Advancing Canada's Competitive Advantage – A national forum on management

Montreal, September 30, 2009 – As you know, HEC Montréal has been putting on a four-day national forum on management. Advancing Canada’s Competitive Advantage is running until October 2nd at HEC Montréal. This morning there were several speakers who presented talks on a range of subjects. Here’s a small taste of what they said. To get in touch with any of our speakers, feel free to contact Céline Poissant (see below).

If you earn $300,000 a year, sitting on the audit committee of a top company, do you have much incentive to blow the whistle on the firm that’s offering you this nice sideline? And did you know that in the U.S. there is no law to stop a nefarious CEO from papering his audit team with his golf buddies? The University of Tennessee’s Joseph Carcello has tales of negligent audit committees, conflict of interest and fraudulent incidents, with studies to back them up.

Maybe it was the hedge-fund manager earning $3.7 billion in one year that offered the first clue to the financial system heading in the wrong direction. Yvan Allaire gives us many more. The author of Black Markets… and Business Blues and President of the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations guides us through what went wrong in the economic crisis. He puts forward a stunning list of causes and offers a lucid prescription for what the world needs, something he call the “Road to a new Capitalism.”

George Dionne has a challenge for researchers in the financial sector: Come up with a tool that can better predict the viability of an organization. The Canada Research Chair in Risk Management and HEC professor says rating agencies are very good at basing their lower grades on past incidents where a failure took place. But that’s like reading yesterday’s weather report. Can researchers find something that offers an early assessment of start-ups and other young companies?

Forum’s complete program.

To watch the conference (complete version) “A Crisis Unlike Any Other… And What to do About it?” by Yvan Allaire follow the link.

Céline Poissant
Media Relations Officer
HEC Montréal
514-340-7320
cell. 514-449-0372