Don Hathaway FCMC

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Don Hathaway, raised on a farm in Southwestern Manitoba, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1956 as a means to further his education. He had an aptitude for electronics, and his success in that field created an opportunity to complete high school while serving as a radar technician. In 1962 he won a gold medal in mathematics from the American Society of Actuaries and subsequently a scholarship to study engineering. He left the RCAF in 1966 to become a design engineer` with Sperry Gyroscope. In December, 1969, he became the Assistant Dean of Business at York University, where he earned an MBA on a part-time basis while designing administrative systems for the faculty. In April, 1974, he joined Urwick, Currie Partners, a consultancy, and pursued a career in that field for the next 25 years. Since 1996 he has been an executive, advisor, investor and corporate director. The bulk of his life has been spent executing leadership roles in diverse business, academic and public settings. He has been a senior partner in two major international consultancies, a CEO in several businesses and public-private corporations and a corporate director on multiple boards while accumulating knowledge and experience in leadership, strategy, finance, risk management, marketing and corporate governance. He has been a director on more than three dozen boards, putting him at ease in public, private and not-for-profit (NFP) settings. He currently leads the boards of four technology-based companies as well as being the Chair of two Independent Review Committees, the bodies providing oversight of the investment funds supporting retirement (RRSP) and educational (RESP) plans. He has led several large value for money audits for the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. An engineer and a serial entrepreneur he is often on the board of small or emerging technology companies and he has advised the boards of many of Canada’s largest corporations on organizational, financial and risk issues. He has strong competencies in board operations, the board-management interface and board committee work, particularly audit, risk, compensation and governance. He has direct experience with corporate re-structuring, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory compliance and initial public offerings. He has written two books on corporate governance, published in 2008 and 2010, and he appears frequently as a speaker or panelist on governance, risk and financial issues. When the Canada Foundation for Innovation, a federal Crown corporation, was determining the best way to fund advanced research computing in Canada he was chosen to be the Chair of an Advisory Committee on Governance and Management, due in large part to his proven success in ground breaking settings, e.g. he was tasked with creating the Ontario Centres of Excellence as its inaugural CEO in 2003/04 and he undertook a similar role with the Global Risk Institute in Financial Services in 2011/12. He wrote the report that resulted in the creation of Compute Canada Calcul Canada Inc. in September 2012, the advanced research computing platform that supports research and innovation at universities across Canada. He was the Board Chair of that organisation for its first five years and in 2016 he was honoured as its first Emeritus Chair. Other former roles include service as a Governor of York University and of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, a Chairman of the University of Waterloo Advisory Council, a member of the Advisory Council to the Masters in Business, Entrepreneurship and Technology (MBET) at the University of Waterloo and a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council of the School of Business and Economics at Wilfred Laurier University. He is a Past President and a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of Ontario and a Past President of the Institute of Management Consultants of Canada, for which he received a Fellowship. He is a member of the Institute of Corporate Directors and holds its ICD.D designation. In October, 2015, he was elected as a Fellow of the World Academy of Productivity Science. He studied electrical engineering and then mathematics at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), and then earned an MBA at York University. He has subsequently taken an ongoing stream of specialist studies, including the executive program in economic value analysis (EVA) at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, extensive work in risk management and ongoing research into corporate governance.

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• First-hand information. Entered by Donald Hathaway at registration.