On Thursday, May 21 I had the privilege to toast the 2009 Manitoba Women Entrepreneur Nominees. Here is my speech.

“Honoured Guests, ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, 2009 nominees. We have come together this evening as a business community to celebrate the achievements of 20 remarkable women entrepreneurs who have demonstrated what it takes to start, build and grow a business. Each one of these women is a success demonstrating the traits of:

• Resourcefulness,
• The ability to see problems as opportunities,
• An impatience with the status quo and traditional thinking,
• The capacity to get things done-often against all odds,
• An obsessive-or some would say irrational-drive to make vision a reality
• Perserverence-overcoming the insurmountable
• Resilience
• An unrelenting focus on results,
• And a need to make a “Big Impact”

This is the DNA of a Women Entrepreneur.

We are in a remarkable period of economic and societal transformation driven by a continuing stream of new technology. It is a new era, a breath taking moment in history, full of opportunity, of exhilarating energy and motivation, of hope and imagination. In this new world the woman entrepreneur plays a pivotal role as a builder and leading contributor to the creation of the new economy. Why?

By our very nature women entrepreneurs are catalysts for change. Embracing change and risk is part of our daily lives. We know how to build a company from the bottom up. How to identify an opportunity, create a plan, fuse soul with vision that attracts the right people, launch, and grow a profitable corporate entity. But most of all we understand what it takes to be an effective leader to get the job done.

Many of the old top down corporations are dying. They are poorly built, can not cope with change very easily, and they lack leadership. An article in the April issue of the Harvard Business Review says that our leading business schools are a fault for the current economic leadership crisis because they perpetuate a managerial theroy that for a company to be successful managers and shareholders need to be aligned at the hip and to ensure this, stock options need to be part of the compensation. This has created a breed of executives more interested in improving stock price than often making a necessary decision for the long term growth and profitability of the corporate entity. Well the days of the overpaid CEOs are done. The new economy is here and it is being built in part right here tonight.

Our new business world is interactive, social, transparent, and based on people. It is people coming together, united under a mission, who move mountains and generate profits. Leadership today is beyond IQ or emotional intelligence because it is based on the science of human interaction that encompasses empathy and tuning into the minds of our employees. You could call it a sort of neural WiFi bonding experience. It enables us to share and navigate our social world and detect someone else’s emotions and reproduce them. The new generation of leader persuades, empowers, collaborates and partners. Women entrepreneurs come naturally equipped with these qualities. It is who we are and what we do. And where there is good leadership there is profitability.

It is hard to believe that a year has passed since my management team assisted me in wheeling the large crate which housed the Women Entrepreneur Award back to our office. At the time I had a bit of an epiphany feeling a desire to contribute back in some way. Joining me tonight along with my daughter Sarah, are some grade 11 and 12 students from Balmoral Hall School (my old Alma Matter where I once served as School Captain. ‘Believe, Achieve, Succeed’ this is the school motto that continues today). These young women are looking forward to hearing the stories and sharing the successes of this year’s nominees – and maybe one day one of them will be up here to accept an award.

To the Nominees: This is your night to celebrate who you are and what you have achieved with your family, friends and colleagues and with those of us in the larger community who support and congratulate you.

Ladies and gentlemen please rise and raise your glasses in a toast to the 2009 Manitoba Women Entreprenur Award Nominees.”