As an independent management consultant for over 20 years from 2001 through 2023, Michael focused on helping his clients and communities effect transition and transformation through:
In 2003 a core group of alumni of the Stevenson & Kellogg evolution of firms (which had sold itself into KMPG Canada in 1993) decided to leverage their complementary skills, mutual respect, and alumni network — and established a virtual consulting firm doing business as Stevenson Kellogg. The business model of the firm was based on independent Partners who owned the operations of the firm, and tiers of associated independent consultants available to contribute to proposals and conduct engagements.
Michael joined the formative core group as a Partner and a key member of the leadership team. Two years later, reflecting natural synergies of client base and core practice areas, Stevenson Kellogg acquired the consulting operations of Phoenix Logistics.
Michael led the Stevenson Kellogg practices in mobilization and change management, and health care. During the peak years of Stevenson Kellogg, Michael directed several of its largest engagements. His core service offerings helped client organizations improve effectiveness through:
As a Partner with Stevenson Kellogg, Michael maintained active roles in business development, practice development and maintaining relationships with associate consultants, and also served in key firm leadership roles:
In the fall of 2000, to the simultaneous amazement and admiration of his network of consulting colleagues, Michael seized the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and daunting challenge of taking full time responsibility for his household and for coaching his children aged 2, 5 and 9 at the time. With clear enthusiasm for this transition strategy, his children and spouse cheerfully contributed to the development of this arrangement by presenting a continuous stream of opportunities for his attention and oversight.
By the time child 3.0 was successfully installed into full time education, with family satisfaction ratings reaching new heights, Michael was able to create a business arrangement that allowed him to time-shift his career activities and maintain his ongoing involvement in after-school support and development.
For the provincial organization of Bereaved Families of Ontario (BFO), Michael was accountable for administrative oversight and for facilitating the health, development and coordinated mission of local affiliate chapters — while also equally accountable for the program offerings and overall administration of the Toronto affiliate.
MIchael oversaw fundraising activity for both organizations, including coordinating significant proposals and cultivating key donors, and contributed to regular communications vehicles for stakeholders in Toronto and province-wide. He also supported development and recognition of bereaved and professional volunteers for the Toronto affiliate.
He also sustained relationships with collaborating organizations including health providers, hospices and funeral directors in Toronto, complementary social agencies in Toronto and at the provincial level, the Bereavement Ontario Network, and national-level bereavement support initiatives and organizations.
His notable accomplishments in these joint and occasionally conflicting roles include:
Michael's success in leading a challenging, multi-firm project generated interest in his capabilities from one of those collaborating firms — EDS — developing a global capability for management consulting services. Michael joined the nascent Canadian leadership team of EDS Management Consulting Services along with new and former colleagues to build that capability. Soon after joining EDS MCS he was instrumental in securing the largest enterprise transformation project tendered in Korea at the time.
With the continued expansion of consulting capability, EDS acquired ATKearney and transitioned its consultants into the acquired firm early in 1995. Michael joined the leadership team of ATKearney Canada, where he joined with global network of consultants leading enterprise transformation, contributing to thought leadership in organizational social systems and the leverage of social capital.
In his consulting opportunities, Michael focused on helping transform client organizations through:
In addition to his responsibility for client work and relationships, Michael's firm leadership responsibilities included:
Michael joined Thorne Stevenson & Kellogg for a summer placement and introduced the firm's highly successful and widely reputed Compensation Consulting practice to the strategic benefits of computer tabulation and statistical analysis. He completed his fourth year undergraduate thesis in collaboration with the firm while performing ongoing analytical support, and then joined the Informatics practice following graduation.
His early work in the Informatics practice focused on facilitating the "second wave" of automation in many organizations, and particularly in the hospitals replacing back office financial systems with early integrated systems expanding to add CPI/ADT and specialized areas of materials management to the financial core.
The acquisitions by Stevenson & Kellogg of the Canadian consulting operations of Ernst & Whinney (in 1986) and Peat Marwick (in 1989) created additional opportunities for Michael. His early strategy work focused on information technology and business process reengineering, then broadened to embrace organizational change management which has become Michael's principal area of service to clients.
Overall, while with Stevenson & Kellogg Michael helped clients improve effectiveness through:
Michael also assumed key internal responsibilities of benefit to the firm and its practices:
Willison Lawn Mower was a family business effecting warranty repair for all major brands of gas, electric and manual lawn mowers sold by department and hardware stores in the Greater Toronto Area. Michael happened upon the opportunity to be their summer driver after being rejected for a position as a technical writer for an international consulting firm, on the basis of being "overqualified."
With deliveries spanning shops, malls and households in the area north of Lake Ontario from Oakville through Brampton, Vaughan, York Region and Pickering, Michael quickly acquired a mental map of the network of optimal travel routes. He also established a manual algorithm for route planning that enabled twice the deliveries in half of the historical time.
Working with Professor Jaap H DeLeeuw, Director of the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS), Michael supported the development of 16-bit microprocessor applications, including creating and programming a two-pass assembler, initially for the innovative TI 9900 processor (1978) and subsequently for the new Intel 8086 microprocessor (1979) — that later found itself in the core architecture of the IBM PC.
An example project was building and optimizing a real-time process to perform Runge-Kutta integration on an incoming digital instrumentation stream, working within the sampling interval. This process supported real-time calculation of the Dynamic Response Index, an indication of the cumulative compressive force damage to a human spine (for example, for a farmer on a tractor, the driver of a speedboat, or a pilot exposed to extreme turbulence).
Thesis: A Data Base System for Compensation Administration — completed under the joint supervision of Professor Samuel H Cohn of the Department of Industrial Engineering, and Mr Donald L King, Vice-President of Thorne Stevenson & Kellogg.
Academic and extracurricular achievements:
Representative recent courses: