Keynote

Linda Nazareth is an economist, a futurist and a respected authority on the future of work. As a newspaper columnist and an author, she knows how to frame things in ways that both educate and entertain, and as the Senior Fellow for Economics and Population Change at think-tank the Macdonald Laurier Institute she knows what she is talking about.

Linda’s career has taken some non-traditional turns for someone in her field. Her first jobs was as a government economist where she specialized in labor market planning, which was followed by a stint at a major financial institution where she spent years as a Senior Economist. Wanting to change things up while she could, she lobbied to have a job created for her on Business News Network (BNN, Canada’s answer to CNBC) while it was a start-up, and spent a decade on-air as their in-house economist. During her time on BNN, Linda started writing books and giving keynote presentations, and eventually left daily broadcasting to give those passions her full-time attention. Her clients have included everyone from American Express through to The Economist Magazine, and all have benefitted from her ability to take big ideals and distil them into information that they can use for their own strategic plans. Linda’s fourth book, Work Is Not a Place: Our Lives and Our Organizations in the Post-Jobs Economy draws on the research she has been building for years as well as the insights gained from interacting with audiences across a range of sectors. With it, she is eager to engage people in thinking about what the world might look like when we replace the idea of ‘jobs’ with that of ‘work’ – and why that might not be a bad idea at all. A frequent media commentator, Linda has been quoted everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Wired magazine.