At one point, Bombardier would have been a shoo-in for the contract to build new commuter-train cars for Montreal’s Agence Métropolitaine de Transport, but not this time.
Instead, the contract is going to the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation, which bid at $69 million, compared to Bombardier’s $103 million — and boasts a wait of six-months less for the new cars.
A Montreal Gazette op-ed co-authored by Just For Laughs co-founder (and Desautels Global Expert) Andy Nulman (BCom'83) makes the case that the new lights on the Jacques-Cartier Bridge, which were switched on for the first time on May 17th for Montreal’s 375th birthday, will help remake the bridge as a city landmark on par with the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Andrea Courey (BCom’82) was newly divorced, with three kids to feed and no money in the bank when she started Grandma Emily’s Granola. She credits her BCom education with giving her the tools she needed to get through the early days of her business, but notes that real-world experience is a very different thing than classroom knowledge.
A new study co-authored by Desautels Professor Laura Doering looks at the role gender played in missed payments at a microfinance bank.
What the authors discovered was that clients who associated their bank manager’s job as a “female” role were more likely to miss payments. In a wider sense, male managers tend to enjoy less authority when filling a job that was previously done by a woman.
Dire predictions about the impending robot-worker invasion abound. It seems like every day, academics and other thought-leaders trot out statistics about how many jobs are going to be vaporized by technology.
Well, new research from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation suggests otherwise. While not all jobs are safe, there are many tasks that robots just can’t do — and technology also creates jobs, though admittedly not as many as it eliminates.
Congratulations to Professor Juan Serpa and Professor Sujata Madan who have been selected as the recipients of the 2016-17 Desautels Faculty Teaching Award for Undergraduate and Graduate teaching, respectively.
McGill University has released the names of the inspirational leaders who will be receiving honorary doctorates this year. The slate includes luminaries in fields ranging from music to sustainability. Nobel Prize winners Arthur McDonald and Paul Nurse will be honoured, as will former prime ministers Paul Martin and Brian Mulroney.
After 2020, Air Canada plans to be running its own in-house loyalty program instead of sticking with Aeroplan. So, what does that mean?
For now, not much. Aeroplan members have plenty of time to use up their points. But once Air Canada shifts to its new plan, there are several possibilities.
After less than a year at the job, Ericsson Senior VP and head of North American operations Rima Qureshi (BCom’87, MBA’96) has left the company. Chief Strategy Officer Niklas Hueveldop has stepped in on an interim basis, and the company has started the search for a permanent replacement. Ericsson is in the midst of a turnaround, streamlining operations and bumping up its investment in R&D.
The last time WestJet’s pilots voted on unionization, only 45 per cent were in favour — but times change.
Last Friday, 62 per cent voted to make the Air Line Pilots Association their bargaining agent, despite WestJet’s stance that being non-union represents a competitive advantage.
Professor Karl Moore calls the vote a likely result of the growth that WestJet has undergone since its early days, saying that the airline has “lost that kind of feisty upstart David and Goliath feeling.”
Ballooning C Series costs, job losses and government cash all played into the recent investor revolt at Bombardier, but running underneath are other problems: The C Series is picking up steam after a slow start, but faces new hurdles in the form of complaints filed by Boeing.
On the rail side, the company’s Swedish office has been rocked by bribery charges, while flaws are hampering rail-car development in Australia — and the company has missed delivery deadlines for Toronto’s new street cars and light rail cars.
Public demonstrations and a shareholder revolt weren’t enough to keep Bombardier chairman Pierre Beaudoin from re-election, though he has stepped back from his former executive role.
Bombardier’s institutional investors by and large withheld support for Beaudoin and the executive pay raise, but Bombardier’s two-tiered share structure gives the founding family control; both measures passed easily.
By all accounts, Quebecers have had it with Bombardier, and they showed it during the company’s annual meeting last week. After months of bad news, culminating in government bailouts and 14,000 jobs hitting the chopping block, the word that top execs were getting an almost 50-per cent pay raise made many throw up their hands in disgust.
In response, the founding family doubled down on the executive compensation in the name of retailing top talent.
As late as Thursday morning, it was still not clear whether Pierre Beaudoin would be able to hang on as Chairman of Bombardier’s board of directors. Even though the founding family’s Class A shares give them over 50 percent of the voting power, the investor revolt that is currently raging is a clear indication that there is a real appetite for change.
Desautels Professor Karl Moore says that, though the board must pay attention to governance issues, Mr. Beaudoin is a valuable asset.
A research paper authored in part by Desautels Professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Management, and Healthcare Samer Faraj compared the traditional management style (where the most experienced person is in charge) with the more self-driving teams that are a hallmark of agile systems development.
