Hi and welcome to my blog.

Why the coffee theme? For anyone who knows me this is an obvious choice for my blog. I love coffee and am a regular visitor to Tim Hortons, Second Cup and Starbucks.  In fact I am also a coffee inventor and coined the term “double - double”. I invented this term about 30 years ago while working a summer job at the Carleton Board of Education. There was a push button coffee machine in the teachers staff room. One of my co-workers asked what I would like in my coffee and I said Double - Double, because they would need to press two cream and two sugar buttons. This is how the term Double - Double came into being. Thats my story and I am sticking to it.

Thank you for dropping by. This blog is dedicated to business, marketing, product life cycle, life long learning and perhaps a dash of politics when the mood strikes me.

I like business and strangely enough actually enjoy going over annual reports and financial statements. Go figure. Maybe when I grow up I can be a forensic auditor, what a cool job that would be. Bell vs Rogers and Air Canada vs Westjet are two Canadian rivalries that I plan on following in some detail. The goal is to have a downloadable report(s) available for readers at some point in the future.

Marketing is my second passion. I thoroughly enjoy strategic marketing and all the planning aspects of launching a product or service. I have some mad marketing skills. That being said I also have some implementation skills and have over the course of my career worked as a project manager so I know how to execute too.

Product lifecycle, what’s not to like about the product lifecycle. I worked as a product manager for several years and learned to love my products and care for them. As a product manager I introduced new products and retired vintage kit, so I have lived the entire product lifecycle and really enjoyed the experience.

Life long learning is last on the list but certainly not least. I love learning new stuff and enjoy continually adding to my body of knowledge; you never know when it might come in handy. I have mentored MBA students with the U of O on consulting projects and currently volunteer with Junior Achievement, both very rewarding experiences. Reading books, listening to educational tapes or CD’s is high on my list of fun past times, hope that doesn’t make me too nerdy. If you are from academia, located in or near Ottawa and looking for a part-time professor please feel free to drop me a line.

My name is Ian Graham and I am a Management Consultant working in Eastern Canada. Ottawa is a great city with an excellent quality of life and plenty of opportunities. We have a good hockey team, at least in the regular season, but not so strong in the playoffs, darn those Toronto Maple Leafs. Lots of cool technology companies and a healthy dose of Government type stuff what with being the nations capital and all.

Please feel free to post a comment or send me an email. If you did leave a comment and it didn’t get posted it is most likely a result of a spam cleaning frenzy where it was lost in amongst all the spam, where does all this spam come from?

Cheers,

Ian Graham