Advanced Management Skills

Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Late Night?

Isn’t time you got out a bit more? No, I’m not referring to your appetite for nightlife – mine has been relatively quite since I left the mayhem of the oil industry a few years ago!

What I’m talking about here is going to evening events organised by professional associations. All it take is a couple of hours, a few cheerful handshakes with like minded people, the swapping of business cards, a lecture on an interesting topic and a few canapés and drinks afterwards. A pleasant way of spending an evening, catching up on some CPD, meeting old friends and of course networking.

Alas, not all of us can attend events that easily. We may live in a quiet part of the world, we may have pressing family commitments or our partner may simply just not trust us!

I normally get to two or three of these events a month, often organised at London Business School (currently the world’s No1 Business School, according to the FT). These feature world-class speakers on a wide variety of interesting topics. Lectures tend to be themed by academic discipline or organised by the various thriving LBS Alumni Clubs.

My purpose here is to let you have a commentary on some of the more interesting talks I have attended. I hope you find them useful.

Venue: London Business School. Format: 45 minute interactive presentation + Q&A

Speaker: Ellen Miller, Faculty of Organisational Behaviour

Whoever you are and whatever your aspirations, the chances are that your success is closely linked to your professional networking skills.

I recently attended a number of events on the subject. This one was particularly interesting due to the following check list which I have adapted to make it more useful: Read the rest of this entry »

Venue: London Business School. Format: 3 x 20 minute presentations + Q&A

Speakers: Paul Farley (British Airways), Mark Spears (KPMG) and Chris Bones (Dean of Henly Business School)

This action packed event covered way too much in an hour to do it full justice here. However, each of the speakers described major change in their ‘home’ organisation and drew some learning from it. Change programmes were described at KPMG (the big accounting firm), at British Airways (currently facing major commercial challenges) and at Henly Business School (following a recent merger).

Although change is a highly complex subject the key takeaway from this event for me was the concept of breaking change down into its three main elements: planning change, winning support for change and implementing change. Some useful points under each of these headings were: Read the rest of this entry »