Zooming In--Vancouver Edition

I live in downtown Vancouver, one of the great places in the world to live, as such, as I develop a client wish list, it's the economic dynamics of my city that draws my attention.

One area I am very keen on working with is our restaurant industry. Particularly some of the bigger players like Earl's, The Cactus Club, Milestones, The Boathouse and The Keg to name a few of those I frequent, but there is no limit as to the restaurants I'd love to have on board.

The are several key reasons.
Restaurants, especially the bigger upper scale chains, have significant impacts on the food chain. The more awareness and practice we can develop around where and how restaurants acquire their food sources, that can be a significant effect on not just their impact, but also creating and instilling deeper awareness in their customer base.

From a Transforming the World, Transforming Vancouver perspective, working closely with restaurants has amazing potential to create a lot of positive ripple affects around the kinds of organizational and cultural practices we need to develop to respond to the greater challenges ahead.

A third being, to keep Vancouver dynamic and a growing economy, restaurants and all manners of our service industries need to expand their role in how this grows and attracts our economic vitality.

It's critical in my mind to develop broader, deeper understanding with all our economic players to gain as much as we can from our potential.

As good as these service entrepreneurs have been, I know from my own observations and napkin assessments there is a lot of under used talent and organizational processes that could be harnessed to further increasing the growth dynamics that are here in the Vancouver area.
Harnessing these in sustainable winning ways is only going to increase the value of Vancouver as a leading city to live.
We as a city need to keeping pushing the envelope as a model city.

I know there are a lot a terrific initiatives here pushing that envelope, but there's a lot left on the table that we can work with.