ALAN W. KENNEDY

All of my working career has been centred on writing on issues of importance to senior executives and boards. I put their thinking to paper. I do the thinking and writing that they do not always have the time to do. And I seldom get it right in the first draft.

I truly understand what the French essayist, Emmanuel Berl, meant when he said "I don't write to say what I think but to know what I think". That's what I do for my clients - show them what they are thinking. It always looks different on paper.

All of these matters are addressed in our new book, The Alpha Strategies, written with Tom Kennedy, my son. The intent of The Alpha Strategies is to help boards, management teams, and managers reach informed decisions on strategy and to articulate and communicate that strategy effectively.

The book represents a consolidation of twenty years of my teaching, research, and consulting on matters of strategy and its communication as well as a prior corporate career which provided me with an extraordinary amount of board experience and insight into how some of Canada's greatest entrepreneurs, managers, and governance experts think, make decisions, and communicate.

My teaching experience at Schulich Executive Education Centre for more than twenty years has been an invaluable asset in terms of undertstanding and learning how to communicate. The first thing any teacher learns is that "One teaches. Two learn". This is certainly true in executive education where fools are not suffered lightly and engaging the participants means everything.

We hope our readers enjoy The Alpha Strategies. The discipline of strategy has been wrapped in mysterious processes and arcane vocabulary for too long. Hopefully, we make the subject more understandable.