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After decades as a CEO and years as the Dean of the Richard Ivey School of Business, business students and other aspiring leaders often ask me what inspired me to become a leader. Was there a moment in my career when I decided that I was going to become the CEO? Did I have a boss who encouraged me or a role model that I wanted to follow? Did I have a plan - a clear path forward early on my career?

Bring up the topic of innovation and often the conversation will soon revolve around a cool, new gadget or an exciting start-up company with a revolutionary idea.-- If the talk is about the challenge of innovation, it usually focuses on developing something new, original and radically different. -- As the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity points out in its recent report, innovation has now become synonymous with invention, when invention is just part of the process of innovation.

...You can't control people through policies, procedures and policing. You can only do it through a strong risk management culture and absolute integrity in all leaders. Leadership on Trial, A Manifesto for Leadership Development, p. 39, comment recorded in Montreal. This observation is one of the thousands shared by the 300 C-suite executives, who participated in a series of candid discussions spearheaded by a group of Ivey faculty over the past year. Our basic purpose in bringing together these executives was to find out if better leadership could have made a difference in preventing the financial meltdown that led to the recent global economic crisis.

"Going into business for yourself, becoming an entrepreneur, is the modern-day equivalent of pioneering on the old frontier," according to entrepreneur and author Paula Nelson. I agree. It takes courage, know-how and perseverance to launch a business and make it succeed. Fortunately for our economy, Canada is home to more than 850,000 women entrepreneurs. Their numbers have increased more than 200 percent over the past 20 years. Today, they annually contribute more than $18 billion to our economy, employ more than 570,000 people, and continue to represent one of the fastest growing sectors. And even in these difficult economic times, they are discovering new markets, charting new territory and building new companies.