*** Free taster session on Tues 22nd Jan *** Leadership Development Programme for the Leaders of Established Small and Medium Businesses along the A34 Corridor from Witney, Abingdon and Oxford to Hungerford, Newbury, Thatcham and Theale
Event on 2013-01-22 08:00:00
********************************************
Revised. New start date Thur 21st February.
Free taster sessions on 22nd January at 8am and 11:30am.
********************************************
Most business leaders value the views of other Managing Directors highly and we at MD2MD and Harwell Innovation Centre believe strongly in enabling leaders to learn with and from other business leaders. We are then delighted to announce that we have partnered to provide a programme of such learning for business leaders in the A34 corridor.
MD2MD provides leadership development for Managing Directors in two unusual ways which we believe makes it much more palatable for the leader of Small and Medium Enterprises like you.
- Firstly, you don’t need to take a long period of time out of your business. If you join, you attend regular monthly meetings where the goal is to identify simple implementable actions that will drive the success of your business. This is continuous improvement applied to leadership development!
- Secondly, as it says on the tin, the ethos and process of MD2MD is to enable and encourage you to learn practically from real world experience of peers and expert practitioners.
The magic of a facilitated peer group like MD2MD is that the ‘experts’ are other full time business bosses, who are themselves coalface leaders, just like you. Each joins to share their advice and experience, as long as you are prepared to do the same in return. Nobody is there to pitch services to the others, and your peers become your ‘board without baggage’.
So why not join the group we will be running at the Harwell Innovation Centre in 2013? Your commitment in joining will be quite simple:
- To pay a small fee as a contribution to the cost of running the group.
- To attend regularly. Out of respect for the full group we will ask you to do everything possible to attend all five meetings because your contribution is of vital benefit to your peers. And to reinforce this, if you do attend 4 / 5 meetings we will refund 50% of your fees (or pay it to a charity of your choice).
- To treat the discussions with honesty and confidentiality, so that you and your peers can be completely open knowing you will get honest and confidential advice.
The group is exclusively for the leaders of established businesses, with 10-200 staff, with a drive to learn with and from peers how to drive their business to the next level. Typical challenges for participants will be getting their team highly motivated to work together in overcoming strategic, revenue generation, customer and operations challenges.
To protect the ability of participants to be able to talk about their challenges openly with peers, we reserve the right to limit the group membership to an appropriate set of business leaders, enthusiastic to learn with and from each other, rather than to sell to or preach at each other. In the event that we cannot accept you into the group, your fees will of course be refunded in full.
This group will meet from 8am to 11am on Thu 21 Feb, Mon 18 Mar, Fri 26 Apr, Wed 22 May and Tues 16th July and include an expert practitioner as a guest speaker each month.
MD2MD has also kindly offered to provide qualifying participants with a complimentary place at their business leaders' conference LeaderFest in Buckinghamshire on Wed 19th June 2013 and a complimentary guest place at a full day MD2MD meeting with a top professional speaker on Tues 10th September.
Membership of this group for the programme will cost £500 + vat with £250 refunded if you attend at least 4/5 sessions. ie £50 per session for active participants.
And there is a money back guarantee! If, at the end of the first session, you feel the event doesn't live up to the expectations we have set here, then simply tell us in writing where we have gone wrong within 2 days and we will refund your fees without question.
The following are comments from Managing Directors and Chief Executives that have previously participated in a similar programme:
The peer group sessions were a breath of fresh air to attend and participate in. The warm and sharing atmosphere made all of the debates and discussions enjoyable rather than a chore. The varying industries represented helped to bring a different perspective to each topic and certainly made it easier to look at business challenges in an alternative light from the norm. I also feel that I have come out of these sessions with some new friends.
I found the opportunity to share and discuss my issues and those of others really useful. As the founder and CEO of my business I get so involved in it that it is refreshing to be among fellow businessmen in the same situation and realise that often your problems are the same as theirs. To have 10 viewpoints on a topic certainly helps put different perspectives and therefore directions to aid solutions. I liked my afternoons with the IoD Peer Group, the speakers were always thought provoking and the trouble shooting sessions helped to remind me that I am not alone in the issues that a business can face and indeed helped me to make more than one decision.
Joining the IoD MD2MD group had immediate benefits as we implemented ideas discussed at the meetings into our business successfully.
As a busy Managing Director, I am deluged with invitations for business panels, seminars, and training courses – many run by banks and professional firms as promotional activities and some selling training. I turn nearly all of them down. However, I recently joined the MD2MD group and have found it extremely useful. MD2MD offers a totally different approach by bringing together a small number of experienced businessmen currently working as Managing Directors to analyse and discuss real business situations. The discussions are confidential and Bob Bradley acts as first rate facilitator for the process. Interesting guest speakers also feature in some of the sessions. I would wholeheartedly recommend MD2MD to any Managing Director wrestling with the complexities of running a business in the current difficult climate.
If the truth be known, I was a little sceptical at first as to the value of the concept. However, having now attended the 2012 programme you should know that the sessions were informative, professional and rewarding. You cleverly orchestrated a like-minded group of professionals, who one way or the other were all experiencing similar happenings and experiences within their businesses during the testing times we are living in. The combination of professional speakers reminding us of various techniques and performance methods served as an appropriate boost to all of us. That coupled with confirmation that our peers were all experiencing similar events, was extremely useful, reassuring and comforting.
Sometimes in business being at the top can be very lonely. Meeting other professionals in a similar position dealing with matters in most instances in a similar way, resulted in a position which I am sure gave most of us the confidence and ability to continue without the usual underlying concerns we all deal with on a day to day basis. For that reason I would like to congratulate you and recommend your programme to any doubting professional.
at Harwell Innovation Centre
Curie Avenue
Didcot, United Kingdom