Michael Adams

Michael Adams is the president of the Environics group of research and communications consulting companies which he co-founded in 1970 and which today employ over 200 professionals in offices located in seven cities in Canada and the United States.

In addition to numerous articles, frequent commentary in the broadcast media and presentations at conferences, seminars and annual meetings in North America, Europe and Asia, Mr. Adams is also the author of four Canadian best sellers: Sex in the Snow: Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium, Better Happy Than Rich? Canadians, Money and the Meaning of Life, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, and American Backlash: The Untold Story of Social Change in the United States. 

Fire and Ice won the prestigious 2003/04 Donner Prize for the best book on Canadian public policy and was selected in the fall of 2005 by the Literary Review of Canada as one of the 100 most important books ever published in the country.

His current book entitled Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism, published in November 2007, focuses on the promise and challenge of Canadian multiculturalism.

In 2006, he founded the Environics Institute to sponsor survey research that will contribute to the discussion of important public policy issues. To date, the Institute has sponsored a survey of Canadian Muslims, a survey of the people of Afghanistan on issues related to the NATO mission in that country, a survey of Canadian’s engagement with the world plus an academic study of the impact of published polls on voting behaviour. The Institute is currently undertaking a major research project on urban aboriginal life in Canada.

Michael Adams holds an Honours B.A. in Political Science from Queen's University (1969) and a M.A. in Sociology from the University of Toronto (1970) and was named as one of the 100 most influential people in Canadian communications according to Marketing Magazine’s Power List 2005.  In the spring of 2009, he will receive an honorary Doctor of Letters from Ryerson University in Toronto.

Outside the field of research consulting, Mr. Adams has a variety of other interests including, since 1990, partnership in the Robert Craig Winery in Napa Valley, California, which has been rated by The Wine Spectator as one of the top 25 wineries in California.

In 2006, he inaugurated the Michael Adams Creative Writing Scholarship at his former high school, North Albion Collegiate, in Rexdale.  The graduating student judged to have written the best personal essay is awarded first year tuition at an Ontario college or university.

• 1. Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values

  Based on Michael Adams's bestselling and prize-winning book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, this fascinating and important presentation draws upon surveys Environics has conducted in the two countries since the early 1990s. Michael offers the counter-intuitive argument that the values of Americans and Canadians are diverging in significant ways, and that these divergences have implications for public policy, consumer marketing and human resources. Audiences are intrigued by values profiles of the regions of Canada and the United States, as well as the trajectories of values evolution among Canadian and American youth. In this consumer-focused version of the presentation, Michael offers insights on how divergent social values in Canada and the United States give rise to different expectations and desires regarding advertising, branding, price, and the shopping experience among other topics.

• 4. Stayin' Alive: How Canadian Baby Boomers Will Work, Play, and Find Meaning In the Second Half of Their Adult Lives

  As Canada's Baby Boomers prepare to enter the second half of their adult lives, leading pollster and analyst Michael Adams describes his generation's thoughts on topics ranging from retirement and spirituality to sexuality and funeral plans. This fun and insightful presentation draws on over twenty years of Environics social values data—including a special 2008 study that surveyed an extra-large sample of Boomers on issues specific to their current life stage. The four social-values "tribes" Adams described in his bestselling book Sex in the Snow are alive and well: the Disengaged Darwinists, Connected Enthusiasts, Autonomous Rebels, and Anxious Communitarians continue to display distinct values and behaviours—and are evolving in fascinating ways as they age. Adams outlines each tribe's approach to retirement, health, technology, family, consumption, spirituality, and politics; this tribal segmentation is an important corrective to analyses that treat Canada's largest generation (over 9-million men and women) as a monolith. His playful accounts of the foibles of his own generation and its various tribes offer amusement as well as illumination. The trends and insights Adams finds in Environics' large bank of social values data will be invaluable to marketers, policy makers, human resource professionals and anyone else seeking to understand where Baby Boomers—and the rest of us—are headed in the years to come.

• 5. Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study

  The 2006 Canadian census reported that for the first time a majority of Aboriginal people in Canada were living in cities. This large, young, and rapidly growing urban population is almost totally absent, however, from the public image of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people living in Canada.
  
  The Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study (UAPS) is a landmark examination of the identities, aspirations, values, and identities of a representative sample of these over 500,000 people living in eleven Canadian cities. It reveals a population that is hugely diverse, but on the whole culturally vibrant, optimistic about urban life (despite experiences of discrimination), and strongly focused on education as a pathway to a better future.
  
  The UAPS was carried out with the guidance and support of an advisory circle composed of eighteen Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars, leaders, and experts. This presentation is generally customized for the audience with the participation of one of these advisors or of one of the project’s lead researchers.

• 3. The Shape of Things to Come: An Overview of Thirty Years of Canadian Public Opinion

  This presentation offers a long-range look at evolving Canadian public opinion, and offers insights into how current trends are likely to play out in the future. Michael Adams offers his analysis of national, regional, and provincial polling data on matters ranging from health care and taxes to immigration, Quebec sovereignty, and Canada's role in the world. A far cry from the frequently superficial polls in the news—generally presented without comparisons to other societies or across time—this presentation offers public opinion data with rare depth and richness, reflecting on long-term trends in the context of unfolding events. This talk offers an immense repository of information on Canadian attitudes, combined with Michael’s insightful and humourous take on the nation's enduring quirks-and its urgent dilemmas.

• 2. Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Multiculturalism

  Canada has the highest immigration rate and the second-largest foreign-born population in the world. With so much internal diversity—and in a world where ethnic and religious strife seems to be proliferating rather than abating over time—is this country on a collision course with social disaster?
  
  In this provocative talk, Michael Adams answers No: Canada's so-called experiment with diversity is in fact a remarkable success. Using both demographic and public opinion data, Adams shows that the vast majority of newcomers to Canada are ready to integrate into their new society, and the vast majority of "old Canadians" are ready to welcome them. In terms of both social attitudes and economic outcomes, there is plenty of cause for optimism.
  
  Accepting a quarter-million newcomers a year is not without challenges, but the anxious headlines in the morning paper are not telling the real story of diversity in Canada. This clear-eyed, data-driven talk will be invaluable to anyone striving to make diversity work in their own organization—and to anyone who dares flirt with optimism about Canada's future.

• Your documentation of the changing face of our customers was extremely thought-provoking and relevant.
  CIBC

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  November 2010

  Stayin' Alive

  Most boomers are healthier than their grandparents could have hoped to be at the same age. Some have made the pursuit of physical, mental, and spiritual health an all-consuming occupation. They're having a great time and intend to experience the next 30 years not as a decline into infirmity, but as the satisfying second half of their adult lives. Stayin' Alive looks into the future and speculate what the aging of the boomers will mean for public policy, consumer marketing, the world of work, investment, philanthropy, tourism, retirement living (here and abroad), health care, and the rituals associated with death.

  
  
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  October 2006

  Sex in the Snow : Canadian Social Values at the End of the Millennium

  In this bestseller, Michael Adams describes the trajectory of social change in Canada, illuminating the society's movement over the latter half of the 20th century from values of religiosity and deference to authority to those of secularism and autonomy. Dividing the population into twelve distinct social values "tribes," Adams argues that for Canadians demography is no longer destiny. In contemporary Canada, individuals' identities are increasingly defined not by traditional demographic markers such as age, race, gender, and class, but by their personal values and worldviews.

  
  
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  November 2005

  American Backlash

  American Backlash is a study of American values that goes beyond the Red versus Blue dichotomy, beyond the litany of divisive political issues that receive so much attention in American public discourse: abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, Darwin versus Genesis, prayer in schools, and so on. Widening the lens to examine the psychology of American society as a whole, Canadian pollster Michael Adams argues that it is neither Red nor Blue America that represents the overall trajectory of social change in the United States. Rather, it is that nearly half the population disengaged from politics that is the greatest barometer of where American society is headed.

  
  
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  October 2001

  Better Happy Than Rich

  Better Happy Than Rich links Canadians' social values to their attitudes and behaviours surrounding that most ubiquitous preoccupation: money. In chapters such as "Making It," "Spending It," and "Giving It Away," pollster and author Michael Adams explores the relationship between how Canadians view the world and how they behave financially. Demonstrating that money really can't buy happiness, Adams' data reveals that the happiest Canadians are those who focus least on consumption and who don't view their finances as a defining aspect of their existence.