The A-Z of Successful Meetings

During my life in the corporate world, like most people, I spent alot of time in meetings. Often these achieved little and seemed to be devices to fill up the days of managers who wanted to feel important. Once I got involved in business improvement I joined the campaign to improve the meetings experience across the organisation.

Moving into consultancy work has allowed me to carry on my crusade for better meetings. I’ve summarised my ideas in this series of blog posts covering the whole alphabet. I’ll be covering a different letter each week, so watch this space!

Secrets of a good presentation (Part 3 of 3)

This is the third and final part of a three part blog post providing guidance on how to create and deliver an effective presentation. Part 1 provided guidance on how to develop your content. Part 2 gave tips on how to deliver your presentation.

This final part in the series considers how to handle questions and how to prepare for what might go wrong.

Secrets of a good presentation (Part 2 of 3)

This is the second part of a three part blog post providing guidance on how to deliver a good presentation. Part 1 explained how to develop your content. This part focuses on the actual delivery of the presentation.

Secrets of a good presentation (Part 1 of 3)

I’ve just spent a few days away at a conference where there was a huge variety of presentation styles and effectiveness of presentations, some good and some much less so. This has prompted me to write this three part post to remind people of some of the secrets of a good presentation.

Cultural differences in teams

We recently hosted two US students visiting the UK on the “People to People” programme.  Our children’s school plays host to the “Homestay” section of the programme. The US students stay with a UK family with kids of around the same age, go to school with them and generally experience everyday life in the UK.

One of the fascinating thing as a parent is observing how the US and UK kids discover and then overcome their cultural differences. Our school uniform always causes comment, especially the blazer. The US kids get asked to say words like “awesome” and we normally are amused about our garden being called a backyard.

Observing this made me think of the differences I see in culture between teams when I’m facilitating.