With many market watchers certain the tech sector is on the cusp of another boom, Ottawa's business community is pulling together to ensure we have the leadership talent in place for success.

The University of Ottawa Executive MBA program is teaming up with Scotiabank, Ernst & Young, Borden Ladner Gervais, the Ottawa Business Journal, the Ottawa Citizen and the CATA Alliance to develop Ottawa's most promising leadership talent through The Leadership Forum.

A long-time advocate of business leadership development and the man behind the forum is Peter Cleveland. He is executive at residence at the U of O's School of Management and head of business strategy firm Cleveland Leadership Group Inc. Prior to founding his firm, he served for 10 years as the managing partner of Ernst & Young's Ottawa office.

Last month Mr. Cleveland spoke to the OBJ about the importance of developing leadership talent, how The Leadership Forum will achieve this goal and perhaps build Ottawa's reputation abroad as a centre of excellence for corporate accountability and governance.

OBJ: How do you judge the calibre of Ottawa's leadership talent? Are there specific weaknesses that need to be addressed?

CLEVELAND: I think Ottawa has a very high calibre of existing senior leaders running senior companies. The next generation of up-and-comers is what we want to focus on. We want to give them practical exposure to senior successful leaders.

OBJ: How does The Leadership Forum fit into the equation? What is its mandate and how will it be achieved?

CLEVELAND: This forum is really a two-year program. It consists of three two-hour forums a year for a total of six forums. As I did the research on what was really, really important ... it's about the whole concept of accountability. Thus far a lot of what has been talked about is governance. And that has been exposed and lots of recommendations made by different bodies plus legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley, that drives the whole concept of governance. So much so that people think governance is synonymous with accountability, which it is not.

Holding individuals and corporations accountable is a cultural thing. Governance is after the fact reporting - boards of directors find out the company has done well or not done well, CEO is performing or not performing ... it is part of accountability but it is not accountability in and of itself.

So, how to transfer and make the next generation of leaders bring in cultures of accountability? You can't legislate people to take advantage of opportunities.

OBJ: You can't legislate how they think.

CLEVELAND: Yeah. So what I have created here is the concept of the culture of accountability. If you looked at the (federal) government and the (Chuck) Guite affair you'll see there was a lot of governance around all of that. They just chose to go around it and no one spoke out and speaking out is a part of accountability.

OBJ: What is on the agenda for the first few months? I believe Paul Coffin, one of the figures at the centre of the sponsorship scandal, is the first speaker.

CLEVELAND: Our first forum is in February. The first one is going to be on corporate ethics. Our speaker there is going to be Paul Coffin ... As an independent fellow you could say, "the guy is not a success and, you know, that wouldn't happen to me." But what happened to Paul was a gradual, slow, inch-by-inch deterioration, any event of which any one of us would do. But if you put it all together and look at it from hindsight, it looks awful.

Then we're going to have the anatomy of accountability and the sort of things that affect it and how to build it into a corporation and how you make it stick. There are no textbooks on this, that's the issue. I'm in the process of writing a book on accountability with the research we have done here for this program. In terms of practically talking to up-and-coming leaders I think this is something that would be very, very worthwhile to strengthening Ottawa leadership.