice. The Victoria native, now based in New York, says her message isn’t just for those eager to advance their careers but also for anyone looking...
I’ve been skate skiing since 2001. Skate ski is an amazing off-season complement to swimming, biking, running, which is what we do a lot of in the fall, spring and summer. It is great for your cardio. It’s really good upper-body work—your quads, your glutes—and it’s a very rhythmic kind of pace. It takes a lot of practice to be...
When business and government leaders from Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates to B.C. Premier Christy Clark gathered in Vancouver for the Emerging Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference last September, one proposal for linking the city and Seattle was high-speed rail (HSR). Washington State politician Dow Constantine envisioned zipping between the two metropolises in an hour or less on trains leaving every...
An offshoot of SPUD—the Vancouver-headquartered Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery company that works with a raft of local farmers—Be Fresh has four cafés and markets throughout the city as well as delivering workplace wellness plans to companies. With its non-GMO housemade healthy meals (free-range chicken Milanese, for example), it aims to keep “employees alert and engaged” and has fuelled such businesses...