Twitting

About ten years ago, my son was touring South East Asia and I was working for a client in London where I spent a lot of time waiting for meetings and had access to the Internet.

I started sending him short e-mails. These were commentaries on things going on at that time. I remember writing a short story about the Beckhams.

I suppose, therefore, I must be a natural twitter.

Having read repeatedly about the business benefits of joining Twitter.com, I have done so. I am fascinated, already, by people joining my readership, although I have no idea how this happens.

The benefit of twitting, for me, is that I can write my thoughts at any time, rather than having to wait until I prepare a formal newsletter. Also, I am no longer constrained to put my thoughts into a coaching context.

The lesson I have to learn, though, is how to write in such short statements. Perhaps, this very constraint will defeat my object.

If you have any experience of using Twitter, then please add your comments, either as a comment on this blog, or on my Twitter page.

Throughout my career as a management development consultant I have worked at senior management level and have particularly enjoyed helping organisations develop or revise their vision, mission and values. People at the top have the greatest leverage on the success or otherwise of their organisation, and my belief and experience is that if they really jointly understand and commit to a vision and strategy this is one of the most powerful areas in which I can help.

In addition, the transition from manager to director is a major change in identity, role and relationship, and is an area where I have assisted clients over recent years.

It is my belief that the introduction of well-managed processes at board level, particularly in the management of board meetings, can have a major impact on the effectiveness and success of organisations.

As a result, I have decided to make my involvement in board and director development more specific. In August last year, I started to build dedicated pages for a new director tab on the Brefi Group website. As they say, one thing led to another. On the advice of a colleague, I employed a copywriter to help me in this process. He advised me that one of the most successful ways of promoting an activity these days is a traditional postal mailshot. So we discussed a campaign. As part of the campaign we decided that it would be useful for me to prepare an authoritative free giveaway report. This I have done. In fact, research and analysis, writing and editing are all long-term interests of mine.

The next stage has been to move the director pages into a new dedicated website.

I am delighted to be able to launch this today. Do have a look at the website, which can be found at www.corporatedirector.co.uk – where you can download my free report, which is entitled "Board Performance Evaluation and Director Appraisal". I would like to give credit to my designer, Chris Walker of Expressive Design.

There has been much discussion in the United Kingdom for several years now about the importance of corporate governance and rules and restrictions for company directors. The Combined Code now requires that companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange carry out an annual evaluation of the performance of their board. This is the theme of my newly promoted specialism.

The evaluation process is a mechanism to improve board effectiveness, maximise strengths and tackle weaknesses, leading to an immediate improvement of performance throughout the organisation.

It takes account of my skills of analysis, and involves the application of the Institute of Directors benchmarks defined in their publication "Standards for the Board".

Of course, the probable outcome will be opportunities for me to facilitate corporate retreats, board development and executive coaching for individual directors ;-)

This weekend I am attending Dr John Demartini's Breakthrough Experience in London. I have been resisting this for some years because, if it is possible, I tend to do too much personal development. However the feedback from people who have attended this event has been so great that I have finally succumbed.

I shall be interested to discover what discoveries lie ahead!

Richard Winfield is founder of Brefi Group.
An international facilitator, he coaches and
facilitates directors and boards in transition:

helping them to make progress by

bringing structure and clarity

to their thinking.

USEFUL LINKS

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• Centre for Director Development


• Demartini events


• Expressive Design

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