Dr. Nora Gold

Jewish Fiction .net

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief

Marrow, Fields of Exile, The Dead Man

Book Author

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

Writer In Residence

Scholar in Residence 

McMaster University

Associate Professor

Dr. Nora Gold is an editor, former professor, and the author of three books of fiction. The first, Marrow and Other Stories, won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and was praised by Alice Munro. Fields of Exile won the 2015 Canadian Jewish Literary Award and praise from both Cynthia Ozick and Irwin Cotler. Gold’s most recent book, The Dead Man, received glowing reviews, including from the Los Angeles Review of Books, and won a Canada Council translation grant, resulting in The Dead Man being published in Hebrew. An excerpt of this novel was also translated into Hungarian and appeared in a prominent literary journal in Hungary. 

Gold, at one time a social worker and a tenured social work professor, was also, for six years, the Writer-in-Residence at the Centre for Women’s Studies at OISE/University of Toronto. In addition, she is the founder and editor-in-chief of Jewish Fiction .net (www.jewishfiction.net), a prestigious online literary journal that publishes first-rate Jewish-themed fiction from around the world, either written in English or translated into English from 18 languages. To date, Jewish Fiction .net has published 500 works of fiction that were never before published in English, including fiction by eminent authors like Elie Wiesel. Jewish Fiction .net has readers in 140 countries. For more details about Dr. Gold, visit www.noragold.com.

Dr. Gold posts daily on LinkedIn. Join her 33,000 followers to read her thoughtful, well-informed infographic-based posts.

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The Ikigai Guy

VLURU LLC

We at VLURU, Encourage, Empower and Enable people to be all they were meant to be in their lives, their leadership, and their companies.

President and Chief Encouragement Officer

Northwestern Mutual

Developed and manage the Continuous Learning & Improvement (CL&I) Lean Transformation and practice development implementation program across the entire NM corporate chain.  Identify needs, value stream opportunities, secure stakeholder engagement to roll out and manage a robust continuous improvement strategy touching primary areas of company. Manage integration of programs with technology, strategy, innovation and customer experience departments.
• Created and led CL&I program from concept to pilot team to fully operational program inside NM, improving business operations unit, delivering 28% more in volume of customers served with 35% less staffing, while improving service quality ratings by 10%
• Delivered $20M in improvements for $2M investment from first two years of program with second phase of program resulting in double digit savings across company
• Spearheaded long-term roll-out of CL&I Lean Transformation Plan Development, accountable for team development, leadership buy-in and execution to roll out to entire organization. Developed business system and executed improvements in operations, IT and product development
• Created Customer Experience (CX) capability and practice to support the CLI practice, increasing customer service levels and satisfaction scores across organizational lines

Director of Transformation:  Innovation

As Director of IT Innovation for Service Management Strategy, led creation of Information Technology Operation and Infrastructure (ITOI) Matrix Organization. Directed design, process development and implementation strategy. Provided ongoing leadership for Enterprise Service Management strategy, support, process, infrastructure and  governance
• Directed priorities, spend and ITOI management team guidance of $40M ITOI Fixed and Flex budgets, including prioritization and execution
• Led two-year productivity effort that identified opportunities for improvement, resulting in a 37% reduction in support costs while raising Service Level Agreement adherence (92% to 98%)
• Successfully led ITOI in creating and executing the project reorganization of ITOI leadership and organizations. Designed and managed ongoing success metrics for evaluation of the strategy and execution of the organizational realignment. The realignment resulted in increased support capability as demonstrated by a 22% reduction in Priority 1 support incidents and a 37% reduction in project delivery time and cost. Change related incidents dropped by 11%
• Led major innovations in Enterprise Security resulting in three successive years of increased support volume and services delivery (avg. 20% each year) while reducing staffing costs and improving quality. Audit showed quality accuracy increased from 60% to 98.2% in first year
• Held prior roles of Deputy Director, then Assistant Director, leading development of a Continuous Improvement pilot in Enterprise Solutions, adopted into a corporate-wide program

Director Of IT Innovation

RF Technologies

Recruited to privately-owned maker of medical Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Radio Frequency Tracking System (RFTS) as Vice President- Installation and Technical Support (later promoted to VP-Customer Solutions (CST) and VP-Emerging Business. 
• Created multi-discipline product development program positioning RFT to be first to market in newly created $350M market. Developed product design plan, implementation plan, business readiness, ‘to market’ plan and vendor relationships. Led manufacturing planning and execution. Revenue from new service exceeded combined existing product sales in three years
• Utilizing Lean Six Sigma, ITIL and network automation processes, transformed a 100% reactive team into a proactive support group, transforming free support offering from a negative cost center into a self-funding service team that eventually represented 33% of revenue. 
• Reduced support costs from 12% of sales in 2002 (prior to arrival) to 8% in 2003 (first year in position) to less than 5% for 2004, while doubling available customer support contact time
• Improvements to service delivery and warranty costs decreased costs by 50%

Vice President- Emerging Business

Metavante

Recruited from GE Medical Systems to role responsible for creating a Network Operations Center, supporting $70M in network products and services revenue with a team of 85 engineers, designers and support staff in a NOC, Voice/LAN, VOIP and engineering support environment.
• TSS revenue support capability grew from $70M to $175M in three years, produced by a team originally scheduled to be outsourced for lack of productivity in 2000
• Was able to double the TSS revenue support capability while reducing team from 85 to 68 
• Implemented products and offerings to remotely monitor networks and networked systems automatically which resulted in 99.97% network uptime. Nationally recognized for this work by Network World Magazine and the AT&T Global Customer Conference in 2003
• Implemented a Six Sigma quality program in the TSS Network Operations Center resulting in a double digit increase in measured productivity while decreasing customer support complaints 95% during first 12 months; complaints remained at zero through 2003

Vice President - Technical Support Services (TSS)

As Global Manager for GE Medical Systems Global Network Operations Center, led creation of GEMS On-Line Center Network Support Team, developing the first GEMS IIS Network Operation Center (IIS NOC). Customer network design and WAN support were added to the NOC product lines. This resulted in revenue produced by the IIS NOC reaching $40M in 2000. Over course of 5 years the NOC expanded into support of all GEMS product lines for network connectivity; this facilitated indirect support for hundreds of millions in service revenue.
• Led development of a “Follow the Sun” program to accommodate 24/7 support and executed with the NOC in Buc, France where responsible for leading two teams in developing an around the clock support plan that included all product lines and facilitated multilingual support

Global Manager-Customer Network Operations Center

United States Marine Corps

E-5 Sergeant - Stationed at Kaneohe Bay US Marine Corps Air Station - Kaneohe, Hawaii

Sergeant

The Ikigai Guy ☕️ • Author & Ikigai Coach 🧭 • Ikiquest+ 🌀

After a 30-year career as a senior leader and executive in Fortune 500 companies, I grabbed an opportunity to take early retirement and do what I had always wanted to do. I support people living to their purpose, and companies bringing their purpose to their products and their people. 

I started VLURU to do just that.

VLURU means versatile guru. Every person and every company is different. Bringing your purpose into all you do takes several different disciplines and skills. VLURU brings an extraordinary variety of tools and techniques to help you achieve your personal and or business goals. 

My journey:

I’ve helped hundreds of people and businesses find fulfillment in their lives, careers, and products throughout my career through coaching, consulting, and mentoring. In the midst of my career transition, I was able to put a name to the practice of helping people find their purpose, Ikigai (ee-key-guy). 

I’m not the first to talk about Ikigai and I’m certainly not the most talented writer. I am, however the first to explain how Authenticity, Purpose, and Harmony work individually and together to cultivate a complete understanding of Ikigai. And maybe more importantly, I am the first person to come at these topics from the perspective of someone who has spent decades studying personal transformation.

I've created a process and framework to help people find fulfillment by uncovering and living into, their Ikigai.

►A globally recognized keynote speaker and transformation expert
►Coined the term 'mono-tasking' for single-focused effort.
► Coined the term Existential Futurist: An existential futurist is concerned with creating the best possible future for individual purpose, freedom, and choice.
► Coined the phrase: Saying I’m mid-century modern sounds so much cooler than 60 
►Coined the term...Humans being Humane to other Human beings (it's what it is all about)
►Coined the term Purpose over Profession
►Trust is the currency of leadership

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