Another Interesting Book by Philips Delves Broughton

One of my colleagues just finished reading "Life's A Pitch - And then you Buy - What the World's Best Sales People Can Teach Us all" by Philips Delves Broughton and have taken the following key learning points :

* Success, according to Nightingale's definition is "really nothing more than the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. The successful person is the one who wakes up in the morning and knows what they are doing, why and where their actions are leading. It could be anything for an exam, teaching, to running a small business or a very large one. The idea itself does not matter". Nightingale claimed that only one in twenty of us achieves this broad definition of success."Most of us are just drifting, composites of others we don't particularly admire but by whom we would rather be liked than not. He argues liked Gitomer, that convention is an ass. "Whatever the great majority is doing in any circumstance, if you do exactly the opposite, you'll probably never make a mistake as long as you live. The tragedy, Nightingale said, is that people die without ever making full use of their abilities and lie on their death beds consumed by regret. 
* Nightingale argues there are seven items necessary for living a full life:

1. Goals - without them a man is no better than a "starfish or amoeba" living hour to hour day to day always reacting, never setting his own course
2. Attitude - because it determines others' attitude towards us
3. Thinking deliberately and with a purpose - not being buffeted by circumstance and biddable by others, but thinking for oneself.
4.  Truth - for it will be reciprocated.  
5. The Law of Laws - the notion that we get what we give 
6. Invest in one's own development - just as a company would invest in its own training then so should we
7. The importance of thoughts - Our thoughts determine our fate. Whether we become dictators or gas station attendants, it is what we think of most of the time that leads to these outcomes. It is why, Nightingale says, that thinking and have a goal are so important. Without them we are nothing. 

At the moment, we are currently busy marketing our new upcoming event. It is the 

Annual Review of Employment Law 2012 (Ramada)

Leadership Event

Recently, one of my colleagues attended a leadership experience event in Belfast and picked up the following points relating to leadership:  

1. Ask yourself, "Have you delivered what your followers want?". Followers want community, recognition, excitement, authenticity.

2. Work out what is it about you that excites others.

3. Display significant, real and perceived differences. Know yourself and show yourself.

4.  Effective leaders use their emotions to liberate the energy of others.  

5. When you reveal weaknesses you reveal yourself. 

6. You need to communicate by telling stories. Great leaders are very good story tellers.

7. Great leaders choose their channels well.

8. To be effective as a leader, be yourself more and with more skill.

At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the 

Equality Law Update 2012

Change Management Issues

At the moment the company is researching change management issues and have discovered a lot of mistakes that caused failure. We noted five common mistakes:

Mistake #1: Not envolving the employees - leaders must actively involve the people most affected by the change in its implementation. This will help ensure employees at all levels of the organization embrace the proposed changes. 

Mistake #2: Not enough leadership - several leaders focus too much on management and too little on leadership.

Mistake #3: Ignoring current corporate culture - when people in an organization realize and recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support the organization’s success and progress, Mistake 3change can occur.

Mistake #4:  Lack of communication - change management communications need to be targeted to each segment of the workforce. It should be delivered in a two-way fashion that allows people to make sense of the change subjectively.  

Mistake #5: Lack of skills and resources - change does not happen through goals and exhortation alone. Like any business operation, It also calls for the right skills and resources, Organizations often simply fail to commit the necessary time, people, and resources to making change work. Paradoxically, successful behavior change often demands the very skills the change Is trying to create.

We're currently busy marketing our seminar rooms for Northern Ireland

Common Purpose - Passion and Resonance

Passion and Resonance was the second topic discussion in the course, "Common Purpose" which one of my colleagues attended to last week. She got some helpful learning points from the discussion:

• "Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about" ~ Steve Pavlina 

• "Without passion, you don't have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~ Donald Trump
•          Communicating a business’ passion:
  -          Be strong, honest, true and accurate
  -          Think about the content, be creative.
  -          Engage in conversation with our customers through our website/ Twitter/ Facebook
  -          How is it we want staff to communicate?

• "Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion" ~Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We're currently busy marketing our Inhouse Training for Northern Ireland

Young Leaders Conference

The Young Leaders Conference was also one of the coursed I attended to two weeks ago. It was all worth it and I learned the following important points:

1.       Don’t hide away from the bad stuff – don’t bury your head in the sand and pretend it will go away when there are problems, deal with them head on even if you know the outcome could mean change.

2.       Taking risks – a good leader should not be afraid to take risks – whether they be good or bad.

3.       Make a decision and stick to it – even if you know it will mean people may dislike you for it. If it needs to be done, stick to the decision and carry it through.

4.       Power of psychology/ persuasion. Think about how you put a suggestion forward. Say for example you have 5 ideas and there is one in particular you would like the person to choose. Place it at number 3 in the list. Research shows that the choice at number 3 is most likely to be chosen as by then the person feels they know what you are talking about and are drawn to number 3. If you have 4 ideas, still put it at number 3 and if you have 3 ideas, make up a first or fourth and place it again at number 3. (David Meade)

5.      Vision was again reiterated at this course, the importance of sharing the vision.

As always we're busy devising more Irish employment law seminars

Common Purpose - Broadening your vision

One of my colleagues underwent a lot of courses last week and one of them was entitled "Common Purpose – Broadening Your Vision". She learned 5 important points from this course:

1.       The day itself raised questions on our own visions – do we have a personal vision? and do we know what the true vision of the organisation we work for is?

2.       Baroness May Blood also demonstrated how humour and humility can take you far in life.

3.       Heard from Peter Dixon from Phoenix Gas, provided a very interesting insight into how a business needs a vision in order to achieve results. Results cannot be expected without the vision behind them.

4.       Heard from Baroness May Blood, truly inspirational woman who clearly had a vision for what she wanted to achieve and showed the energy and determination to match it.

5.       Paul Rooney from PWC gave an interested session on Leadership and who he looked to for leadership and vision both in his career and personal life.

We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms for Northern Ireland

David Meade's Insight

A colleague of mine attended a course two weeks ago hosted by David Meade. She got 5 helpful important points from the conference:

1.       Know when to take a risk – David Meade relayed the story of how he took the chance and left his University job to start a career doing Mentalist TV work. On his first appearance on the Stephen Nolan radio show, he was expected to be “car crash radio”. His determination and desire to succeed proved otherwise.
2.       Power of positive thinking – being told you are terrible at something will make you worse at the task, being told you are good (even when you are not) will make you perform better as you believe you are good at the task (research carried out by team of ballet dancers who were asked to play basketball. They were then randomly selected and told some were good and some were terrible at playing – even if they were really good. The ones who were told they were great outperformed the ones who had been told they were terrible). 
3.       Awareness – when given a task be aware of the other things going on around you. It is amazing how you can miss the most obvious thing because you are so busy focussing on the task in hand.


We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms for Northern Ireland