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 institutions. All it takes 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 to spend an evening, catch up on some CPD, meet old friends and of course network.

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 attend. I hope you find them useful.

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Speakers: Nader Tavassoli, Professor of Marketing at LBS & Richard Hytner, Deputy Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide

Every Autumn a strange ritual takes place called the London Business School Alumni Celebration. I really don’t understand why a group of otherwise sane adults decide to hold a massive global jamboree to celebrate LBS, its achievements and those of its ‘illustrious alumni’. How cringing!

On the other hand it’s a great opportunity for the gregarious to attend an excellent lecture, network enthusiastically and overdose on canapés and wine!

This year’s lecture was no exception and the speakers, both self acknowledged as ‘vertically challenged’, gave an excellent talk on how the top companies use their culture to create a sustainable competitive advantage by creating staff and customer ‘Loyalty Beyond Reason’.

Many case studies were presented including how Southwest Airlines and Saatchi & Saatchi were using this thinking to develop their businesses. Key takeaways were that businesses need to:

• Stand for what people care about
• Excel at ‘moments that matter’
• Start on the inside

This is just a small part of a much larger and fascinating topic.

Acknowledgements & Useful Links

My thanks to LBS for organising such an interesting event.

Details of the many excellent programmes run by London Business School can be found by clicking here.

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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:

• Do you constantly seek ways to expand the size and diversity of your network?
• Do you prepare for networking events to maximise the opportunity?
• Do you run have enough business cards for each event?
• Are you comfortable with starting conversations?
• Do you introduce yourself in a way that is clear, concise and engaging?
• Do you reintroduce yourself to people rather than wait for them to remember you?
• Do you remember people’s names and facts about them?
• Do you make notes on people’s business cards to remember them?
• Do you proactively introduce members of your network to each other?
• Do you record information about your network and can you easily retrieve it?
• Do you organise your thoughts before making calls to people in your network?
• Do you regularly keep in contact with people in your network?
• Do you return phone calls within 24 hours?
• Do you ask for assistance or guidance from people in your network?
• Do you provide useful information or contacts to the people in your network?
• Do you find opportunities to ask others ‘Who do you know who…?’
• Do re-evaluate your network?
• Do you operate with integrity and professionalism in your interactions?
• Do you help others develop their networks?
• Do you enjoy networking?

The more strongly you can answer the above questions the better you are at networking. If you have any ‘areas for development’ act on them now!

This is just a small part of a much larger and fascinating topic.

Acknowledgements & Useful Links

My thanks to Elen Miller and LBS for organising such an interesting event.

Details of the many excellent Executive Education programmes run by London Business School can be found by clicking here.

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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:

1. Planning Change (aim to spend ~10% of time here)

Organisations have a limited capacity for change and leaders need to have a clear view about which change initiatives to support and in what order. None of the presentations mentioned the fact that high quality option appraisals / business cases are required during the change planning process which I felt was a significant omission.

2. Winning Support for Change (aim to spend ~45% of time here)

Nothing major happens in large organisations without winning the support of key stakeholders. Senior management must spend a lot of time on this. The first main takeaway on this subject was to map stakeholders carefully and develop a communications plan based on this. The second takeaway was to use data to convince stakeholders and involve them deeply in the analysis of this data so that they reach the inevitable conclusion that a change programme is really needed to tackle this. This involves key stakeholders and gains their commitment to the change programme.

3. Implementing Change (aim to spend ~45% of time here)

Although this event wasn’t really about implementation, the war stories gave valuable insights into the change process in the three organisations. It was difficult to draw any common learning from this apart from the old saying:

“Never let a good crisis go to waste” – it is easier to sell change from a ‘burning platform’.

The importance of ‘Authentic Leadership’ was stressed but not really covered during this event. Apart from this, implementing change seemed to be about JFDI and having excellent feedback systems to ensure that change happens more or less as envisaged.

Conclusion

Overall a great event which was both interesting and thought provoking. There are bound to be gaps in a subject this large, however, the event was definitely worth attending. I can also report that the canapés were legendary but the red wine was a bit iffy. Will stick to the lager next time!

Acknowledgements & Useful Links

My thanks to the LBS Human Capital Network for organising such an interesting event.

Details of the many excellent Executive Education programmes run by London Business School can be found by clicking here.

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