Research shows audiences dread virtual presentations for three main reasons, borne out by painful past experiences:
The technology is clunky.
The presenters are boring.
The meetings are too long and waste time.
This is one of those books I wish I had written. Millions of web meetings take place every day, yet they are often boring, poorly conducted, and technologically challenged. But that doesn’t have to happen to you!
7 Reasons why you should consider working with . . . Brough Leadership Institute as preferred provider for your management and leadership development and sales and marketing skills training.
After years of asking corporate clients to define and articulate their unique value proposition, we felt it was time to reinforce and rearticulate our answer to the same question about the services we provide. We don't want to assume that everyone who visits our site, or hears about out company, is aware of...
One of the most difficult challenges for companies is to create alignment in stakeholder perceptions between the organisation's leadership values and its ultimate strategy. This often results in a misalignment between corporate identity (how the organisation wants to be seen by its stakeholders) and how it is actually seen (corporate image). When this happens it will always result in a negative effect on corporate reputation.
When you think of this process using "lenses", it it is often easy to see where the potential "blur points" occur:
Dear Chartered Marketers, A New Permanent Advisory Committee
It is with great pleasure that we advise you that, following a comprehensive nomination and voting process, the following CMs have been chosen to represent South Africa's Chartered Marketers on the Permanent Advisory Committee (PAC).
On February 11 1990, after being freed from Victor Verster Prison following 27 years of incarceration as a political prisoner, Nelson Mandela delivered his first public address (Mandela, 1990). What follows is a rhetorical analysis of this speech, with particular reference to the relationship between the communication, negotiation, and conflict resolution concepts used in the speech and the outcomes of those concepts.
Communication Concepts
After 18 months of testing of a range of virtual delivery platforms, Brough Leadership Institute has decided to become a licensed provider of virtual training solutions using the Adobe® Connect™ platform. This is an ideal platform for our delivery of elearning, webconferencing, web seminars and virtual classroom programmes in leadership and organisational development, sales training, negotiation skills, presentation skills and even high performance intact and virtual teams.
Los Angeles experienced a 4.4 magnitude earthquake on 17 March 2010. What makes the quake significant is that it was the latest in a long list of earthquakes that occurred in just the first eleven weeks of 2010. The LA earthquake followed the dramatic quake in Haiti, the 8.8 earthquake in Chile (reported to have been strong enough to move the earth of its axis), as well as quakes in Japan, Indonesia, and Turkey. In many cases, devastating aftershocks followed these initial quakes.
In a study of 120 senior teams in 11 countries, the Hay Group found that CEOs themselves aren't always clear on the decisions they want a leadership team to resolve versus those they reserve for themselves. The research findings identified six steps that increase the likelihood of a senior team evolving into an efficient and effective unit capable of leveraging its collective expertise to address an enterprise's most important challenges and opportunities.
These are:
Collaborative leadership is at its strongest at the point of contact. This leadership challenges the traditional leader-follower, top-down approach. Collaborative leadership is often self-organizing. It respects internal and external stakeholders as peers, and embraces diversity, creativity and divergence. This means that collaborative leadership. can be messy. The diagram from Creative Desktop illustrates some of the types of collaborators that exist in an organization.
Communication: A Duplication of Ideas
by Andy Brough
For more specific, detailed information on our bespoke corporate training solutions, please go directly to our corporate training page menu here. . .
Tom Peters is famous for saying, "Execution is strategy. Strategy is execution." In a turbulent market, those companies that are able to effectively execute on strategy have a far greater chance of success. The Wall Street Journal Guide to Management (2009) noted that successful execution requires:
1. Clear goals that support the overall strategy
2. A means of measuring progress towards these goals on a regular basis
3. Clear accountability for that progress..
Creating and communicating value –by Andy Brough
Surviving and thriving in the modern world of business, means determining, defining and delivering a competitive value proposition to your customers.
In his book, “Reorganize for resilience, putting customers at the centre of your business” (Harvard Business Press, 2009) Ranjay Gulati demonstrates that companies looking to reestablish themselves after the recession will need to take an “outside-in” approach to customer service. Customer centricity is not just a good idea; it is fundamental to business survival. The customer centric approach to business requires both insight and action.
The Diamond Profile DISC 360 Online Assessment
Don't Waste Another Day on What You Don't Like
Probably the single most important reason why people struggle to reach their full potential is the traditional fallacy that in order to be successful you need to improve your weaknesses. As a result, people waste years and even decades trying to become better at what they struggle with.
During the recent downturn in the economy, many large companies and multinationals were looking for alternative ways of training. The virtual classroom has become an effective and popular alternative. Andy Brough gives us insight into this new trend in training, sharing valuable tips for trainers.
Negotiation is a process that can, by its very nature strike fear in your heart. Am I going to be ripped off? Is this the best offer? What if they don’t take this price? These are all questions that can cause even the most experienced negotiators to tremble at the prospect of trying to reach a deal. However, solid negotiation should be seen as providing you with an opportunity to work towards an outcome that achieves both a favourable result and a strong relationship.
GLOBAL VIRTUAL TEAMS- Andy Brough
7 Zones of Consideration for High Performance Teams (HPT) by Andy Brough
If you are part of a team and you want to assess your team’s performance, it is worthwhile considering these 7 zones of High Performance
1. People Capable individuals who are competent and self-sufficient
2. Trust Develop trusting relationships to overcome distance
3. Purpose A clear sense of direction that aligns team members
4. Technology Appropriate and skilled use of technology
John Nicholls (1994) proposed that leadership skills be considered from the basis of inspirational leadership (the heart), strategic leadership (the head), and supervisory leadership (of the hands). In all three cases, leadership is about the effect of the leader on people, individually or collectively, in relation to their environment.
THE ORGANISATIONAL LEADER AS STAKEHOLDER NEGOTIATOR
Al Dunlap was famously quoted as saying that “The most ridiculous term heard in the boardroom today is ‘stakeholders’. Stakeholders! Every time I hear the word, I ask, ‘How much did they pay for their stake?’”
As we begin the week after the final of the FIFA 2010 World Cup and as Spain celebrate their victory over the Netherlands, there are some key lessons we as South Africans can learn from staging the event.
When the eyes of the world are on you, there is a reason to deliver
Brands are ubiquitous. Brand management is both an art and a science that is afforded hundreds of millions of dollars annually. 60-80% of the market cap of public companies is made up of intangibles. This explains why companies spend so much time, energy and effort on building strong brands.
What’s interesting is the attention that has been given to Personal Branding in the past 10-15 years. Tom Peters, discussing what it takes to be the CEO of ME Inc, wrote
My initial interest in leadership training was in trying to understand the role of the leader as communicator. This led me to study verbal interaction analysis and, specifically negotiation and influencing skills. This work enabled me to work with leaders in many organizations around the world and how they engaged with a full range of stakeholders. This journey then took me to research the issues of corporate identity and corporate reputation.
Sustainable companies of the 21st century understand the power of stakeholder engagement. Where companies traditionally use branding to communicate corporate identity, corporate image is the view that stakeholders actually have of your organization. Corporate reputation is the sum total of all stakeholder perceptions over time. For stakeholders to support you, they need to trust you. For them to trust you, you need to ensure consistency and alignment of your brand so that you deliver on your brand promises.
SADCAS: A CASE STUDY
2. Keep these considerations in mind when delivering your presentation:
2011 sees the launch of a new range of programmes for Brough Leadership Institute. These programmes form part of a suite of core leadership, management and marketing modules that are offered in-house.
Our newest offering, designed by Andrew Brough, as part of his final submission to Regent University as a culminating project in Organizational Leadership, examines the role of the Leader as Stakeholder Collaborator.
The View from up here:
Strategic thinking precedes effective organisational change
The one question that every organisation must answer in order not just to survive, but also to realize its true reason for existence is . . . “What is our sustainable competitive advantage?”
"There are four ways, and only four ways in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it." Dale Carnegie
How has technology impacted on the quality of our communication? Axelrod (2009) noted “technologies are only artifacts in our search to keep making our work and life more efficient, effective and meaningful.” If a technology does not make our work and life more efficient, effective, and meaningful, is it really worth using.
This is a great book for marketers looking to engage around the sustainability debate. What sounds like an oxymoron, "Sustainability Marketing", is examined as part of the evolutionary process of marketing thought. The authors propose that this approach needs to be brought into the mainstream of marketing. They suggest that sustainability marketing is marketing that is:
The word mentor means many things in different contexts. Recently there has been a
significant level of interest in the relationship between sales management and mentoring.
What is of particular interest is how peer mentoring could benefit particularly new recruits.
A lot of work has been done on the role that a salesperson’s peers play in influencing
personal motivation and skills development. Peer mentoring has been described as the
During a recent customer service workshop, I was reminded again of the outstanding work done by Jan Carlzon on "Moments of Truth" - this great idea that a moment of truth is any "opportunity that a customer gets to create and develop an impression of your business."
Most of the men and women at the top levels of business and government share a common skill. In addition to the specialised experience in a particular business or function, they have developed the ability to effectively present their ideas to a group.
In a recent survey 1500 executives, who had been promoted to the position of Chairman of the Board, President, or Vice President of leading American corporations, were asked to identify which course they considered most important in preparing them for their management careers. Seventy-two percent responded with communications.
In a recent leadership survey 72% of respondents indicated they were looking
for a leader who was forward looking. At the same time they also identified that
business leaders spend as little as 3 % of work time envisioning. In creating and
casting vision it is critical that there is a shared ownership of the vision.
It is a cliché to say that South Africa is an extraordinary country with
extraordinary people that passed relatively unscathed through an
extraordinary time. Yet it is only a cliché to us who live in this
extraordinary place everyday of our lives, and have become blasé about our
The Power of the Dominant Buying Motive
Given the current economic challenges, sales trainers are working hard to convince
clients that there is still a place for selling skills and sales training. Corporate sales
training market needs to reposition itself yet again. Clients need to be convinced more
than ever that there is merit in investing in training a sales team. This needs to go
beyond “39 steps to closing the deal.”
To do that, trainers in selling and negotiation skills need to keep it simple. This is
The concept of an "Academy" dates back to the time of Plato.
academy |əˈkadəmē|
noun ( pl. -mies)
I had the privilege recently of meeting Vanessa Hall, Founder of Entente International Movement of Trust and author of, "The Truth about Trust". Vanessa's personal story and the journey that she has travelled in exploring the role that trust plays in society is extremely thought-provoking. Vanessa uses a simple but profound model to explain how trust, or the lack of it, underpins our interactions with one another. Trust is based on expectations, needs and promises (either implicit or explicit). When expectation or needs are not met and promises are not kept, then trust is broken.
There is more than enough evidence to link a company's financial performance to its ability to successfully execute on a marketing plan. If marketers are to gain credibility in the boardroom, they will need to demonstrate an ability to design and deliver on a marketing plan that:
One of the unique things about our training company is that we specialise in customized training solutions.
The management development and training market has had to reinvent itself over the past 18 months. As corporates have taken the opportunity to reexamine the investment in organizational development, providers have found creative ways to continue to offer top-quality content and expert faculty to the markets where they are needed most. One of the tools that has facilitated this process is the virtual classroom.