I will be 62 next November. I am a Baby Boomer living in a world my generation created, a world that might not be sustainable. I want to contribute with each and all of you to change this and make our world a happier, self-sustaining world for our grand children, our children and ourselves. This is what this site is about, this is what my life is all about.
Here is my story, who I am and who I am still becoming.
Me at 11 months
My father at 21
I was born a French Canadian on the shores of the majestic Saint-Laurence River, in Matane, a small Gaspesian town of the Province of Quebec. Like all of you, I started my life naked. Like some of you, I started with an edge because Canada was and still is a rich, very developed country.
From Day One, I lived my life through multiple projects. Some I chose; many were imposed on me to make sure I fit into the economic models that shaped our world.
My childhood was not always easy. My father, Lucien, was a self-taught, self-made man who had to leave his home at 13 to earn a living. He was 21 when he married my mother, Odette, then 20. Right away they started their Roman Catholic family and managed to have five Baby Boomers. I was their second.
Through the vagaries of life, economic crises, good and bad project choices, my family was sometimes part of the middle class, sometimes close to the bottom of the food chain. My mother became a working mother many years before it became the norm. But, what we lacked in material comfort, we replaced with ample love.
I left home for good at age 17, when I joined the military to pay for my studies. I got accepted into one of the Royal Military Colleges (RMC). So like my father and like many Millennials now, I started making my own money while I was still a teenager.
Four years later, in 1974, I graduated from the Kingston RMC, first of my Chemical Engineering promotion, with first class honors. God knows how! After graduation I went on to complete a MEng at McGill University. While there, I fell in love and married Charlotte, still my sweetheart and the love of my life today, 38 years later. Two years later, I was sent to Canadian Forces Base Bagotville as an aircraft maintenance officer, serving to repay for my studies.
Graduation Day
Our small family, circa 1984
Charlotte and I, circa 2014
At 23, I was already managing my first work team – 37 people, the vast majority of them older and better paid than me. And it was then that I learned the magic of working with teams and how to do more with my team than I could ever do alone. It was also then that Charlotte and I welcomed our first and only child, Benoît, a Generation X wonder, the future master mind of many software development projects.
In 1984, eight years after my first transfer to Bagotville, I left the military, with another degree in my pocket (MBA) and a few pretty challenging projects under my belt and on my CV.
I began my life as a full time project expert. For close to 40 years now, I have been managing all sizes of projects, as well as sponsoring, training and coaching thousands of others to successfully manage their own. I have managed multi-disciplinary, multi-million dollar projects that involved hundreds of people as well as some that involved just me and my free time.
I have coached hundreds if not thousands of people, through seminars, workshops, formal courses and conferences across the world: in Canada, in the USA, in South America (Brazil), in Europe (France, Great Britain, and Sweden), in North Africa (Morocco) and in Asia (Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia).
In 1995 Charlotte and I co-founded our own project-oriented consulting, coaching and training enterprise (Quali-Scope Enterprises Inc.), and we have dedicated all of our time to its operation since 2002. Today, both Charlotte and I are recognized internationally as organizational agility and Agile-Lean project management experts, giving conferences, training and coaching people to be better project leaders and team members across the globe.
Early in my working life I learned the strength of collaborative work and co-creation and, for that reason, I embraced the Internet and its social networks as soon as they became serious business in the early 1990s.
The importance of the Internet in our lives was imprinted in my mind and heart through the revolutionary writings of Pierre Levy, the philosopher of the cyberspace, in 2001. These writings and constant exposure to the Internet and all the information it was giving me in real time on the state of our planet and our turbulent times, changed my life.
September, 11, 2001. The whole world was in shock. Looking around, all I could see was excessive competition everywhere, global warfare for scarcer resources and for the control of our minds and souls.
My faith in a bright, collaborative future for humanity was dismally low. So, like many others, I started looking for some piece of evidence that would help me regain my emotional balance.
I came across the world model used by Don Beck and the work he did in the middle 1990s , to help Nelson Mandela in his efforts to transition, without bloodshed, the New South Africa from the hatred and violence caused by Apartheid to a country of social equity, tolerance and collaboration.
Our Times
Nelson Mandela
This world model had been initially developed and pioneered by Professor Clare Graves, and later perfected by Mr. Beck. It was called Spiral Dynamics
Spiral Dynamics could not only explain the evolution of humankind through precise stages of development all backed up by empirical data; it was also announcing the next one, confirmed by emerging empirical data on the current evolution of each country, showing those already living in this future stage, namely the Scandinavian countries, and to some extent, my own homeland, the province of Quebec, Canada.
The next stage announced by Spiral Dynamics, already in the making, was a collaborative world to address and ensure survival in the face of scarcer essential resources. And the Internet had suddenly become an important part and a major enabler in the emergence of this new collaborative world.
Having found a new anchor for my faith in the future, I was compelled to become more collaborative in all my endeavors. I had just become a Millennial, in my values and behaviors, at age 47.
Becoming ME
YOU, ME, “WE”
I felt an urgency to act and to work for a sustainable future, not only for our son, his wife Lan and our granddaughter Stephanie, but for all of mankind. I also started to believe again, as many of you do, that I can make a significant contribution by influencing and coaching one human at a time if need be, to do my share building with other Millennial- minded people, a happier and more sustainable world for all of us.
My values, behaviors and practices have evolved rapidly toward a more collaborative, co-creative mindset and with time, I developed and started using and successfully teaching hundreds of people my own style of agile, collaborative, co-creative project management.
I have been changing all my life to be who I am, wish to be and continue to become. At my age, I am not thinking about retirement, at least not for the next 20 years. I can contribute to change the world and I also believe that, together, we can make this world a happier and more sustainable place for all of us. I know I cannot do it alone, but I know I am not alone, not by a long shot.
Today, I wear red shoes for my conferences and other appearances, very red shoes. It is one of my ways of expressing that I am confident that I can make a difference. I do that using the values, principles and tools of agile, collaborative, co-creative project management, weird and very simple things that I learned and integrated through multiple failures and also many good, very significant successes.
And because of what I learned, I can very effectively guide, train and coach all of you to avoid many mistakes and to learn quickly to use winning strategies that took me a lifetime to integrate into my values, behaviors and best practices.
I’ve done it with hundreds of others of all ages who still believe they can make a difference in their life and the lives of others. I will do it with you. We will lead together and change things NOW.
My RED shoes
CLAUDE EMOND
@ClaudeEmond
I offer Coaching, Consulting, Training and Speaking Programs and Services to businesses, communities, teams and individuals. My purpose is to help you achieve, through Agile Change and Project Management, performance levels that will make you and your teams the very best at what you do, as well as contribute to a happier life for all. I believe in YOU, I believe in ME, I believe in WE
© 2014 Claude Emond
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