The Beacon Group - Doug Williamson

“The Beacon Group’s program proved to be a transformational experience for our staff, and has created a new, more open culture of creativity and collaboration that has given The Globe and Mail a marked and measurable competitive advantage.”

— Phillip Crawley
Publisher & C.E.O.
The Globe & Mail

“The Beacon Group’s thought provoking curriculum utilizes best practice tools and interactive media for evaluation, assessment and overall learning. It has helped us raise the bar on our calibre of talent.”

— Ernst Lieb
President & C.E.O. (Retired)
Mercedes-Benz USA LLC

“The Beacon Group was able to handle our 360 reviews across 9 offices in a manner that brought significant value to our partners, the firm and ultimately our clients.”

— Judson Whiteside
Partner
Miller Thomson LLP

“The human capital programs provided by The Beacon Group are best in class.”

— Tye Burt
President & C.E.O.
Kinross Gold Corp.

“The Beacon Group acted as a strategic partner and was instrumental in helping us raise the bar on candid dialogue and team performance.”

— Robert Courteau
President
SAP North America

“The Beacon Group approaches very serious and difficult topics in an accessible and insightful way.”

— Eric Siegel
President & C.E.O. (Retired)
Export Development Canada

“We engaged The Beacon Group when we needed to bring two cultures together after our first major international acquisition: the evidence of their success lies in both the subsequent growth in our business and our presence in more than twelve countries on five continents.”

— Rupert Duchesne
President & CEO Aimia
(formerly Groupe
Aeroplan Inc.)

“The Beacon Group excels in facilitating open & candid dialogue that has fostered superior team performance.”

— Mary Ellen Carlyle
Senior Vice President
& General Manager
Dome Productions

“Top-level thought leadership, combined with practical, cost-effective solutions—that’s the real value the Beacon Group team brings to bear on Foresters talent challenges.”

— Suanne Nielsen
Senior Vice President
& Chief Talent Officer
Foresters

“The Beacon Group delivered cutting edge perspectives on many human capital topics that were tailored and customized to our company in a way that we could not have obtained at more generic, cookie-cutter advising shops.”

— Doug Lord
President of United
States Solutions Group (Retired)
Xerox Corp.

“Doug Williamson and his team were of invaluable assistance in helping our organization navigate through a completely new strategic planning process and emerge with a three year plan resoundingly endorsed by our Board. Doug’s global perspectives and ability to drive consensus was an integral part of our success.”

— Don Forgeron
President & CEO
Insurance Bureau of Canada

“The Global HR & Communications senior team engaged the Beacon Group in shepherding us through a unique strategic planning process that involved an outside-in view of our current and future workforce and how this aligns to our business strategy. Thanks to Doug and his team it was a thought provoking process that sharpened our strategic thinking and, in the end, made our strategy stronger.”

— Sylvia Chrominska
Group Head
Global Human Resources
& Communications

“The Beacon Group’s customized and personalized approach fit our needs perfectly. From the initial self-discovery phase all the way to recommending solutions, the work they have done has been consistently world-class. They combine strong analytics with a wealth of real world experience. They are focused, targeted and are experts at taking theoretic concepts and making them real. We look forward to working with Doug and his team as we continue to elevate our business and improve our internal performance.”

— Don Romano
President
Mazda Canada Inc.

“I have had the pleasure of working with The Beacon Group and Doug Williamson for several years across several organizations and have always been impressed with their professionalism, work ethic and customer orientation. Doug's own highly energetic and highly customized approach to the specific needs of our business and our leadership team sets him apart from other strategic facilitators and objective "thought provokers" I have experienced. I am always grateful and impressed by the tangible results his interventions tend to produce.”

— Lloyd A. Perlmutter
Chief Executive Officer
Mexx Canada Inc.

“The big contribution was The Beacon Group challenged our culture and our comfort level. We then arrived at a clear plan of concise deliverables that we needed to execute to move forward on our vision.”

— Tony Ambler
President
Swish Maintenance Limited

“SKF approached The Beacon Group to develop our Talent Management program. The process implemented by Doug Williamson and his team was extremely important for us in determining how to execute the program on a clear, organized and systematic way. This was one of our most important projects that will enable us to ensure our sustainable growth.”

— João Ricciarelli
President
SKF Canada

“Through its sound and strategically practical business knowledge and experience The Beacon Group has and continues to assist SCI in better understanding and enabling our organization to build engaged teams and leadership capability to help make our supply chain clients more competitive.”

—John Ferguson
President & C.E.O.
SCI Group Inc.

R. Douglas Williamson President
Chief Executive Officer

Doug is President & C.E.O. of The Beacon Group, a Toronto based leadership and strategy development firm with clients spanning a diverse cross section of industries and geographies. He leads the company’s professional staff in delivering the highest possible standards of excellence as they advise and support senior leaders and their organizations. The Beacon Group is recognized for creating innovative, customized and impactful programs to fuel organizational transformation and improve leadership effectiveness.

Doug regularly speaks and writes on the importance of Leadership, Strategy and Talent Management. In recent years he has been engaged by such clients as Mercedes-Benz, Xerox, Sony, SAP, Kinross Gold, Novartis, Scotiabank, Mazda and The Globe and Mail.

Throughout his 30 year international business career, Doug has been intimately involved in shaping positive transformational change in individual leaders and their organizations ranging from Fortune 500 to smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses. He has been instrumental in improving the overall performance and effectiveness of countless senior executives, their teams and their organizations, helping them to develop high performance strategies, leaders and cultures.

On a personal level, Doug has lived, worked and studied in Europe, the United States, Mexico, Australia and Canada. Over his varied business career, he has gained valuable experience in a wide variety of demanding and unusual environments. This includes work for clients in the Financial and Legal Services sector, the Pharmaceutical industry and the Retail, Resource and Manufacturing arenas. He has supported and advised privately owned companies as well as organizations in the Not-for-Profit sector and those in the vibrant and emerging new economy sectors of high technology and health care.

Prior to forming The Beacon Group, Doug held several senior executive level positions, over many years, with The Royal Bank of Canada in Canada, Europe and the United States. During this time he led Business Units specializing in Corporate Finance, Project Finance, Advisory Services and Investment Banking in the U.K., the Nordic countries and the Midwestern U.S.A. He has worked on some of the biggest corporate restructurings, reorganizations and refinancings in each of those markets, ranging from complicated transactions for BP Group, Royal Dutch Shell and Norsk Hydro in the British North Sea, to equally challenging industrial restructurings for the Chrysler Group and United Airlines in the USA, Dunlop Tire and Decca Records in the U.K., and Sandvik and Aga in Sweden. Doug also has experience with complex Merger and Acquisition activities in support of companies such as Smurfit-Stone Container in Chicago, Guardian Industries in Detroit and the Carlson group of companies in Minneapolis.

Prior to leaving the Royal Bank in 1995, he led their Canadian Commercial Banking Division responsible for a wide range of activities including Agricultural lending, Franchise banking, Film financing as well as lending in the emerging markets of Life Sciences and other Knowledge-based industries. He also took on the unique challenges of lending in the Small and Medium sized busi- ness sectors. During this period, he was one of several influential industry participants in the Canadian government’s parliamentary hearings into bank lending practices.

Doug served as the first Chief Executive Officer of Canada’s largest Payroll Processing firm from 1992-1994 and was responsible for its reorganization, transformation and recapitalization. The company, and its 400 employees, was then subsequently sold to ADP Canada Inc.

In addition to his experience in the private sector, Doug served in senior executive level positions within the Canadian Government from 1990-1992. This included a period as Deputy Superintendent of Bankruptcy and Special Assistant to the Deputy Minister of Corporate and Commercial Affairs. During this period, Doug was deeply involved in designing legislative changes to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act.

While in Ottawa, he also played an instrumental role in the introduction of legislation to support and encourage the growth and financing of “Knowledge-baes Industries”. He served as a Special Advisor in the Office of the Prime Minister and was a member of the Canadian Government’s 1992 Commission on Economic Prosperity and one of the principal authors of their report - “Financing the New Economy”.

To augment his professional experience, Doug has pursued a lifelong passion for continuing education in a variety of specialized fields ranging from strategic business management to economics, organizational effectiveness and behavioural psychology. He has paused from time to time to study at McGill University in Montreal, The London Business School in London, England and The Tuck School at Dartmouth College in the U.S.A. He now uses his extensive experience repertoire to add value to his work at The Beacon Group.

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