Business Acumen and Addiction Counselling

Born in family home “Woodeden”, which my father gave to Easter Seal Society to create first Easter Seal Camp. IN high school I worked for two summers as a counsellor at Merrywood Camp. Grew up in Toronto: Crescent School, University of Toronto Schools, Victoria College (BA, Hon. Psych.), Harvard Business School (MBA). Co-founded Crystaplex Plastics, which I grew to be Canada’s largest industrial plastics distributor, manufacturer, and fabricator. Business was volatile in the period 1965 - 1980, and capital was short, so my partner and I developed an exciting business model, which maximized employee participation and co-operation, leading to minimum need for supervision, and maximum service and performance to customers. It worked very well. Around 1980, I switched fields to work in addictions, where I ran treatment centres in Canada and the USA, and wrote Canadian national standards for addiction counsellors. Crystaplex was sold, to the great profit of its long-term employees, who had become shareholders. The 1990s were spent in Germany, where my partner did post-graduate work, and we jointly founded and ran a small corporation.Since 2000 I have been working with some high-tech companies, doing addict counselling, and attempting to age gracefully