Another Interesting Book by Philips Delves Broughton

I've 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. The Law of Laws - the notion that we get what we give
5. Truth - for it will be reciprocated.
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 

Northern Ireland's Mediation Symposium 2012.

Three Great New Websites

Recently, I came across 3 great new websites. New to me at least. They are:

 

* Opensiteexplorer.org This provides pretty much everything you want to know about your website and your competitors in terms of google ranking, authority and linking. It's easy to use and it's the sort of thing you just want to keep playing with when you should be at the tea table and your food's going cold.

 

* Mysupermarket.co.uk compares the prices for you of thousands of items across six of the main supermarkets. I guess it's best if you have a one off big purchase to make and want to know who is doing it cheapest. The test I did on a litre of Smirnoff vodka told me that I'd save a fuller £10 by going to Tesco over Sainsburys.

 

* Beatthebrochure.com - it claims to give you the lowest holiday prices guaranteed - and my first experiments with it returned impressive results.

 

How did we ever manage to survive before the Internet?

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

TUPE Update for Schools and Colleges - A Legal Update with Practical Exercises.

"The Jelly Effect" by Andy Bounds

I've been reading "The Jelly Effect" by Andy Bounds this week and it has some great pearls of wisdom in it. They include:

 

* Never compare your inside to somebody else's outside. Because you'll always lose" Marie Mosely

* When networking "Be interested (in them) not interesting (about yourself)

* The grass isn't greener on the otherside. The grass is greener where you water it.

* Customers don't care what you do; they only care what they're left with AFTER you've done it

* There are only two things customers are interested in. If they know with 100% certainty that they will get the AFTERS they require, they will buy

* "Do or do not. There is no try". Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

We're currently busy marketing our latest event. It is the Comparative Employment Law: NI, GB and ROI

Latest Seminar Event

Recently, I attended a seminar in which one of the speakers was Dr. Hugh Cormican, founder Andor Technology and he made the following very useful points:



1. The best time to eat a frog is first thing in the morning. In other words, get the difficult unenviable tasks over with first.


2.  Question: five frogs are in a log, four decided to jump. How many are left? The answer is five, just because you decided to do something it doesn't follow that you will do it.


3. Measure everything. Encourage risk taking but control it. You should worry about what your team will worry about next.


4. Realize the power within yourself.


5.Men don't multitask but they do segment very well. 


Finally and very importantly please repeat the following. To be more effective as a leader, be yourself but with more skill.


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

Discipline and Underperformance at Work

Leadership Event

Recently, I 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. When you reveal weaknesses you reveal yourself.


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


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 Screening Guidance.

Invest NI Seminar

I attended an Invest NI seminar on 26th of June 2012 and picked up the following key points.





In relation to organizations:


1. When you don't know what you don't know an opportunity is lost. Therefore, benchmarking in organizations is critical.


2. Those organizations that export generally are better managed.


3. The higher the level of perceived competetion in an organization, the greater efficiency in that company.


4. Great organizations build leadership in as many places as possible.


5. Great organizations give people early experience of leadership.


At the moment we’re all working hard on our big event coming up soon. This is the Section 75 and the New Guidance Conference.

Common Purpose - Broadening Your Vision

One colleague of mine 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.       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.

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.       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?

5.       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.

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

Social Effectiveness Training

 I went to a really interesting seminar on Wednesday evening of this week organised by the Association of Coaching in Belfast. It was delivered by Michael Mallow, a very entertaining speaker. I learnt the ten following things:



1.   We can only control our own behaviour.
2.   All we can give another person is information.
3.   All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
4.   The problem relationship is part of our present life.
5.   What happened to the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.
6.   We satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World.
7.   All we can do is behave.
8.   All behaviour is Total Behaviour and is made up of four components: acting, thinking, emotions and physiology.
9.   All Total Behaviour is chosen, but we only have direct control over the acting and thinking components. We can only control our emotions and physiology indirectly through how we choose to act and think.
10.  All Total Behaviour is designated by verbs and named by the part that is the most recognisable.


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

Mediation Seminar

I attended a mediation seminar on Saturday last in Letterkenny Donegal and came away with the following learning points :  

* A good mediator should hold onto a closed mediation file indefinitely afterwards

* It's advisable to ask all parties for any notes they have taken for you to destroy after a mediation has finished.

* In most employment cases a mediator should eschrow an agreement giving parties time to seek professional advice before signing an agreement.

* "Professional advice" is a better term than "legal advice" for it wider and encompasses medical and business advice where necessary as well as legal

* Any person shadowing a mediator should be referred to as an assistant rather than an observer. Co-mediators are just that and share responsibility and liability equally.

We're currently busy marketing our interview rooms 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.       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)

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

5.       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.

We're currently busy marketing our training centre for Northern Ireland

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: 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 #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: 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 #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.


As always we're busy devising more employment law seminars

David Meade's Insights

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



1.       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).
2.       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.
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 re-working how we marketing our employment law email service

Good to Great

One of my colleagues told me about a great book he read, it's called, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. He took five key learning points from it:

1.     Pursue the big 3 traits. Good-to-great companies move ahead of their competitors by pursuing only those projects that have three traits;

        a.     What they can be ‘best in the world’ at

        b.    What drives profitability for their     business model

        c.     What their people are deeply passionate about

2.     Good is the enemy of great. This is one of the reasons why so little becomes great, but ultimately good companies can become great companies if they push themselves and don’t settle for great.

3.     Stick to what you’re good at – The Hedgehog Concept. Good-to-great companies are those that consistently stick to doing what they do best and avoid getting distracted into new fields of business that are away from their core competencies.

4.     Do not get side-tracked on non-core ideas. Instead, good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding what lies within their Hedgehog Concept and ignoring everything that does not.

5.     Creating a good-to-great company takes time and is an iterative process rather than a blinding flash of inspiration. To guide this process, many use a ‘Business Council’ approach to gain the depth of understanding required to come up with a unique differentiating Hedgehog Concept.

We're currently busy marketing our training centre for Northern Ireland

Employee Engagement

I have been researching staff engagement recently and has come up with the following conclusions:

1. One of the most effective strategy to impact engagement across an organization: Start at the top

• It will be an uphill battle for everyone if your most senior teams are not true believers of the power engagement.

2. Spot an Engaged Employee, engaged employees are: Authentic

• Employees who are themselves are more effective in the workplace.

3. Define and refine your culture to engage: Keep your “culture to engage” in the front of employees’ and managers’ minds.

•  Make “culture,” “engagement,” and similar subjects frequent items for discussion.

4. One of the most important rules of Employee Engagement: Rules are meant to be broken.

•  Sometimes, you may find that it is necessary to break a rule to easily proved extraordinary service or just to make things work as they should.

5. Engage remote teams: Use web cams

•  An inexpensive web cam can be tied to your Instant Messenger. It is a great way to humanize people who are just names on a "cc" list.

We're currently busy marketing our training centre for Northern Ireland

Active Listening

A colleague of mine listened to an audio cd this morning by Peter Thompson called ‘The best kept secrets of the world’s great communicators’ – the following is a summary of one chapter on ‘Active Listening.’ These are the points that he noted from the session:  

Listen actively when there is high emotion or the possibility of misunderstanding, when the person is important to you, or when you need the information they have. The better you listen and respond to others, the better they will listen and respond to you. The more attention you pay when someone else is talking, the more attention they will pay when you are talking. The following are ways to listen actively:

1.       Allow people to finish their own sentences no matter how enthusiastically you want to jump into the conversation. Doing so will indicate respect for what the person is saying.

2.       Maintain eye contact. It shows others that you are paying attention.

3.       Make notes. This will reinforce your memory. It is advisable to ask permission first in some situations. That permission is seldom refused. If you wish to take a tape recording, it is vital to ask permission.

4.       Think of listening based on the ratio of having two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. Listen twice as much as you speak.

5.       Get all the information that is available within a conversation so you will not jump to any false conclusions. Wait for the end of the sentence or end of the conversation to be sure this conversation is unique from any other that may sound similar to you.

6.       Respond so the other person knows you are listening. Your response may be “Yes” or “I see” or merely nodding your head. Any of these will do.

7.       Be accepting rather than judgmental so you can truly hear the message being given. Different accents, catch phrases, speeds of speech, and cultural generalizations can get in the way of hearing the actual message.

8.       Ask questions when you do not understand something that was said. This goes a long way to building strong communication.

9.       Ask core questions. That is typically a series of “why” questions that go deeper into a particular subject to gain the greatest understanding of a situation. Start with broad information and continue seeking more specific responses.

10.   Pause before replying. Pausing will add power to what you say. It indicates you are giving a considered response, that you thought about it, that it is not just some answer you offer every time this question comes up.

11.   Use the Rapid Repeat Method to improve your listening skills and concentration abilities. Do this by simply repeating, silently in your mind, what is being said a fraction of a second later. This holds your concentration and improves your recall of what was said.

 We're currently re-working how we marketing our employment law email service

IoD Annual Convention 2012

Two weeks ago, one of my colleagues attended the IoD Annual Convention here in London. It was really helpful and she was able to gather a number of key points: 

1.       From speaker Kevin Roberts, CEO Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide: “inspire rather than inform”, specifically on the company website. Customers want to be inspired by what they see, not bored by informative text. Think about what your webpage looks like and revise to inspire customers.

2.       Passion drives success. It’s not all about the talent you have for something, it’s the passion and the drive you have which will ultimately lead to your success (BackleyBlack – Steve Backley and Roger Black)

3.       “Success is a decision not a gift” (BackleyBlack)

4.      From Kevin Roberts, it’s not all about Return On Investment but Return On Involvement. Get the staff fully involved and the return will be much much greater.

5.       How to make the most out of your LinkedIn Profile (from Ariel Eckstein presentation, MD of EMEA, LinkedIn. Complete your profile – importantly add a photo – it makes it more personal to those connecting with you. Only connect to those who you will actually do business with. Treat your Linkedin connections like your phone book. Would you phone the people on your LinkedIn connection?

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

Social Media Marketing

Legal-Island has been studying social media marketing closely this week and have gleaned 5 important key points to remember:

1. It's a Revolution - A fundamental and revolutionary change in online behaviour, expectations and in the online customer experience
2. It's Social - Marketing as a conversation is a two-way dialogue. New 'mindsets' are required to be successful in social media
3. Power Shift - Social media empowers the customers and the network


4. Declining Effectiveness - the traditional approaches to sales and marketing are not as effective as before
5. The End of Business as Usual -  We need new 'mindsets', new business approaches and new performance measures. It's not all about being a broadcast medium. It's about listening to and engaging with customers, partners and community.


We're busy at the moment marketing our new Mediation Services for Northern Ireland