Speaking

Swift Fox offers fun and useful seminars on how to make your daily work processes better. Most of them are about ways to get great results out of ordinary people doing average, everyday work. Consider Swift Fox to inspire and challenge your people at your next corporate, government or group function.

Dave Hunchak is an energetic process-improvement consultant with twenty five years of direct involvement with management practice and theory. A guy with a lot of interests, Dave's experience ranges from R & D to production to sales; Engineering design to marketing; finance to operations; from manufacturing, construction and nuclear power, to software, music, agriculture and mining; from small technology startups to large international corporations. His passions include educating, entertaining, and discovering better ways to run organizations. Talk to him - he can talk to your group.

Working with recently-unearthed scrolls of ancient management wisdom, you'll learn a full range of spells to destroy motivation, eliminate teamwork, crush fragile spirits, and rid yourself of employees. While these Dark Arts will mostly be familiar, we'll also explore some lesser-known but more powerful Bright Magic that goes far beyond traditional myth-guided attempts to generate motivation, teamwork, and loyalty in your people. Useful to anyone who's struggling to retain employees, improve the performance of their teams, or bridge the gap between management and labour.

An entertaining and insightful look at marketing, using principles from industrial engineering and quality management. In this primer on systems thinking, we'll explore how to truly satisfy your customers, clarify the role of marketing, change how you measure success, and make you wish you weren't above average. Participants should have opposable thumbs and be willing to work for chocolate. This presentation will be useful to those in management, marketing, operations, human resources and anyone with an interest in improving their organization.

"Business is booming, the orders pile up 
Delivery time stretches, we just can't keep up 
We can't find more people, we have to get by, 
How can we do more, what can we try?"

"Budgets are shrinking, staffing is tight 
It just can't go on to work late every night 
Quality slips as we tighten the screws, 
We can't meet our targets, what can we do?"

Whether in health care, sales or construction, 
Ag, education, government or production 
You'll find more capacity, though it's hidden, unseen
If you learn about quality, variation, and Lean.

An industry-neutral introduction to the useful principles of lean.

The business press is like a broken record when it comes to the competitiveness of our organizations - competition is good, competition fuels innovation, competition is natural. While there's a grain of truth in those messages, you'll see that there's a truckload of truth in the fact that cooperation is actually the key to improving the  daily work. We'll review the research on competition and cooperation, and discover why our current competition-based management strategies make it so difficult for us to create and sustain successful teams, supply chains, projects and organizations. Help stamp out competitiveness (so you can become more competitive!)

Improve productivity, quality and employee satisfaction with three simple quality tools from Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Thomas Gordon, a bunch of other Ph.D's, and the Lean body of knowledge. We'll explore practices that help error-proof communication, learn how to define good work, and experience first-hand the surprising work improvements that can come from cleaning up and putting things in their place (5S). While simple, these techniques are NOT easy, and can be used to improve your daily work no matter how fancy your existing systems already are. You'll see things you can do better right away, and will be able to come back to these ideas for years to come.