Whilst on holiday last week David took the time to catch up on his favourite author, Terry Pratchett, by reading two more books from his Discworld series in between pedalo rides and sandcastle building with the kids. 

If you haven’t read any of the Discworld series we strongly recommend that you do…especially if you work in communications and/or have an interest in the written word.  The books are loaded with witty and irresistible language that kept causing David to stop, think, chuckle then read the section out to his wife after saying ‘oh you have got to listen to this’.  

One thing that we really like is how the stories from this surreal magical Discworld (which is flat and is carried through space on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle…to describe just a few of its interesting features!) help you think about real life.  For example, there is a tribe on the Discworld who have managed to develop a crop that they harvest this year and plant next year.  It doesn’t do you much good to think about that for too long but with time (to be burned) on the sun longer last week David couldn’t help thinking about how sometimes we put too much pressure on immediate results…sometimes at the detriment of longer term growth.

A couple of years ago an MD of a large UK company shared with us her strategy and asked for our comments.  I think we said something like ‘your strategy is the equivalent of chopping down the tree to get the apples off.’

One of our clients, Northern Rail, recently won a prestigious award with a little bit of help from Rambutan!

They won the ‘most effective use of internal communications’ category at the HR Excellence Awards 2009. The judges said: “In a particularly strong category, Northern Rail stood out for its comprehensive, practical and multi-dimensional approach to internal communications”, and since we’ve been working closely with Northern Rail for quite some time in this area we’re pretty pleased!

We’ll share more details about the measurable difference that internal communication is making at Northern when our full website’s up and running, but just to give you a taste: in their employee survey in 2006 the score for the question ‘I am kept up to date with regular news / information relating to our business’ was at 59% and with a clear strategy and lots of hard work this went up to 82%!

Well done to Jo, Jane, Richard and Heidi and everyone else at Northern whose determination to refresh the way people communicate is achieving great results. We love working with you!

When we have spent time refreshing the ways you can think about it!

Last week at the National College for Schools Leadership (NCSL) we ran ‘the power of thinking differently’ workshop which helped people from varying roles in NCSL find creative solutions to improve the way they work and think.  The feedback we received was fantastic including this from Mayuri who attended the workshop.  She said;

“Brilliant, brilliant course.  Content, delivery style, fun-factor – brilliant… innovative and entertaining whilst educating us and making sure we got hands-on experience during the day.  Can’t rate the day highly enough!”

If you want to know how an everyday paperclip can encourage your people to find incredible ways to generate ideas that make a difference to the way they work then we should chat!

I read in the Independent last week that only 7% of youngsters in the UK are privately educated, but 75% of judges, 70% of finance directors, 55% of solicitors, more than 50% of top journalists and 45% of senior civil servants are public-school products.

Well-paid professional jobs continue to be passed down between the generations: doctors, lawyers, accountants and bankers typically grow up in families with incomes two-thirds higher than average.  Whist I am not surprised to see that privately educated children and those from more wealthy families do better, the level of the inequality shocked me.

There are loads more details on the Independent’s website at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-big-question-why-has-britain-become-more-unequal-and-can-it-be-changed-1755796.html .  Have a look and join the blog with any thoughts.