Latest news with #Professor
CTV News
6 days ago
- Politics
- CTV News
Canada's Constitution one of the most difficult to amend in the world: professor
Watch University of Toronto professor David Schneiderman discusses the complex process of amending Canada's constitution, and what Alberta would hope to achieve.
Forbes
14-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
What Nobody Tells You About Being CEO: 8 Challenges
Nirmal Chhabria | Academic Director, Professor of the Practice, Executive coach, ex-CEO, Author. There's a cruel irony at the heart of leadership: The better you become at getting promoted, the worse prepared you are for what comes next. I discovered this truth during a conversation with a CEO who had just closed a $30 million funding round. "I should be celebrating," he confided, "but I've never felt more lost. I know how to build products and lead teams, but running a company? I'm improvising every day." After working with hundreds of CEOs, I've identified a disturbing pattern: The same eight challenges surface repeatedly, regardless of company size or sector. These aren't random problems—they're systemic blind spots revealing a fundamental gap between what we think CEO work entails and what it actually requires. Here are the eight silent killers that undermine capable leaders and the counterintuitive solutions that separate struggling CEOs from thriving ones. 1. The Revenue Mirage: When Growth Becomes A Guessing Game Nothing exposes a CEO's vulnerability quite like unpredictable revenue. You celebrate record months followed by inexplicable dry spells, making every planning session feel like reading tea leaves. The problem isn't market volatility—it's treating sales like an art instead of a science. Most CEOs inherit or create sales processes that depend on individual heroics rather than systematic predictability. The Solution: Transform your sales engine into a measurable system. Map every stage from initial contact to closed deal. Identify bottlenecks and conversion rates at each step. Create multiple acquisition channels so you're never dependent on one source. When revenue becomes predictable, everything else becomes possible. 2. The Leadership Bottleneck: How Your Chaos Limits Everyone Else Here's the hardest truth most CEOs refuse to face: If you're disorganized, your entire company operates below its potential. I've watched brilliant executives optimize every business process while their personal productivity remains a disaster. They'll invest millions in operational efficiency but won't spend 30 minutes planning their week. The result? They're perpetually reactive and unable to give their best thinking to critical decisions. The Solution: Create an "Ideal Week" template and protect it ruthlessly. Schedule thinking time like board meetings. Block time for reading, planning and deep work. What gets scheduled gets done—including your effectiveness. Your calendar is your strategy made visible. 3. The Board Room Theater: Mistaking Updates For Leadership Most CEOs turn board meetings into elaborate status reports, wasting their most valuable resource: collective wisdom from people who've solved similar problems. You send board materials hours before the meeting, then spend precious time reading through information that directors could have absorbed independently. Meanwhile, the complex strategic questions that keep you awake at night remain unaddressed. The Solution: Send board packages 48 hours in advance with clear labels: "Pre-reading only" versus "Discussion required." Dedicate meeting time to your most critical strategic challenges. Transform your board from an audience into advisors. 4. The Hiring Paradox: The Wrong Person At The Right Time "Hire ahead of the curve" has become startup gospel, but it's destructive when applied blindly. I've seen CEOs hire seasoned executives who expect fully-formed processes in chaotic early-stage environments and junior people who can't scale as the company grows. The real challenge isn't finding talented people—it's finding someone who can excel in your current reality while growing into your future needs. The Solution: Be brutally honest about what you need today versus 12 months from now. Hire someone who can dominate both phases. Look for adaptive intelligence over perfect credentials. 5. The Accountability Illusion: Why Good Intentions Aren't Enough "My team just doesn't deliver what they commit to," frustrated CEOs tell me regularly. But when I examine their management systems, I find sporadic team meetings, cancelled one-on-ones and no consistent tracking of commitments. You can't create accountability through wishful thinking and ad hoc check-ins. The Solution: Fix your meeting rhythm first. Weekly team meetings happen religiously. One-on-ones are sacred. Track progress against commitments systematically. As management expert Andy Grove noted, meetings are the medium of management. 6. The Communication Crisis: When Your Message Gets Lost Visit your website right now. Can a complete stranger understand what you do, who it's for and what they should do next within five seconds? If not, you're hemorrhaging opportunities daily. Unclear value propositions don't just confuse customers—they paralyze employees who can't prioritize effectively and investors who can't understand your competitive advantage. The Solution: Ruthlessly simplify your message. Test it with people outside your industry. If they can't explain your value back to you clearly, keep refining until they can. Clarity is competitive advantage. 7. The Conversation Deficit: How Avoidance Amplifies Problems Every CEO I know is postponing at least one crucial conversation. Performance feedback for an underperforming executive. Tough discussions about company culture. Strategic disagreements with co-founders. The cruel mathematics of leadership: Difficult conversations become exponentially more difficult the longer you wait. The Solution: Address issues while manageable. Learn structured communication frameworks that remove emotion from difficult discussions. Set a personal rule: No conversation gets delayed more than one week once you've identified the need. 8. The Strategy Fog: When Direction Becomes Confusion If you can't explain your strategy in one clear sentence, your team definitely can't execute it. This creates cascading confusion: Employees don't know what to prioritize, customers don't understand why they should choose you and investors can't see how you'll win. The Solution: Distill your strategy into one sentence that anyone can remember and repeat. Test it with your team. If they can't articulate it back to you consistently, keep simplifying until they can. The CEO's Hidden Superpower These eight challenges are predictable and interconnected. The CEOs who scale successfully don't have superior intelligence—they build superior systems for the fundamentals most leaders take for granted. Your company's ceiling isn't determined by market conditions, but by your willingness to master the unsexy basics that make everything else possible. The question isn't whether you'll face these challenges—it's whether you'll address them before they address you. Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Is it true that … it's harder to build muscle mass and strength as you age?
'Your muscles become less responsive to exercise with age,' says Professor Leigh Breen, an expert in skeletal muscle physiology and metabolism at Birmingham University. 'It's not as easy to gain muscle and strength as when you were younger.' But that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. 'The idea that exercise becomes pointless past a certain age is simply wrong,' he says. 'Everyone responds to structured exercise. You may not build as much visible muscle, but strength, cardiovascular health, brain function and protection against non-transmittable disease all improve.' Muscle mass and strength begin to decline from about the age of 40, compared with peak levels in your 20s. It's thought the body's responsiveness to training also starts to wane around then, but it is still possible to build muscle with the right strategy. 'With a few tweaks – more frequent sessions or increasing the number of sets in each workout – older adults can achieve results close to those of younger people,' Breen says. 'Nutrition is also key. Adequate protein, plus carbs and healthy fats, fuel your exercise, accelerate your recovery and support how your body adapts.' UK guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week for those aged 19 to 64, plus muscle-strengthening exercises, such as lifting weights, for all major muscle groups at least twice a week. This is vital not just for fitness, but for long-term health. 'Regular aerobic and resistance training cuts the risk of almost every noncommunicable disease – type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's,' Breen says. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Can exercising still have a positive impact on your health, even if you've never picked up a weight? 'Definitely,' he says. 'People who've trained for years are better protected, but even late starters can dramatically reduce their disease risk in a short time.'
The Independent
10-07-2025
- Climate
- The Independent
How to get rid of flying ants: An expert's advice
A bug expert has revealed his top tips for tackling flying ants as the annual "flying ant day" phenomenon is set to return to Britain and Ireland as warmer weather persists. Swarms of winged black garden ants emerge from their nests for a "nuptial flight" — their reproductive phase — typically in July or August. They favour hot and humid conditions with low winds, ideally around 25C. Speaking on This Morning, Professor James Logan explained that shutting doors, using a screen, and putting your food away in sealable containers can help combat the insects. "The best thing you can do is just leave them alone, lock up the holes in your house and stop them coming in," he concluded.
Fast Company
10-07-2025
- Fast Company
Data privacy is failing. Here's what encryption and MFA can (and can't) do
Cybersecurity and data privacy are constantly in the news. Governments are passing new cybersecurity laws. Companies are investing in cybersecurity controls such as firewalls, encryption, and awareness training at record levels. And yet, people are losing ground on data privacy. In 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center reported that companies sent out 1.3 billion notifications to the victims of data breaches. That's more than triple the notices sent out the year before. It's clear that despite growing efforts, personal data breaches are not only continuing, but accelerating. What can you do about this situation? Many people think of the cybersecurity issue as a technical problem. They're right: Technical controls are an important part of protecting personal information, but they are not enough. As a professor of information technology, analytics, and operations at the University of Notre Dame, I study ways to protect personal privacy. Solid personal privacy protection is made up of three pillars: accessible technical controls, public awareness of the need for privacy, and public policies that prioritize personal privacy. Each plays a crucial role in protecting personal privacy. A weakness in any one puts the entire system at risk. The first line of defense Technology is the first line of defense, guarding access to computers that store data and encrypting information as it travels between computers to keep intruders from gaining access. But even the best security tools can fail when misused, misconfigured, or ignored. Two technical controls are especially important: encryption and multifactor authentication (MFA). These are the backbone of digital privacy—and they work best when widely adopted and properly implemented. Encryption uses complex math to put sensitive data in an unreadable format that can only be unlocked with the right key. For example, your web browser uses HTTPS encryption to protect your information when you visit a secure webpage. This prevents anyone on your network—or any network between you and the website—from eavesdropping on your communications. Today, nearly all web traffic is encrypted in this way. But if we're so good at encrypting data on networks, why are we still suffering all of these data breaches? The reality is that encrypting data in transit is only part of the challenge. Securing stored data We also need to protect data wherever it's stored—on phones, laptops, and the servers that make up cloud storage. Unfortunately, this is where security often falls short. Encrypting stored data, or data at rest, isn't as widespread as encrypting data that is moving from one place to another. While modern smartphones typically encrypt files by default, the same can't be said for cloud storage or company databases. Only 10% of organizations report that at least 80% of the information they have stored in the cloud is encrypted, according to a 2024 industry survey. This leaves a huge amount of unencrypted personal information potentially exposed if attackers manage to break in. Without encryption, breaking into a database is like opening an unlocked filing cabinet—everything inside is accessible to the attacker. Multifactor authentication is a security measure that requires you to provide more than one form of verification before accessing sensitive information. This type of authentication is more difficult to crack than a password alone because it requires a combination of different types of information. It often combines something you know, such as a password, with something you have, such as a smartphone app that can generate a verification code or with something that's part of what you are, like a fingerprint. Proper use of multifactor authentication reduces the risk of compromise by 99.22%. While 83% of organizations require that their employees use multifactor authentication, according to another industry survey, this still leaves millions of accounts protected by nothing more than a password. As attackers grow more sophisticated and credential theft remains rampant, closing that 17% gap isn't just a best practice—it's a necessity. Multifactor authentication is one of the simplest, most effective steps organizations can take to prevent data breaches, but it remains underused. Expanding its adoption could dramatically reduce the number of successful attacks each year. Awareness gives people the knowledge they need Even the best technology falls short when people make mistakes. Human error played a role in 68% of 2024 data breaches, according to a Verizon report. Organizations can mitigate this risk through employee training, data minimization—meaning collecting only the information necessary for a task, then deleting it when it's no longer needed—and strict access controls. Policies, audits, and incident response plans can help organizations prepare for a possible data breach so they can stem the damage, see who is responsible and learn from the experience. It's also important to guard against insider threats and physical intrusion using physical safeguards such as locking down server rooms. Public policy holds organizations accountable Legal protections help hold organizations accountable in keeping data protected and giving people control over their data. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation is one of the most comprehensive privacy laws in the world. It mandates strong data protection practices and gives people the right to access, correct, and delete their personal data. And the General Data Protection Regulation has teeth: In 2023, Meta was fined €1.2 billion (US$1.4 billion) when Facebook was found in violation. Despite years of discussion, the U.S. still has no comprehensive federal privacy law. Several proposals have been introduced in Congress, but none have made it across the finish line. In its place, a mix of state regulations and industry-specific rules—such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for health data and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for financial institutions —fill the gaps. Some states have passed their own privacy laws, but this patchwork leaves Americans with uneven protections and creates compliance headaches for businesses operating across jurisdictions. The tools, policies, and knowledge to protect personal data exist—but people's and institutions' use of them still falls short. Stronger encryption, more widespread use of multifactor authentication, better training, and clearer legal standards could prevent many breaches. It's clear that these tools work. What's needed now is the collective will—and a unified federal mandate—to put those protections in place.
