In May, the University of Waterloo launched a new alumni chapter in Ottawa. As part of the event, alumni from the Ottawa region joined an expert panel to explore happiness.
Moderator:
Salman Jivani (BA ’11, MA ’17), associate vice-president, office of advancement, University of Waterloo
Panelists:
Dr. Linda Duxbury (BSc ’75, MASc ’77, PhD ’83), professor, management, Carleton University
Niraj Bhargava (BASc ’86), founder and CEO, NuEnergy.ai and The New Energy Group
Robert Beamish (BA ’15), senior officer, transformation team, Global Affairs Canada
In May, the University of Waterloo launched a new alumni chapter in Ottawa. As part of the event, alumni from the Ottawa region joined an expert panel to explore happiness.
Moderator:
Salman Jivani (BA ’11, MA ’17), associate vice-president, office of advancement, University of Waterloo
Panelists:
Dr. Linda Duxbury (BSc ’75, MASc ’77, PhD ’83), professor, management, Carleton University
Niraj Bhargava (BASc ’86), founder and CEO, NuEnergy.ai and The New Energy Group
Robert Beamish (BA ’15), senior officer, transformation team, Global Affairs Canada
How do you find happiness? How do you balance competing priorities? How does our community impact our well-being? These are a few of the questions our alumni panel explore in this discussion about happiness. The recording is from May 2024 at the launch event for a new University of Waterloo alumni chapter in Ottawa. Let's listen in.
Salman Jivani:Good evening everyone. Welcome to the University of Waterloo alumni chapter launch event in Ottawa. Our theme tonight is the quest f or happiness, building community in life and at work. It's about exploring what community means and how it can transform our personal and professional lives. We're going to have a great panel discussion for you, and I want to call our panelists up and I can introduce our panelists as we go as well. So first we have , and he is the founder and CEO of NuEnergy. ai and the New Energy Group as well.
Salman Jivani:Niraj is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for innovation, benefiting society, leading in AI governance frameworks and contributing to mental health initiatives as chair of the Innovation Committee of the board at Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. Next we have Dr Linda Duxbury. I was proud of being a two-time alum. Linda is a three-time alum of the University of Waterloo and a full professor and chancellor's professor at Carleton University, renowned for extensive research on work-family conflict change management and employee well-being, notably focusing on the impact of COVID-19 on Canadian employees. And third, we have Robert Beamish, who is a Senior Officer at Global Affairs Canada. Robert is dedicated to economic inclusion and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples worldwide, leveraging his expertise in economics and business to drive culture change and equity and diversity and inclusion within Canada's foreign ministry. So, without further ado, I'm going to get seated over there and we're going to jump through these questions. Okay, this first question is for all of you. We'll with Niraj. How do you find purpose and happiness in your work?
Niraj Bhargava:Well, thanks everybody for having me here. It's a delight to see fellow alumni and you know I reflect back because I graduated in the 80s in system design engineering and back in that day I was really having a lot of fun in my life, you know. So I remember the bomb shelter, I remember being at dawn in Village One, I remember engineering society events and scavenger hunts and all sorts of fun. But I also was an editor of the Iron Warrior newspaper and it gave me a chance to reflect back then about and I had some really cool co-op terms. But I was trying to figure out, you know, am I going to work to live or live to work? And I remember that was a dilemma I had back then and you know I scratched my head a lot about it and I wrote an article on that and a few other topics, and what I learned for myself was that that's the wrong question.
Niraj Bhargava:It's all life. So why can't we just figure out how to make your life consistent with what matters to you? So instead of siloing work and life, I put it together. I looked for things in my work. That was what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be. So that allowed me to not you know kind of regret. The nine to five. It was like this is life and so, yeah, I work extra hours sometimes. Other times I focus more on vacations and holidays and time with family. But that's a big part of how I sort of found it, that we don't have to separate them.
Salman Jivani:That's great. Thank you, Linda same question.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:I too am delighted to be here. Apparently, did not get the memo about the colour coordination, but actually we didn't get a memo either. We just happened to do it, and if you remember the bomb shelter, you weren't having enough fun.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:That's all that is all I have to say. So I study employee well-being, work-life balance, health, et cetera. And happiness at work. For me, happiness, what makes me happy might not make you happy.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:Okay, happiness at work is a very personal thing. It depends on fit, and fit by that I mean we all have things we value, we all have things that we enjoy, we all have things that make us go wow, and we all have things that we'd rather stick needles in our eyes than do. What you've got to do is find a job that has more of the one thing and less of the other. So I'm an academic, I'm a prof, and for some of you that would be not the most attractive job. Okay, and I'm not saying all of my job is wonderful, but I love parts of my job. If I didn't, I would have retired by now like I really love it. And what do I love? I love my phd students. I love my grad students, not a hundred percent of the time, but most of the time.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:Okay, I love teaching. I'm a performer, I love when the light goes on and I say something and they go geez, I never thought of that. I don't like committee work. I don't really like marking, and so what I do is I try to reduce my time in those things and spend the time in the things I like, and I also like the fact that my job is extremely flexible and it allows me to do that. So for me, I have the dream job, but my job might not be your dream job. The trick for you is to figure out what are your values. You know we already heard Neeraj say that, and that's what you go for. You don't become me and you don't become somebody else.
Salman Jivani:So maximizing love. Thank you, I appreciate that, Rob. Same question.
Robert Beamish:Same question. Hello everyone, I want to reintroduce myself. My name is Robert Beamish, but my name is also Brown Bear or Ozawa Makwa, and this is my spirit name that was given to me and that this enables and informs a lot of how I show up. So my father is Algonquin Métis and my mother immigrated to Canada from Jamaica and she's indigenous Jamaican and African Jamaican. So these are parts of my identity that I operate through and this affects how I show up to work and how I show up in life.
Robert Beamish:And I think I'm very fortunate early on to have found something that I know that lights my fire every day, and so it was.
Robert Beamish:If I can enable others to realize their full potential in whatever I'm doing, I'm going to be jazzed, I'm going to love it, and so, whatever I've done, I have tried to find that, and if it wasn't in the job description of the job title, I started volunteering, I started doing something else, start hanging out with the folks in the hallway and see what they're up to and help them with something.
Robert Beamish:But if I could find a way to integrate that, no matter what I was doing, I'd be able to find happiness in that, because it decentered myself and it allowed me to show up not only with my own values, but with my cultural values, also informed, to inform the work and how I could show up. So I've been very fortunate, and sometimes it's a bit of a stretch to be like, okay, this, you know, this next report is really enabling others to realize their full potential, but other times it's been really easy, and so that's been something that I've always kind of has been my guiding value of like. Am I being true to myself in this? And if I'm not, how do I raise that up?
Salman Jivani:That's a great answer. So you're being intentional, essentially. That's great. This next question, , this one's for you. You're involved in AI and system design engineering fields that are transforming how we live and work. How do you envision AI shaping our communities in the future.
Niraj Bhargava:Well, I'm happy to talk about AI. I could talk about it for a while, but you know. Let me go back. I told the story about being an Iron Warrior editor and one of my editorials you can look it up in 1984, I wrote one called Automation and it was a question about why are we automating? Are we going to put us all out of work? That was in 84, 85, as we were writing that, and I remember what the punchline of that article was why don't we all have a four-day work week? If we just use technology and we'll be better and better and have more time for fun and all those things.
Niraj Bhargava:So I just set that as a backdrop, because technology has been part of my career all the way along and probably for everybody here in Waterloo is obviously very, very strong in technology and these waves are happening, but clearly with AI, it's not just another wave. This is truly transformational. You know, technology waves have come and gone and they will continue to, but this case we actually have technology learning faster than us and so there's a real, significant change happening and we all know this and we can debate whether this is the best opportunity in the world or the biggest risk of the world, and so I think the truth is it's both, and so I think the truth is it's both, and so we have this transformation happening and it's happening to every single one of our jobs. So we have a choice of how to handle this transformation with AI, and we all know this, and I know there's a lot of people in the room that are smarter than me on AI and we're all talking about it. It's a really, really important topic, but I really do believe that there's an opportunity to seize that change. The genie's out of the bottle. We all know that AI is here, you know, just like calculators were back in the wind and all we can use this tool and the technology for so much good, so much opportunity in health care and climate change and poverty and education just huge amounts of opportunities.
Niraj Bhargava:But there's real risks and one of the concerns and I was talking to Vivek earlier, president Goel, about how Canada is doing on this topic and one of the things you see in the headlines is that there's a lot of fear and a lot of us are fearful of AI, and I would turn that around and say, when we govern AI, which our company, new Energy AI, does you need to ask those questions? Don't pretend they don't exist. Let's ask those hard questions and then let's build trust in AI by making sure that we get good answers on the privacy issues, on the ethical issues, on the bias issues, on the existential issues, because there really is a transformational opportunity and the risks are real. But if we ask the questions and look for transparent answers, we can seize that opportunity. So I think AI is an opportunity to build more happiness, have better health care, deal with these major existential issues the negative ones of climate change and peace and all. But let's not pretend the risks aren't there. Let's do something about it.
Salman Jivani:I appreciate the optimism. That's great, Linda. The pandemic has changed the way we work, often blurring the lines between office and home. Can you share what trends you've seen in your research on the impact of these blurred lines on individual well-being?
Dr. Linda Duxbury:So thank you. This is the depressing round of questions. The first round was oh, happiness, and now we're getting into reality. How many of you came out of the pandemic going, god, I'm in a good place now. This was just the best three years of my life. Let's do it again. You know this is, if you go.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:If you said yes, it was, you're in a minority. Okay, I've got data on over 50,000 Canadians. We asked them coming out of the pandemic how do you feel? So the number one thing was frustrated. The second was angry. There was no positive, like people weren't going. Yeah, wow, happiness was kind of way down there.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:Mental health problems, stress problems, anxiety problems, health problems, stress problems, anxiety problems. And the problem is is the change isn't stopping. Ai is one piece of the change. We've got Israel, we've got Palestine, we've got Ukraine, we've got I could keep going, but that would defeat a talk on the quest for happiness.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:But the reality is what happened happened was people went home. A lot of people had never had the experience of working from home. They didn't have a home office. Their office was anywhere I would talk to people who would, because we were doing a lot of interviews the only place they could get away from their family, was in the bathroom and they would take calls, zoom calls, of all things. How many of you did it? You know some of you Say, yeah, see, some of you did it.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:It was extremely challenging and it was more challenging, you know, we talk a lot about working mothers and mothers who had to balance it, but actually people who lived alone had real challenges too, because they lived alone. So we're coming, you know, and the new normal how many of you is? That's like chalk on you know, chalk on a blackboard. It's like we're not at a new normal and we have to realize that we've got to look after ourselves and do some stuff for us to get back into some kind of routine, because our routines are gone, our routines, you know, we had working lives before and now we have to really think about what we want for. So it gives us an opportunity to get back in a different way probably than before, a new form of happiness.
Salman Jivani:I'll say I than ever before. That's a positive thing, right.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:Yes.
Salman Jivani:Rob, you've prioritized following your passions throughout your career. Walk me through what it looks like to center passion and impact through your professional development.
Robert Beamish:That's a good question. I appreciate that, salman. I think with any decision there's always tradeoffs. So in centering passion and impact, it's first off what's the kind of impact you want to have? What are your passions? I'm very passionate about sleeping, but I can't, sadly, follow that. But you know, finding things that are going to jazz me up at work with what I can do and bring my skills to them where I feel fulfilled, finding that out is like a really important piece there. So there's a lot of self-reflection and introspection and that ongoing journey with friends, with loved ones, with therapists and professionals to find out what my passions are and being open to relearning that and growing with what that looks like in different stages.
Robert Beamish:And then a really real piece was when I started working for the public service and I was on a casual contract. I work at Global Affairs and I had another casual contract presented for me from Global Affairs for a team that I was really excited about, I was really passionate about, and I had an indeterminate contract offered from the bank that I used to work at prior and I knew that field. I was in it before. It was a promotion, it was downtown Toronto, it was going to be great and it was like there was like 40, 50% salary difference and I knew that I was like, okay, this is a really, this is a really tangible moment where I have to make a decision of like, am I prioritizing the impact that I want to have or my own financial gain? And it took me a while. I still have that same banker's contact information just in case. But I decided to stay with the public service and it's something that I think about and I think when I'm having a rough day or you get a last-minute tasking, it comes out and I feel like I should have made that other call. But then at the end of the day, I know that I'm proud of that decision and it's looked like having to make and affirm, remake that decision, reaffirm that decision in so many other areas of life.
Robert Beamish:Of moving to Ottawa, I didn't see myself moving to Ottawa. I had the opportunity to live in so many places and I didn't think Ottawa was going to be on the list. But making that decision where it was, hey, this is a great opportunity. And then, since moving here, I've come to love this city. Oh, my gosh. And look at all you beautiful people here, the opportunity to get to know folks here that have also chosen to make the city home, or that grew up here, that are choosing to make the best of it. I think that these kinds of intentional choices, making them in an informed way where there's a trade-off, you trade something off. It's not Toronto, it's not Montreal, but it is something else. Ottawa has its own thing going and you have to find that the public service isn't the financial sector and it's not those paychecks, but it does offer something else. And so being able to come to terms and be okay with that at the end of the day.,
Salman Jivani:you what what what what personal practices do you put in place to build a supportive community at home and at work, and what advice do you have for others struggling with balance?
Dr. Linda Duxbury:So unfortunately, my husband's here tonight. That brings a little honesty factor in what I do. So, in terms of balance, that's what I study and we know there's two types of people in the world. There's what we call segmenters. They have work and life and they make every effort to separate them. So work is work, life is life. When I'm working, I'm working. When I'm having a life, I'm having a life. And then we have integrators who they take calls constantly at dinner because, hey, you know I'm still with you. No, you're not. So I'm a segmenter. I try really hard at. You know, when my, when our daughter was growing up, no phones, no phones at the dinner table, that's it. No emails at the dinner table. I know you guys are a lot of you are techie people but quite honestly it's not good for you.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:Technology makes it possible to be in touch and work 24-7. Depending on who your organization is, you might be doing just that. So you know, for me how I balance is. We just got back from three weeks in Japan. When I work, I put an e-mail message on. I say I'm not answering my e-mails and I don't. Okay. But when I'm working, I might work 50, 60, 70. Keep nodding, john. Yeah, when I'm working, I'm working. When I'm not working, no, I'm not working, and for me, that's the secret to my mental health.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:And so what I really want you to all ask yourself is how many of you on your deathbed are going to go. Dear Lord, don't take me now. I have emails in my in-box and I have a WhatsApp. I want to answer Like if that's your attitude, your deathbed may come earlier than you think. What is important in terms of balance is priorities. It can be about work, it can be about life, it can be about family, but if it's always about work, then really you have to think about your priorities, because that's not good for you. It's really not good for you. Was that okay, John??.
Salman Jivani:I'm not going to repeat. Actually, I will repeat what your husband said You're a workaholic, so that's not good for me.
Salman Jivani:I'm glad you have balance. Rob, can you share the role of cultural community in your life and work, and what challenges have you faced and how have you overcome them to foster this ?
Robert Beamish:I know the questions, but they still hit every time I hear it and it's just, it gets me every time there are challenges. No matter what you choose, right, you get the job. You don't get the job, you're going to face challenges. You're navigating how to be unemployed and look for a job, and then you're navigating adapting to a new job and then, whatever you choose, you're going to have challenges that come with it. And so, choosing the types of challenges that you want and opting into those challenges and knowing what they come with, I think that's been the big piece.
Robert Beamish:So for me, I have chosen to make community building, community integration, community revitalization one of the big challenges that I integrate into my work. So when I was a student at Waterloo, I was vice president of the Indigenous Students Association and now at Global Affairs, I'm co-chair of our Indigenous Employees Network, and so this community building and creating a space for individuals to have a sense of community, have a sense of belonging, has been huge, and that's been something that I've always been passionate about and found that community has seen me in those places, beyond seeing me for my skills or my ability to you know, hit a performance review, to see me for other aspects, for the silly younger brother that sometimes shows up late, usually shows up late to most events and being able to see me. Beyond these things, that are pieces of who I am and my identity. And so there becomes this integration of identity and who I am, that my identity doesn't have to be separate from who I am at work and who I am, that my identity doesn't have to be separate from who I am at work. And so community building and advocating for integration, for anti-racism, for equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility and reconciliation has become a huge part of what drives me and gives me passion. But it also ties into that other piece of enabling other people to realize their potential, to build up others and to remove barriers.
Robert Beamish:So some of those challenges are really setting boundaries and width work, because when identity becomes on the forefront, I'm showing up.
Robert Beamish:And if I walk down the hall, my identity as an, as a, an Afro-Indigenous person, as a Jamaican Métis, is front and center and somebody could just pop in and start talking to me, questions Like I am on the way to the washroom. This is not the time, but my identity. It feels like I can't draw that boundary and so sometimes of realizing where I need to draw boundaries with work of like this isn't actually this is something that you don't have access to. This is part of my own lived experience, of my own story, and that isn't made available to you because I have a role in an employee network that my story and my family story isn't just accessible all the time, and when it is accessible I can set those terms, and so that's been a challenge that I've had to navigate, but that's a challenge that I'm also choosing to navigate and opting in to navigate in a conscious way. So it's been difficult, but it's a difficulty that I enjoy. There's always going to be challenges.
Salman Jivani:I have one more question, and it's going to be for all of you, but before that I just want to say I appreciate how raw and real this conversation has been so far, and so we've learned through this conversation the impact of community on our overall well-being and happiness. Can you share some final thoughts or advice for the audience in strengthening their communities and well-being, perhaps rooted in what you're doing in your own life? And, Niraj, we'll start with you, thank you.
Niraj Bhargava:You know there's so many great themes in this conversation. You know things that matter a lot to us family. You know I can talk about spirituality. You know other areas, but you asked about community. You know I also can watch the news and get really depressed about the world and so many big problems and all. But we do have a strong community. Hats off to Waterloo for creating an alumni chapter.
Niraj Bhargava:We're a community, there's a lot of community, and what I find is that we can't individually solve the world's problems, but we all can make a difference and if each of us finds something to have impact, we will make the world a better place and things will be better on many, many fronts. You know I had some lived experience with mental health in my friends and family and I had a wake up call saying, wow, there is some challenges here. So I thought what volunteer work can I do in the community? And I've been on the board of the Royal Ottawa for eight years and I find that really, really satisfying to contribute as best I can to a great research institution there. So I think if we all pick something that we can contribute, we can't solve big problems alone. We need community. We all can make a difference, individually and collectively, a lot will happen.
Salman Jivani:I appreciate that. So one step at a time. Linda, same question.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:So I'm going to take a more individual approach to this answer. No one's going to give you balance, no one's going to give you happiness, no one's going to come up to you and go hey, you have to take responsibility for you. You hate your job, start looking for another job. You hate your partner. Maybe you know I'm just saying, but if you keep focusing, if we focus on what's wrong, then we see what's wrong. Sometimes the real trick is to stop the rumination, stop the cycle of and there's this and there's this, and there's this and there's this, and replace it with yeah, but I have a wonderful husband, I have a great job, I love this, I love that. So try to replace the negative thoughts with the positive. It sounds silly, it sounds little, but it actually makes a huge difference. We teach a thing called self-fulfilling prophecy and you tend to become what you think you are. So start thinking about what you want to be and remember you have to make the effort to do it. Nobody else is going to give it to you.
Salman Jivani:Okay, I love that. This is a reframing of the mindset. That's great. And, Rob, same question for you.
Robert Beamish:I love that. I'm taking that with me. I'm taking that with me, linda. I think for me it's going back to realizing that we're relational. We're relational at the core of it. Everything we do is relational.
Robert Beamish:We're relational with land, we're relational with people, we're relational with animals, and prioritizing and cultivating those relationships in a holistic and integrated way, and cultivating those relationships in a holistic and integrated way, in a way that's with our minds.
Robert Beamish:We know how to do it with our minds, but what about with our bodies, our spirits, our emotions, our hearts integrated into that? And when you have an alignment of that and your heart isn't just always compartmentalized till that one day a week when you get to journal, or the evening before you go to bed to do your reading, if you can have that integrated and you can show up with your heart, then you can connect with people and you can show up and have yourself be seen. It takes courage to do so. The vulnerability to be seen and to be who you truly are means you could be rejected for who you truly are, which sucks as well, but folks know who've done that. Then you also give yourself the opportunity to be accepted for who you really are as well and to have your whole self integrated in both your relationships with yourself, with land, with people, and it just allows for a much fuller way of being.
Salman Jivani:That's great. I think that's a great segue to calling on the audience. We're going to move to our Q&A portion of the discussion. So if you have a question for our panelists, please raise your hand and a volunteer with a microphone is going to head over to you, and I see a bunch of hands. We have one in the back there and then we'll get to you right next.
Audience member:Hi guys, thank you very much. I'm one of those Ottawa alumni who got a job in the Federal Public Service. I'm not looking back, even though sometimes I do. There's this no matter where I've been in the public service. There's this lately in the last 15 years, 10 years, 10 years. There's this lately in the last 15 years, 10 years, 10 years. There's been this term called change management.
Audience member:Yeah it's worth a laugh. So for global affairs, for your own sectors, how would you and how do you recommend dealing with change in your quest for happiness? And that's a question for all three of you.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:So I'll start on this one, because I don't know if you know, but I teach the MBA and PhD in change and I have 12 PhD students who are working in the area of change. What I do know is that organizations love to talk change more than they like to do change, and change is not about talking about change, it's about doing change. So we know if you, as an organization, are serious about change, if you go beyond talking and senior leadership spends their time on it. They don't delegate it downward and they do post-mortem analysis and look at what went wrong so it doesn't go wrong again. And so time and energy and money. So if we talk change but we don't fund it, we don't give people time to learn how to do things differently. We don't reward different, we get same.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:And so when I talk about where we are right now, we're in a period of tremendous disruption, when change is no longer optional because it's coming from external sources and it's not like, well, I'm going to sit this one out. And so the longer it takes you to realize that this one is not optional and it is going to require different, the harder it's going to be for you to stay viable. So the public service likes to talk change, but now they have to do change, and that will be very different. Universities we were talking about that. We also like to talk about it more than we like to do it.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:Everybody likes to talk about it, even people like to talk about it, but we're at the point where life is like an elastic band it's going to snap and break if we don't change soon. So what I would say, though, is look after yourself during change. That's coming back to the theme I'm always saying there's turbulence around you, but center yourself. Make sure you know where you are in it and what you can contribute, and what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do. I hope that helps.
Robert Beamish:I'll give a public service perspective and I'm glad I didn't go first because that would have oh my goodness. So I work on a change management team at Global Affairs, so I feel like that would have been.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:I worked with Global Affairs on change management a decade ago.
Robert Beamish:Okay, I might be playing with the scraps from that still. And so a big piece that I personally am reckoning with is we're trying to do culture change and folks that know GAC or have heard of GAC it's not necessarily people don't go there for the culture, they go for a file, they go to work on international issues and they stay despite the culture. So how do we shift that? How do we shift that narrative? And so I've really been trying to take what I said before of having this integration of head, heart, mind, body, spirit, emotions and integrate that into an actual strategy. But it just becomes really difficult to to integrate that kind of language. To have love in an engagement strategy for a department is just it's, it's weird and it feels uncomfortable.
Robert Beamish:And I'm in the place right now where it's like all right. Well, a lot of folks are not feeling comfortable in our current culture. So we're going to have to deal with the discomfort of having love in our engagement strategy. That's going to be the discomfort we're going to opt for, as opposed to this other discomfort that everybody else has been feeling. So how do we actually do that? Is there's going to be change, but also realizing some folks have different kind of um adaptability. Their, their preference for change is different. I love change um I love that in the.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:one in one in five are dispositionally resistant to change.
Robert Beamish:Yeah.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:Dispositionally unable to change. That means a significant number of you in this room, would you know, sorry to interrupt. But that's a reality and we don't account for that in our change management plan.
Robert Beamish:And I think that's exactly it of how do we create, and then you integrate, a lens of like DEI, anti-racism accessibility, how do we do a plan that has changed, that plays to the folks that have this disposition, not to the ones that are like, okay, change, woohoo, I'm on board, not playing to them. We play to the folks who have the most barriers, and so if we can lift up the folks with the most barriers, then everybody else is going to get lifted in this initiative as well. So I think that that's how I'm trying to approach it.
Niraj Bhargava:I'll add a comment, maybe just from a private sector point of view, because I love change as well. But I've learned that back to the diversity comment, that we need to also have results, we need to execute, we need to focus. So you don. We need to also have results, we need to execute, we need to focus. So you don't want to change for the change's sake. And so when you look around yourselves and say, okay, maybe I'm not one of those frontier change people, but I'm one who's focused on execution and all that diversity is really strong because we need to follow through on the change as well. So different people bring different strengths to the change agenda and you know, and I think we have to respect that, because that all can add together to get the change done, not just to talk about it.
Salman Jivani:I think you all agree Less talk, more do, for the most part.
Dr. Linda Duxbury:And listen. So don't just if you're somebody in a management position, don't change without consultation, don't change without listening, because you're probably not all-knowing. Just putting that up there, okay.
Salman Jivani:Love that. Thank you. I saw a hand on the right side of the room. There it is.
Audience member:Thank you. My name is Bob Huggins. I'm a proud Artsy out of the University of Waterloo 1981.
Salman Jivani:Artsies can we get?
Robert Beamish:Arts, Arts, Arts, Arts, Arts.
Audience member:I'm also one of the fortunate Canadians who have sold the technology business to Google.
Salman Jivani:Okay, alright.
Audience member:The genesis of that idea was in the Dana Porter Library. Too many hours spent, so here's a title story. I wrote a LinkedIn post and it was all about being a young man and watching in horror as a neighborhood bully took a magnifying glass to some ants, burned them up as they were doing their business, and then I found out that the lens the actual lens, the recreational lens was created by a UK inventor back in 1250. And, of course, anyone who's wearing glasses in here today, well, I appreciate the invention that was the eyeglass, not to mention the folks that put up the Hubble and all of the people that use lenses today. So my question is, more to Niraj, on the AI front are we going to make this life a better place with AI or are we going to burn ants?
Niraj Bhargava:You know I sort of said it earlier but I am a big believer that the long term is a series of short terms, and so there are some real risks as well as huge opportunities. But we need to take it one step at a time and seize the opportunity, but deal with the risks. And again, let's not pretend the risks don't exist. There's bias, there's privacy issues, there's ethical issues, and we need to address them now. So back to the do as opposed to talk about it. We've got to get practical and seize AI, but deal with those questions, and then I don't think we'll have that existential issue.
Salman Jivani:Great. Thank you, Niraj, and I just got the indicator from the back that we are at time. I want to thank our amazing panelists for sharing their experiences and insights. Let's give them a round of applause. We've explored some big questions about community technology and the quest for happiness. I hope tonight's discussion has inspired you to think about your role in building a more connected and inclusive world. Let's keep this momentum going and create communities that bring out the best in everyone.
Jennifer Ferguson:You’ve been listening to a University of Waterloo alumni podcast. Interested in more stories about happiness? Check out Waterloo Magazine – uwaterloo. ca/magazine. And if you're not in the Ottawa area but you'd still like to connect with other Waterloo alumni, find a chapter near you. Go to uwaterloo. ca/ alumni.