Sinclair MacRae

In this four-hour workshop, you will strengthen your ethical self-confidence, awareness, and autonomy by better understanding the underlying values of the Chartered Professional Accountants’ Code of Professional Conduct, to which all CPAs must adhere.

Accounting is marked by a commitment to five core values: professional behaviour, integrity and due care, objectivity, professional competence, and confidentiality.  In this engaging and interactive workshop, Sinclair MacRae will examine these values and consider how living up to them enables us to fulfil our duties to our clients in the context of our fiduciary relations while maintaining our vital function as independent professionals.

We will also examine and justify a useful framework for thinking about accounting ethics and a clear, repeatable process for making ethical decisions.

Note: This workshop satisfies the CPA’s CPE triennial four-hour ethics requirement.

Sound ethics is the foundation of professionalism in the financial services industry and a key component of success. In this fun and interactive workshop, Sinclair MacRae will examine several concepts in insurance ethics and gain a deeper understanding of the nature and value of insurance, including the vital role it plays in enabling us to share risks, undertake essential initiatives, and deliver basic services.

Suitable for agents, brokers, adjusters, and underwriters, the two principal aims of this workshop are to develop a useful framework for thinking through a range of ethical questions and dilemmas across the insurance industry and to generate a clear and repeatable process for making ethical decisions.

Participants will broaden and deepen their understanding of ethics, what it requires of them in their professional life, and why it matters for their success, thereby improving their ability to raise ethical issues and consciousness in their workplaces and professional relationships.

Note: This four-hour workshop counts toward CE requirements. Since also delivers abbreviated one-hour and two-hour versions of this presentation.

Sound ethics is the foundation of professionalism and a key component of personal and work-related success. In this entertaining keynote or his fun and interactive workshop, Sinclair MacRae will demonstrate the relevance of ethics to your audience. He will help your group explore the nature and value of applied and professional ethics as these relate to their everyday practices.

Starting with your professional Code of Ethics, take this opportunity to challenge and sharpen your ethical problem-solving skills in a practical, fun, straightforward, and focused manner. Gain greater insight into the principles underlying your profession and the reason it deserves public trust.

Sinclair MacRae presentations are an excellent fit for a wide range of professional associations and general business audiences. If you need a speaker for your conference, convention, or someone to design and deliver a compelling professional development seminar or workshop, Sinclair will shape and customize his presentation to meet your specific needs, interests, and issues.

Both the spectres of cancel culture and the backlash against it loom over all of our workplaces. They are the newest additions to all of the traditional barriers to fostering employee engagement, buy-in, and accountability.

These social forces threaten to import the political divisiveness wracking wider society into the heart of our organizational cultures. In the face of these threats avoidance is not a rational strategy. The question is: how can organizations balance worthy equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives with the vital need to promote honesty, courage, principled dissent, openness, and pride in one’s employer?

In this Sinclair MacRae presentation, we will address these sensitive and fear-inducing issues directly. We will examine their natures, causes, and consequences, and explore some useful remedies.

To this end, we will engage in the sort of mature and constructive dialogue sorely lacking in our political culture but absolutely requisite for maintaining a healthy and productive workplace milieu, one in which employees embrace and take pride in their organization’s foundational values. 

In his lively, inspiring, and informative keynote presentation or workshop, Sinclair MacRae explains the essential role that trust plays in business success. Learn why healthy, moral trust is necessary among all the stakeholders in a flourishing organization.

A culture of trust is crucial for meeting the challenges you and your organization face. Discover how the latest research supports the view that “a healthy trust is a critical element that drives employees’ taking on responsibility for their organization’s success”. The marvel of successful organizations is that they foster a healthy trust that enables them to maximize the untapped potential of their workforce.

Sinclair will challenge your group to recognize and promote the fundamental constellation of values that distinguish successful employees and organizations; values that include trust, honesty, integrity, authenticity, competence, mutual respect, excellence, accountability, collegiality and cooperation, open communication, emotional intelligence, and sound ethics.

Learn about the value and basis of trust and the elements of human nature that impact trust. How do you distinguish “trust” from “healthy, moral trust”? In this practical presentation, Sinc presents useful tools for assessing, engendering and increasing a healthy trust in yourself, your teams, and your organization.

The capacity to build and enjoy healthy and productive trusting relationships with others is not something we are born with; fortunately, it is something we can consciously develop. Take this opportunity to challenge and develop your healthy trust-building skills in a practical and straightforward manner.

Who Should Attend?

This presentation is useful for anyone who needs to trust others in their work but it is especially valuable for team leaders, managers, supervisors and senior executives.

The professor emeritus of applied psychology Keith Stanovich distinguishes between standard measures of intelligence and rationality. Whereas most people identify intelligence with rationality, research shows that there is only a small-to-medium correlation across a range of rational thinking skills and intelligence test performance.

This is because intelligence tests do not measure the various dimensions of rationality. Thus, Stanovich defines “dyrationalia” as “the state of being irrational despite having adequate intelligence.” Dysrationalia plagues people and organizations, just like it plagues our society, but the good news is that the remedies for it are within our grasp. We can learn to live more rational lives and maximize our prospects of being authentically happy.

In this presentation, you will learn the first crucial steps for living a more rational life. We will identify and explore the three component parts of rationality – epistemic rationality, axiologic rationality, and instrumental rationality – and examine how their functioning delivers authentic happiness for individuals and success for organizations.

The causes of the neglect and breakdown of values education among young people in our society are complex and the consequences of this are serious and all around us. Fortunately, we can take constructive measures to counteract these harmful consequences.

One key lies in revitalizing our commitment to, and understanding, a liberal arts education. This, in turn, first requires that we correctly appreciate the value of this kind of education. 

When educational and business leaders extol the values of the liberal arts they usually emphasize them for their extrinsic and instrumental benefits – for instance by praising graduates of liberal arts and humanities programs for their critical thinking skills – at the expense of appreciating their potential for cultivating good and responsible citizens who live virtuous and meaningful lives.

In this Sinclair MacRae presentation, we will address the question of the intrinsic value of education and examine how answering this question can lead us to better appreciate and directly cultivate values in education, thereby counteracting our current over-emphasis in education on the learning and recall of facts.