Keynote Presentations

Take a Bold Look at Tomorrow... Today!

If you want to know what's ahead for the business travel industry - and you want to know now - then don't want to miss ACTE's Global Conference in Vancouver where we'll bring together some of the world's most celebrated thinkers and strategists and ask them to share their bold vision of the future. And, according to them, what a future it will be, with numerous issues that will challenge us as never before! Just don't expect these dynamic visionaries to simply identify the problems looming on our horizon; ACTE's Vancouver conference keynotes will offer up their own unique and, often, bold solutions, guiding the way to the business travel industry's most rewarding future ever!




Graeme Deans
Vice President
A.T. Kearney, Inc.

Tuesday, May 3, 2005
8:30am-9:45am
When it comes to business strategy, there are few consultants with the same vision and experience as Graeme K. Deans. An expert on the effects of mergers on business, Mr. Deans can take some of the uncertainty out of the changing business climate.

Mr. Deans is a vice president of A.T. Kearney, the global management consulting firm. He currently leads A.T. Kearney's North American Strategy management consulting practice. He is based in Toronto and also serves as Chairman of A.T. Kearney Canada.

Mr. Deans was formerly the Managing Director of A.T. Kearney's operations across Southeast Asia and India and prior to that the head of A.T. Kearney's Asian Automotive consulting practice. His consulting specialties include business and marketing strategy, organizational design and effectiveness, and mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Deans' consulting work has focused primarily on the automotive, consumer products and financial services industries.

Mr. Deans is the co-author of the award-winning business book "Winning The Merger Endgame" (McGraw-Hill, 2002) and speaks frequently on business strategy issues. His latest book, "STRETCH! How Great Companies Grow In Good Times and Bad" (John Wiley), has recently been released.


                 

Judy Dempsey
Diplomatic Correspondent
International Herald Tribune

Sunday, May 1, 2005
6:00pm-7:30pm
 The name Judy Dempsey has become synonymous with incisive geo-political reporting and commentary. Drawing from her extensive international journalistic experience, Ms. Dempsey provides a front line view of the current geo-political situation, the EU and their impact on the travel industry.

In August 2004, she joined the International Herald Tribune as the correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe based in Berlin and is currently the Senior Correspondent, Europe for the publication. She took this position after her post at the Financial Times - one of the world's leading business newspapers with a global readership of more than 1.6 million - where she was responsible for covering the European Union's international, security and defense policies, NATO and EU enlargement and transatlantic relations.

Ms. Dempsey is the recipient of numerous honours in recognition of her outstanding achievements in journalism including the European Women of Achievements Award in 2003, the Anglo-German Prize and Foreign Press Association Award.




Michael Furdyk
Entreprenuer and Consultant

Monday, May 2, 2005
8:30am-9:45am
Michael Furdyk is one of the brightest young minds in the world of technology. Starting at a very young age, he has turned his interest of computers into a series of successful online companies. In 1996, Mr. Furdyk co-founded MyDesktop.com, an innovative online technology community, and then sold the site to U.S.-based Internet.com in May of 1999. Since then, Mr. Furdyk co-founded BuyBuddy.com, a provider of comparison shopping infrastructure to web portals and wireless carriers, which recently closed a $4.5-million round of funding from XDL Intervest.

Mr. Furdyk's overriding goal has been to help individuals and companies realize the true potential of new technology. In that regard he has done work for many large corporations, including Xerox, CIBC, IBM, and recently a 6-month consulting engagement with Microsoft in Seattle, Washington.

Mr. Furdyk is a co-founder of TakingITGlobal, a non-profit that, using communication, collaboration, and community, is helping youth around the world realize the potential of technology. As one of the "10 entrepreneurs who shaped the year 1999," according to Profit Magazine, Mr. Furdyk has shared his experiences as a member of the Net Generation by speaking at many events, including the Boca Raton gathering of The Business Council. The success of BuyBuddy.com and MyDesktop.com was responsible for numerous media appearances including Fast Company, Business 2.0, BusinessWeek, CNN, MSNBC, ZDTV, CTV, CBC, Global, Globe and Mail, and the National Post. He has presented to the Romanov commission on technology's potential future role in health care, and is a frequent contributor to Canadian Business magazine.


                 

Rush Kidder
President
Institute for Global Ethics

Tuesday, May 3, 2005
2:15pm-3:15pm
Rush Kidder's calling is to help people make better, more ethical decisions in every aspect of life. Through his lively, compelling, real-life stories, he illustrates the fact that our toughest choices are not matters of right versus wrong but of right versus right. Using a robust, straightforward framework for discussing ethics, he brings an uncommon clarity to the complexities of ethical decision-making. In books, lectures, seminars, and frequent news commentary, he gives us a common language and a methodology for analyzing situations where two values are in conflict.

Dr. Kidder's seminal 1995 book, How Good People Make Tough Choices, provides practical tools for tough decision-making. President Jimmy Carter described the book as, "a thought-provoking guide to enlightened and progressive personal behavior." Of an earlier book, Shared Values for a Troubled World: Conversations with Men and Women of Conscience, Bill Moyers wrote, "only Rush Kidder would have made this odyssey, and only Rush Kidder could have returned with such a valuable cargo of insights." His new book, Moral Courage was released in January 2005.

Dr. Kidder has worked for over a decade to refine his guidelines for ethical decision making through his Institute for Global Ethics, a non-profit, non-partisan think-tank headquartered in Camden, Maine. Through extensive, around the world research based on interviews, surveys, and focus groups, the institute has recognized that despite different cultures, religions, and political systems, people worldwide tend to agree on five core, shared values: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. The institute has developed ethics training programs for corporations, nonprofits, government entities, and even prisons. Through its offices in the United States, the UK, and Canada, it runs an active character education program for primary and secondary schools.

Prior to founding the Institute, Dr. Kidder was an award-winning senior columnist and foreign correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. He continues to write weekly commentaries and op-ed pieces, some of which have appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Boston Globe.


                 

Chuck Martin
CEO
NFI Research


Monday, May 2, 2005
2:15pm-3:15pm
Business strategist and best-selling author Chuck Martin uses his broad experience and unique research platform to help companies understand and influence the factors impacting their business. Mr. Martin offers invaluable context and pragmatic solutions to the problems leaders at all levels face today, helping them refocus on what matters most: overall vision, customers, strategy and execution.

As the CEO of NFI Research, a firm that analyzes trends in business, management and information technology, Mr. Martin is at the nexus of a global idea exchange and the leader of a research engine that regularly samples the mood and intentions of more than 3,000 senior executives and managers from 1,400 companies in more than 50 countries, including half the Fortune 100.

In his forthcoming book, Tough Management: The 7 Winning Ways to Make Tough Decisions Easier, Deliver the Numbers, and Grow the Business in Good Times and Bad, Mr. Martin focuses on what really matters in today's difficult market (actual results) and what really works in today's demanding workplace (forcing the hard decisions). From years of research on the world's most successful leaders and managers, he has distilled the skills they've used to improve performance-without raising their stress levels. Mr. Martin's last book, Managing for the Short Term, provided indispensable guidance for reconnecting long-term strategic vision with the short-term actions needed to realize that vision.

A former vice president of IBM responsible for a global division, Mr. Martin was also the founding publisher and Chief Operating Officer of Interactive Age, the magazine credited with helping to define the interactive marketplace and the first publication to launch simultaneously in print and on the World Wide Web. Mr. Martin writes a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper column on management and business issues and regularly appears on television business shows.