| WELCOME TO ANDREW BROUGH COMMUNICATIONS | EQUIPPING FOR EXCELLENCE |
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. Vanessa's recommendations for building trust are:...
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
achievements...
After 18 months of testing of a range of virtual delivery platforms, Andrew Brough Communications has decided to be come 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.
We are able to share ideas powerfully using Adobe® Connect™ web conferencing software. As a participant, you can also securely share presentations and...
Creating and communicating value –by Andy Brough
If you aim to survive In the modern world of business, determining competitive advantage is a non-negotiable. This week as I worked with two different sales teams to define their competitive advantage , I was struck by how quickly they responded to the question, “Why should I buy from you?” with a somewhat vanilla “because of my personal service.” Whilst service is to be commended, Dixon, Freeman, and Toman, (2010) observed that customers tend to punish bad service more readily than they reward delightful service. Delighting customers doesn’t build loyalty, rather reducing...
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.
Against this backdrop of dramatic tectonic shifts taking place under the earth’s crust, the global business landscape is also undergoing radical...
Communication: A Duplication of Ideas
by Andy Brough
In the technology savvy world of social and electronic media, it’s certainly worth considering whether or not our interpersonal communication is actually improving as a result of these advances. This is particularly important when one considers the dynamic of the leader-follower relationship. Even with the modern luxuries of email on our mobile phones, instant messaging, and video conferencing, the possibility for misunderstanding, ambiguity, and even confusion still exists. When all of these complexities are considered in a...
SADCAS: A CASE STUDY
The Southern African Development Community Accreditation Service (SADCAS) was established in terms of Article 10(1) and 10(2) of the SADC Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Standardization, Quality Assurance, Accreditation, and Metrology (SQAM). SADCAS was incorporated on 6 December 2005 under the Botswana Companies Act Chapter 42.01 as a nonprofit limited company with its own Memorandum and Articles of Association. SADCAS was subsequently approved by the SADC Council of Ministers in August 2007 as a subsidiary organization of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) at a meeting...
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
We need to translate this same political, economic and social will to deliver into all other sectors of society. One can only wonder what the effect would be if South African leaders could put the same amount of focus and energy into combating HIV/AIDS, the crime rate, unemployment and the challenges in the public education sector, that was...
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?’”
Thankfully, not everyone holds to Dunlap’s point of view when it comes to stakeholder engagement. More and more companies are acknowledging that stakeholder relations matter, not just because the business imperatives are clear, but also because we now live in an era of what...
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. There is no doubt that first prize in a development context is a face to face intervention, however the past year has shown that, when used correctly, the virtual platform offers a multitude of possibilities:
(a) Real...
