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Bronwynn Ford is born on October 15 2008

Introducing the latest addition to the Ford/Myton Clan...  Bronwynn Elaine Ford!!!  Born after a 2 days labour @ 1336 on October 15th, 2008 AD at Ridge Meadows Hospital, Maple Ridge, BC.  7 lbs 1 ounce, 19 5/8" long, and a 12"

diameter head.  

 

Axis Insurance Kitsilano - Open House September 18 2008

 

Gail, Diana, Verona and Lisa - 4 hostesses of a very successful Open House at our newly relocated Kitsilano office.

Axis Yukon - a place of beauty with Jeff, Leslie, William and Genna

Yukon - end of the summer 2008.

Close your eyes and breathe in crisp Yukon air. Smell spruce sap and the earthy scent of tundra, and listen for the excited howls of husky sled dogs. Open your eyes and drink in Yukon landscapes under dancing aurora borealis. Canoe a Yukon river and dip your hands into the clearest water you've ever seen. Life in Yukon is a larger than life experience. Stay awhile—you won't want to leave.    

Success meeting - a great success

                                                                                  The energy was palpable when 20 brains of Axis team gathered together to share in knowedge of the past and look towards the future success.

Growth - helping customer be successful - continuous improvement - focus on profitability - networking - cash flow - mining prospect data base - community involvement - the role of Finance Department - never letting customer down - ensuring effective paperwork - retention: those are just a few of the themes discussed.

The pictorial documentary is on the right.

Axis Producers: Are you ready for market turbulence?

Part 1 of 2: Know the warning signs of distress  

It’s a frightening time to be in business in Canada.

Market turbulence, which has been garnering daily headlines, is expected to intensify across all sectors. From automotive and forestry to fishery and gas services, the business landscape is evolving rapidly, and no company can afford to ignore the changes and their potential impact.

In the oil and gas sector, for example, producers and services firms are grappling with massive increases in energy and commodity costs. Significant labour shortages and a tightening regulatory environment have pushed many companies in this space to the ropes.

Agriculture is similarly under siege. Canada’s livestock and cattle producers, greenhouses and fisheries are wrestling with spiraling input costs and unpredictable border controls that restrict exports. The strong Canadian dollar has priced many Canadian producers right out of the market just as the federal government shifts its focus away from agriculture toward other market sectors.

The forestry sector is also suffering, in large part due to its failure to prepare for a rising dollar. Years of depreciated Canadian currency allowed many producers to become complacent. As a result of this natural money market advantage, many players failed to invest in R&D, plant upgrades or economies of scale rationalizations needed to effectively compete in global markets. The dollar took flight just as international competitors arrived on the scene.

China has emerged as a leading low-cost manufacturer. Similarly, South America is known as an inexpensive source of eucalyptus fibre, Nordic Europe is home to a range of very efficient plants and Finland has established a strong reputation for technological leadership in the forestry industry.

The timing couldn’t be worse for Canada, as the volatile currency exposes forestry industry weaknesses just as global market competition heats up. It gets worse in pulp and paper, where Canadian mill capacity ranks among the lowest in the world, while the average age of Canadian plants is older than the global norm.

Canada also lags in lumber, where yields and rotations are significantly below international averages because of climate and tree species. The situation isn’t helped by Canada’s relatively high cost structure and inefficient, outdated transportation infrastructure.

Despite their reputation as sudden events, crises typically percolate for quite some time before igniting. Forward-thinking organizations recognize that even subtle symptoms can, if left unchecked, evolve into full-blown disasters over time.

Because it can take a significant period of time for business emergencies to take root, it is important to view these events as preventable. Businesses that put processes in place to actively watch for and respond to symptoms of underperformance stand a better chance of avoiding crises altogether. If setbacks prove unavoidable, well-prepared companies are better equipped to stop their progress before they worsen.

Read the whole article from CMA Management magazine:

Download market_turbulence_challenges_canadian_companies.doc

How the Best of the Best Get Better and Better

Compete only with yourself, demand relentless feedback, and don’t forget to celebrate, says this sports psychologist and executive coach.

by Graham Jones

Until 1954, most people believed that a human being was incapable of running a mile in less than four minutes. But that very year, English miler Roger Bannister proved them wrong.

“Doctors and scientists said that breaking the four-minute mile was impossible, that one would die in the attempt,” Bannister is reported to have said afterward. “Thus, when I got up from the track after collapsing at the finish line, I figured I was dead.” Which goes to show that in sports, as in business, the main obstacle to achieving “the impossible” may be a self-limiting mind-set.

Sport is not business, of course, but the parallels are striking. In both worlds, elite performers are not born but made. Obviously, star athletes must have some innate, natural ability—coordination, physical flexibility, anatomical capacities—just as successful senior executives need to be able to think strategically and relate to people. But the real key to excellence in both sports and business is not the ability to swim fast or do quantitative analyses quickly in your head; rather, it is mental toughness. 

Elite performers in both arenas thrive on pressure; they excel when the heat is turned up. Their rise to the top is the result of very careful planning—of setting and hitting hundreds of small goals. Elite performers use competition to hone their skills, and they reinvent themselves continually to stay ahead of the pack. Finally, whenever they score big wins, top performers take time to celebrate their victories.

You can’t stay at the top if you aren’t comfortable in high-stress situations. Indeed, the ability to remain cool under fire is the one trait of elite performers that is most often thought of as inborn. But in fact you can learn to love the pressure—for driving you to perform better than you ever thought you could. To do that, however, you have to first make a choice to devote yourself passionately to self-improvement. Greg Searle, who won an Olympic gold medal in rowing, is often asked whether success was worth the price. He always gives the same reply: “I never made any sacrifices; I made choices.”

Read on the rest of this article from Harvard Business Review:

Download how_the_best_of_the_best_get_better_and_better.doc

 

Lets make Verona run for cause in high heels

Hey Axions,

I’m attempting to run the 5km for the 2008 Run for Rescue on October 19, 2008. 

All money collected goes towards Tony’s African Village Project. 

If I can collect $2,000 in pledges I will jog/walk it in heels.

For every $1,000 in pledges I collect will add another 1 inch.  Maximum 4 inches.   J

On a side note, if anyone wants to donate a pair of manolos… call me.

Verona

More info on Axis organized charity run: http://runforrescue.com/

Axis summer picnic - August 22 2008

This year's summer picnic was again a big success! Sunny weather, great team spirit, yummy food and challenging games. Thanks to all who organized this event, especially Leila, Amber, Blake, Don and our sponsor - Tony Davis.

You can view more pictures here:  http://axisinsurance.typepad.com/photos/axis_picnic_summer_2008/

Understanding what the customer buys - by Peter Drucker

The most important question for a business is: “What is value to the customer?” Yet it is the one least often asked. One reason is the sales professionals are quite sure they know the answer. Value is what they, in their business, define as quality. But this is almost always the wrong definition. The customer never buys a product. By definition the customer buys the satisfaction of a want. He buys value.

For a teenage girl, for instance, value in a shoe is high fashion. It has to be “in”. Price is a secondary consideration and durability is not value at all. For the same girl as a young mother, a few years later, high fashion becomes a restraint. She will not buy something that is quite unfashionable. But what she looks for is durability, price, comfort and fit. The same shoe that represents the best buy for a teenager is a very poor value for her slightly older sister.

What a company’s different customers consider value is so complicated that it can be answered only by the customers themselves. A salesperson should not even try to guess the answers – it should always go to the customers in a systematic quest for them.

Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.

The fallacy of the sales people is often the sole focus on the thorough knowledge of the product while it is the intimate knowledge of the needs of each customer that is of the primary importance.

Action point: What do your customers consider most valuable about the product or service you provide? If you don’t know, find out. If you do know, ask your customers if you are delivering.

Peter Drucker is considered the top management thinker, the father of modern management, his 39 books and countless articles explored how humans are organized across all sectors of society—in business, government and the nonprofit world.

Enterprise Management Risk - what is it?

Enterprise risk management, or ERM as it is called, uses an integrated or holistic approach to understand and manage all the risks an organization faces. Its primary purpose is to improve the quality of decision-making throughout an organization.

ERM started in the late 1980s, when financial and insurance companies began to understand that they were taking dissimilar, independent and sometimes competing approaches to managing a mounting number and types of risks they faced internally and externally. The uncoordinated, and sometimes conflicting, approaches to managing organizational risk led executives to ignore some risks while spending too much time managing others. The result was employees did not give senior management a complete picture of the risks they faced, thereby increasing the likelihood that the organization would be surprised by events that, in retrospect, were predictable.

During the past decade and a half, ERM has grown from being a good idea into a more formal discipline to manage an organization’s risks. No universally accepted definition of ERM exists, so it's best to think of it as a common framework for managing four types of organizational risks.

• Strategic risks involve the organization’s direction. Is the organization’s current course and ability to adapt to market changes correct, or does it need to be changed to keep from stagnating or collapsing? Strategic risks include the organization’s overall objectives, the assumptions that underlie those objectives, as well as the constraints the organization faces.

• Operational risks involve the people, processes and technology that are needed to carry out the organization’s strategic objectives. These risks would include how well information technology systems function or the effectiveness of information security to protect confidential data.

• Financial risks involve the allocation of resources, including the organization’s financial investments. For instance, are financial resources allocated so they create the best return for a public company’s shareholders, or in the case of a government agency, do investments generate the best value?

• Insurable risks are amenable to be addressed by insurance (specifically, “pure” risks that involve only outcomes of a financial loss or no loss).

Of course, some risks include aspects of more than one of the four classes of risks. Some risks also evolve from one class to others. For instance, disclosure of personal information due to the loss of a laptop (an operational risk) may create both a reputational (a strategic risk) and monetary (a financial risk) consequence.

For the past decade, ERM has been touted as how organizations should manage their risks. The subprime mortgage crisis and its ramifications, however, have created an open question of the value of ERM. Financial institutions, including Bears Stearns, HSBC, Merrill Lynch, UBS and many others, which before the crisis were touted as world-class best practitioners of enterprise risk management, have experienced tens of billions of dollars in losses because they did not understand the risks in which they had invested.

What the subprime situation has made clear is that many financial firms practiced ERM in only a pro forma manner. These organizations may have talked a good ERM game, but they definitely didn’t practice one.

For instance, some institutions never questioned strategic risks related to basic market assumptions, such as housing prices would never fall dramatically. Nor did senior management understand the extent of the risks, such as in their size or complexity. Part of the reason was that managers were not concerned about long-term risks as long as short-term profits were being generated. A predictable, nasty surprise was a foregone conclusion.

The subprime debacle once again underscores the critical importance of creating a healthy organizational risk culture, in which senior managers want to know about risks, take action to mitigate them and not make overseers feel unwelcomed when they point risks out.

The subprime situation also highlights the importance of understanding the many ways risks are interconnected. Firms that believed they were immune from what was happening in the subprime market found to their surprise they were not.

You can access this free webinar "Enterprise Risk Management: Eliminating Obstacles to Success" here: http://www.businessinsurance.com/cgi-bin/page.pl?pageId=1104