One of my favourite networking or netlearning events is The Distinguished Address Series at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol.
It is a great place for learning, developing and growing and the fact that the Bristol business and academic community is out in force is a networking bonus.
The vibe and energy in the room (lecture theatre) is electric. The Bristol business community (private and public sector) is out in force and the academic community too. It takes me right back to student days at Business School and brings back all those feelings of excitement and optimism about the future and the feeling that anything is possible. It would be wonderful to have more attendance from teachers and pupils from secondary education, so they could see for themselves that business success doesn’t come in a straight line.
In January I was lucky enough to attend the “Boldness in Business” address from Lord Karan Bilimoria CBE, DL and Chairman Cobra Beer.
Lord Karan Bilimoria is a talented natural story-teller and he shared his narrative of building the cobra brand from scratch in a humorous and entertaining way and engaged the audience beautifully.
His messages and teaching were so powerful that I had to write this article and share some of them with you.
- Good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgement
- Very few businesses are overnight successes. Success is not a destination, it is a journey and a very rocky bumpy journey with lots of ups and downs
- One word sets apart successful entrepreneurs from others … GUTS – it takes GUTS to do it in the first place and GUTS to keep on doing it
- Serendipity is seeing what everyone sees but thinking what no one else has thought
- Luck is when determination meets opportunity. There are always waves that are going past you in life. If you are determined, you will catch one of those waves, if not they will keep going past you.
- The 10 Ps of a successful business
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
- People – nothing without the people
- Phinance
- Passion NOT pension
- Profit
- Partnership
- Principles – it is better to fail doing the right thing than rather than succeed doing the wrong thing ..
- One word sets apart successful entrepreneurs from others … GUTS – it takes GUTS to do it in the first place and GUTS to keep on doing it
- Creative does not mean being good at art. If we encouraged our children from primary school to be creative we would double our GDP growth rate
- We hire on WILL not SKILL
- We were rightsourcing NOT outsourcing
Listen to the podcast here https://soundcloud.com/uwebristol
@UWE #Brandbuilding #startup #BristolLectures #Backtobusinessschool #Lifelonglearning
Sarah Taylor Phillips is a Future of Work strategist, speaker and founder of Career Voyage. With a background spanning AI, fmcg marketing, headhunting, interim management and entrepreneurship, she has spent more than 30 years’ connecting people, strengths and opportunities.
Today, Sarah works with organisations to attract, engage, retain, retrain and exit talent across age-diverse and intergenerational workforces from early and returning talent to experienced workers. Her work focuses on better work design, job sharing, flexible and fractional careers, knowledge transfer, rethinking retirement and reengineering role for an AI- enabled world.
At the heartof Career VoyAGE is a simple question:
How can we design work differently to make better use of the talent we already have?