Two weeks ago we took time out from our day to day business for an away day as a team. One of the key quality objectives for us for the year ahead is to SIMPLIFY our business. I laid out to the team the vision and the benefits of working towards better results, clearer thinking and execution. I gave examples of challenging processes, checking daily task activity for relevance and working to the power of five.

So what has happened? The feedback on the session itself was great and left me full of expectation. In asking the team today what difference it has made since our away day session, the answer was varied. Some have fully embraced the message whilst others have used perceived barriers as reasons not to change.

As a business…

[Continue Reading]

The Fit For Business (FFB) team have been working with businesses across the Eastern Region to promote the idea of The Big Lunch.
Healthy Eating and Mental Wellbeing make up two of the five core components of the FFB Programme – so linking in with the ‘Big Lunch’ concept has been great to get our business placed ‘Champions’ to promote and run ‘Big Lunches’ within their own workplace!

Despite the event being on a Sunday, businesses have still been keen to hold their own ‘Big Lunch’ during the week running up to the big day! [Continue Reading]

Returning to Beijing so soon after the Games last year was an emotional experience and as I walked through the terminal to meet my hosts from the British Council, the memories came flooding back. It was surreal to think I was back in the city that has changed my life even more than the previous Games I attended as a swimmer.
For this trip I was visiting to recount the experience from last year and also share my story of getting to the top of the podium in two sports. My overnight flight had been relatively short for the distance travelled, just 7 hours and I arrived and was ready for a trip to the Summer Palace before the work of the trip started the following day. One thing I had not appreciated on previous trips was the lack of local…

[Continue Reading]

Here at Creating Excellence we are excited by technology!! Working with our friends at Pixelwork (who designed our new and enhanced website) we are embracing the concept of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 for those of you not already in the know is the technical terminology referring to the new second generation of web development and web design, with Web 1.0 – the first generation - being the World Wide Web itself. Web 2.0 is very complex to explain, to make it easier to understand I found a good ‘YouTube’ video upload that explains it, to see the video follow this link; http://blogs.sun.com/robin/entry/web_2_0_explained.

To simplify the term though, Web 2.0…

[Continue Reading]

Like many business principles, the past few months has been a time of reflection and resetting of parameters. We have reviewed our offer, our market positioning, rationalised our structure and focussed upon some key cultural issues. Out of this I hope that we at Creating Excellence will become a leaner and fitter organisation offering a great service to our customers and friends.

One of the best pieces of advice I received during this period was to “do in the good times what you have to do in the bad times!” This rang very true with me as there has been a real need to focus upon what makes our business good, what underpins our work and to recognise what success looks like. So, in short, cut out the fluffy stuff,…

[Continue Reading]

Vital tips for cutting costs and handling staff expectations
Thursday 14 May 2009 by Patricia Wheatley Burt (FCIPD)

OK, if some organisations ‘fessed-up’, the first tranche of redundancies have included people who: weren’t performing; didn’t fit culturally; were too challenging; were too demanding; due to retire; didn’t have a clearly defined brief/job; and so on. In fact, the process was designed to test the water, show willingness to address problems and to cut costs – often driven by finance demanding an instant alleviation of fixed overheads. And you managed to keep the number of lay-offs below the magic 20, or 100 – to avoid the legal requirement of a one- or three-month consultation period, but will this…

[Continue Reading]

Inspirational Speaker Michael McGrath recently had an interview featured in the May 2009 edition of magazine Hospitality North – ‘Top Tips for Effective Presentations’, take at look at the article here

Click here to download Michael McGraths Feature interview - 680K (PDF

[Continue Reading]

Jim Lawless asks:

Who should decide upon the leader’s direction? The leader, by definition.

Rule 6 - There is no safety in numbers. The second of the Leadership Rules in Taming Tigers.

Once upon a time, the trend was for leadership by principle and consideration of what the “right path” might be to achieve the grand vision. We voted for people we would trust to make the right call. Often they failed, for sure, but there was a direction and a “lead” provided to the country.

It then became apparent that if your plan was to “market” a party to the highest number of voters, rather than to risk “selling” your vision for the nation to those voters, then leadership by focus groups was a more effective…

[Continue Reading]

I appeared on the popular TV show, “The Gadget Show” on Channel 5 which was aired on Monday night at 8pm, but will be repeated all week on FiveR at different times. I had to compete against the presenter in three different skating challenges and the whole idea was to see whether technology could beat a world class athlete at their sport. You can check out the show by clicking on this link http://demand.five.tv/Episode.aspx?episodeBaseName=C5144920011  Be sure to check out the show to see who comes out on top!

[Continue Reading]

Hello and welcome to my blog! I’m Lesley Owusu, Great Britain international track and field athlete, educator, motivational and inspirational speaker. As I am making my inspirational speakers blogging debut I wanted to take this opportunity to briefly share a few facts about myself in order of provide a better insight about my diverse background and personality.

I spent my early childhood in Ghana, grew up in Berkshire and later studied Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska in the USA. I later stumbled into education due to my curiosity and pursued a path in teaching. I have been working in education for the past ten years which has been a very rewarding and challenging adventure. The experiences…

[Continue Reading]