Born in South Africa, Donald Rumball has lived in the U.K and Canada since 1963. He obtained his B.A. at Witwatersrand University, majoring in Mathematics, French and Economics and became a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries (F.I.A.) in London.
He left the actuarial profession in 1972 to become a journalist for the Financial Post, where he rose to become Business Editor, winning numerous prizes and awards for his writing. In 1981, he started Canada’s first national magazine for entrepreneurs, Small Business Magazine, (later called Profit but ultimately a victim of the retrenchment of all magazines), leading it through its growth pangs to become both widely respected and profitable by the time he left in 1987. He has since contributed to several major newspapers and magazines. Since 1975, he has been a regular commentator on business and economics for Radio Canada and the French channel of TV Ontario.
Since 1981, he has concentrated primarily on entrepreneurs and innovation. He has published three books – The Entrepreneurial Edge (1988 and a second edition in 2018), Peter Munk: The making of a Modern Tycoon (1996 and 1997) and The University Club of Toronto: Its Life, Its Times (2009); a fourth – a biography of Sándor Demján, an extraordinary Hungarian entrepreneur who succeeded under both communism and capitalism — has been sold to a publisher and will be published shortly. A biography of Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International, completed in 2001, was not published. He has also written a novel about entrepreneurs and their interaction with big business and big finance (and above all each other) was published in 2018.
During 1991-93, he ran a national network of entrepreneurs (the National Entrepreneurship Development Institute), sponsored by the federal government; later, he played a major role in creating a comparable network in Ontario (the Innovators Alliance). He has consulted on strategy, marketing and financing to the publishing industry and to clients of the Industrial Research Assistance Program. He also helped to design seminar programs for putative entrepreneurs for the Business Development Bank of Canada.
He was Entrepreneur-in-residence at the Centre for Entrepreneurship in the Faculty of Management Studies, University of Toronto (1993-95) and Executive-in-residence at Ryerson University (1995-97). He was named a Fellow of Ryerson in 1990. He has served on the boards of the Canadian Council of Small Business and Entrepreneurship and the International Council for Small Business. He has researched and written more than 30 studies (in both official languages) on entrepreneurs and innovation for the federal and Ontario governments, especially companies committed to rapid growth. He also led a research program at the University of Toronto on entrepreneurship in the arts and cultural sector. He designed the intellectual content for the Toronto Stock Exchange’s Visitor Centre (Stock Market Place, subsequently disbanded), including an animated video on the history of money and capital markets, as well as several interactive games illuminating the role of the stock market in the economy.
He is Past President of the University Club of Toronto, Pleiades Theatre and Théâtre français de Toronto, as well as York Cricket Club and served as Treasurer of both the Lycée Français de Toronto and the Alliance Française de Toronto, where he shepherded a $7-million expansion of the building, incorporating a new theatre and eight new classrooms.