The Business Leadership Podcast with Edwin Frondozo

TBLP020 | Elaine Mah: Find Your Own Voice

Elaine Mah is the Director for Canada at Intel Corporation and a twelve year veteran with the company. Among her many achievements at Intel, Elaine is especially proud of her work fostering innovation and growth with small businesses through her Canadian small business advisory board.

She is a frequent speaker at industry and government conferences on the importance of technology to the Canadian economy, as well as on emerging trends. Elaine currently sits on the National Board of Directors of the Information Technology Association of Canada.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

How she went from a marketing role in an agency to leading a technology company
What she did when she took over as Country Manager
How she transitioned when a replacement took over
Biggest turning point in her career

Reading List

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP019 | Fatima Zaidi: Hacking Outbound Sales

Fatima Zaidi has had over nine years of experience in Business Development, Marketing, and Strategy. Her expertise in sales effectiveness and partnerships led her to the role as VP of Business Development for Eighty-Eight, a Toronto-based creative communications agency.

Prior to Eighty-Eight, Fatima was the Head of Business Development at retail company Rent frock Repeat (who were on season 7 of Dragons’ Den). She was responsible for the overall management of all strategic business development, marketing, and customer relationship activities nationwide.

Fatima is a commentator for Global News, chair for the Discover Your Personal Brand (DYPB) conference, a content writer for Huffington Post and BetaKit, and was named Marketing Magazine’s top 30 under 30 marketers and brand developers for 2016.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

How she obtained over 200 partnerships in 2 years
The strategy she used to grow Rent Frock Repeat
Her 6 step system on Hacking Sales
What happened when she said yes to a coffee meeting

Reading List

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP018 | Jeff Cates: Connect at the Heart

Jeff Cates is the President and CEO of Intuit Canada, a software development company that produces premier brands such as TurboTax, QuickBooks and Mint. Under Jeff’s leadership, Intuit Canada has risen to become one of the top places to work in Canada, as ranked by the Great Place to Work Institute. He is responsible for helping the company become recognized as the nation’s undisputed financial solutions leader in every market it serves, by leading a team of over 400 employees dedicated to simplifying the business of life.

Cates joined Intuit in 2011, with a background that includes innovative marketing, partner management and entrepreneurship. Previously, Cates worked at Apple Canada leading their commercial business, and Hewlett Packard as vice president of their consumer division. He earned an MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University and a bachelor of commerce degree from McMaster University.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

What it took to become the best place to work in Canada
How to connect with employees hearts and passions
The impact that HP and Apple had on him
What Canada must do to improve the startups and entrepreneurs
His involvement with Startup Canada and how he met Victoria Lennox
His passion on Financial Literacy and making it a movement

Reading List

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP017 | Julia Deans: Build Your Network

Julia Deans is the CEO of Futurpreneur Canada, a national non-profit organization that has helped almost 10,000 Canadians aged 18-39 launch start-ups with business coaching, financing, mentoring and other resources.

Julia started her career as a lawyer with Torys LLP in Toronto and Hong Kong, before creating a successful legal recruitment business in Singapore.

From 2005 to 2012, she was CEO of CivicAction, a cross-sector leadership coalition that has successfully tackled major social, economic and environmental challenges in the Toronto region. In 2012, she chaired Ontario’s Expert Roundtable on Immigration, helping develop the province’s first-ever immigration strategy.

Julia is a director of George Brown College and of Investeco, and a trustee of the Canada Post Community Foundation. She is past Chair of IWF Canada’s Toronto Chapter, a former board member of Luminato and the Living City Foundation, and a past advisor to organizations including Artscape, the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation and the Hague Process on Refugees and Migration. She has been recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women (2014) and as a Woman of Influence Canadian Diversity Champion (2012), and has received the University of Toronto’s Arbor Award.

Julia is a graduate of Queen’s University, Columbia University and Osgoode Hall Law School, and has received executive education at Harvard Business School. She is qualified to practice law in Ontario, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

What she learned starting a business in Singapore
Leading not-for-profit organisations CivicAction and Ontario’s Expert Roundtable for Immigration
How she recruited John Tory to be the chair for CivicActionand recruiting John Tory to be on the board
How to diversify your board and get more women on it
Learn to build your network to help you become a great leader

Reading List

You’re it

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP016 | Stefan Grambart: Inspire the Creative Side

Today’s guest is Stefan Grambart, an Emmy® award-winning Creative Director pushing at the boundaries of collaborative storytelling, helping to shape the future of VR, gaming, and entertainment in general.

Stefan has worked on a wide range of interactive projects focusing on narrative and visual storytelling – both for clients and as original properties. He has over twenty years of combined experience across film and television, entertainment, games, and digital media.

I caught up with Stefan at the FITC Toronto conference where I learned quite a bit about the fascinating world of VR (virtual reality) and where the world is going.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

How improv and Dungeons and Dragons help him create in VR
The challenges working and leading creatives
To be mindful of your overall career goals
Learn how to treat your team as potential alumni

Reading List

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP015 | Rami Sayar: Technology and Community

On today’s episode, I have the opportunity to catch up and sit down with Rami Sayar at the FITC Toronto event. Rami is a Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Canada.

Rami is a technologist passionate about the intersection of art, design and the web. For the past 5 years, he has been experimenting with the bleeding edge of emerging technologies, determined to find a use for them in everyday life.

In his current role as a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Canada in Montreal, Rami covers technical areas such as open source technologies, open data, and cloud computing. He is a frequent international speaker and has spoken at prestigious conferences such as Build, FITC, ConFoo, DroidCon, CUSEC, KWS and TEDx at HEC Montreal. Rami is prevented from sleeping by his curiosity for experimentation, his insistence on shipping high-quality code and helping startups survive the grind.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

How he is leading by being a “fanboy” marrying technology and community
Gain exposure at a world-wide organisation, like Microsoft
Finding and navigating through Microsft to find the right stakeholders
Building through community events like Startup Grind and meetups
Continue publishing and sharing to gain trust and creditbility

Links

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP014 | Suzanne Grant: The Art of the Possible

I am excited to share the conversation I had with Suzanne Grant. Suzanne’s experience is characterized by breadth and depth leading in technology, military, non-profit, health and creative fields. She has won awards and commendations at each stage of her career and attributes her success to authentic leadership, strategic thinking and collaboration.

Suzanne served in the Canadian Forces as an engineering officer. She bootstrapped a strategic communications agency and publishing house, The Art of Business, in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar, where she also founded Qatar’s favourite award-winning print and digital publication, Qatar Happening.

Suzanne has hired Steve Wozniak and Tim Sebastian, and partnered with Serena Williams and the Queen of Qatar. She has been interviewed on Al Jazeera TV, CBC Radio, Global Media, Rogers TV and multiple international print titles. She launched a national sports team, and organized powerboat world championship launches. She advised Virgin Health Bank on patient reach and executed Accenture’s launch in a new country.

Suzanne’s most cherished accomplishments include leading grassroots movements. She founded and spearheaded a Canada-wide charity campaign for Rwandan orphans in 1994. In 2007 she founded Spirit of Empowerment, a historic catalyst event for young professional Arab women. Back home in 2012, Suzanne introduced a global initiative at Startup Canada to encourage a more global outlook amongst Canada’s entrepreneurs. She helped to create and lead a global youth entrepreneurship fellowship, a partnership between Cambridge University and Startup Canada.

Suzanne is a generous community contributor and global citizen. She has a BSc, Physics from Carleton University and studied entrepreneurship at St Lawrence College. She has been awarded the Canadian Decoration for long-term service to Canada, received a commendation from the Military, was named Local Hero by the city of Kingston and has won a Startup Canada Innovation Award and a Microsoft Web Award.

Suzanne’s mantra is The Art of the Possible.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

Leading a mission of hope with the Diamond Eye
What leadership training was like in the military
Why she likes reading biographies and what can be learned from them
How she successfully built a company in the middle-east
Her passion and drive to continually give back

Links

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP013 | Mitch Seguin: Be Aware to Find Opportunities

Mitch Seguin is the Co-founder and Head of Product and Design at TribalScale.

Mitch has always been a tech geek at heart, from his roots building hospital data centres to product management at Xtreme Labs, Mitch has seen every facet of product design and development. Mitch focused much of his working energy at Xtreme Labs in the startup space. Working with companies from seed round, he saw huge growth among his client partners and quickly gained an eye for potential success. When Xtreme Labs was acquired by Pivotal in 2013, Mitch saw the opportunity to fully immerse himself in the client relationship aspect of mobile development. Over this time, Mitch helped launch Pivotal offices in Denver and Washington DC.

Years later, Mitch has moved on to lead a new breed of mobile and emerging technology company. As head of product and design for TribalScale, Mitch has returned to his roots, helping to manage projects for companies big and small to create the ultimate in world class mobile and connected experiences.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

What it’s like when the organization grows from the founding team to over 90 in less than two years.
How he ensures that he keeps the company culture intact with the rapid growth.
His thoughts on the voice controlled era, where the user interface of the future will come from.
The two things that are necessary to find great talent in the project management vertical.
What he learned when he was working at Pivotal opening up a new office

Links

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP012 | Chris Zacharias: Building the Graphics Card of the Internet

My guest on this episode is Chris Zacharias, the founder and CEO of Imgix. He founded imgix, a real-time image processing service that enables businesses of all sizes to deliver rich visual content with high performance and easy setup.

Prior to that, he was one of YouTube’s early web developers. He was responsible for creating YouTube’s HTML5 video player and Feather, an ultra-lightweight version of YouTube that loads quickly in parts of the world with slow Internet connections. These experiences drove Chris to recognize a need for tools that let developers build great visual experiences without adding bulk to their apps.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

How a spontaneous trip to Lake Tahoe changed the way we watch videos on youtube hint html5 video player
How to use 20% of your time on passion specific projects
Cultural understanding and paying attention to what’s going on
Borrow ideas from gaming industry and adapt to internet technologies
Fun fact, the IMG tag barely made it into the HTML specification
Biggest turning point in his career was Demo Day at Y-Combinator
Difference between engineering and business skills
Why he is the first person to jump on a job, and why he’s the worst person for the job
How listening helps an organization’s ideas bubble to the top
Pick big ideas. You’re going to do it anyway!

Links

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This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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TBLP011 | Jim Love: The Artist and Generalist

My guest on this episode is Jim Love. Jim is CIO and Chief Content Officer at IT World Canada. Over the past 4 years, working with his partner Fawn Annan, President of IT World Canada, Jim has worked to make IT World Canada one of the leading digital publishers in the B2B space and a case study in digital transformation.

In addition to his work as a business and technology executive, Jim is also a well-known writer who published in leading publications in Canada and internationally. In his role as Chief Content Officer for IT World Canada having overall responsibility for all editorial and commercial content. He facilitates large and small session with technology and business executives across the country, supervises the research done by IT World Canada and heads the digital content production.

Jim continues to publish both topical items and his research into strategic technology and marketing in Canada and abroad. He is also an award-winning playwright and musician and he continues to publish.

Equally, at home in technology and line of business roles, over his 35-year career, Jim has held senior level positions in financial services, consulting and publishing. He has worked in software development, operations, sales, and marketing.

In consulting, Jim has held senior level positions in management consulting at Ernst and Young and as a Global Vice President for DMR Group (now Fujitsu). In these roles and in his private consulting practice he has worked with everything from large multi-nationals to entrepreneurial start-ups, to governments and government-owned companies in Canada and around the world. Jim has led large assignments in Financial Services, Telecommunications, Human Resources, Marketing, Technology, Mining and Natural Resources and Government.

Jim has been part of the faculty at the University of Waterloo and York University. He continues to teach an online course in Management Consulting for the Certified Management Consultant’s Association (CMC Canada) and he is a member of the technology curriculum committee at McGill University.

His work has taken him to Asia, Europe, West Africa as well as all across North America from Canada to the US to the Caribbean.

What You Will Learn From This Episode

How being a generalist has helped him succeed as a leader
Understanding what business problems you are trying to solve
Explaining how we are in the middle of a significant change and why it is important to keep on learning
Technology does not exist without a purpose
On being nominated for Juno Award

Links

Thanks for taking the time to listen. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a comment, I would love to hear from you.

This podcast is produced by Slingshot VoIP, a business telecommunications leader.

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