Blog Posts

Read our free blog posts and gain knowledge, insights, tips and techniques

Are Great Leaders Born or Developed?

Leadership
Are leaders born? Are leaders developed? In this post I look at the debate that often comes up in our leadership skills training course and offer some thoughts on this.

Business and Leadership Lessons From The Apprentice – Smell What Sells

Lessons From the Apprentice
This weeks task was simple – take a set of products, try and sell them, find out what’s selling, re-invest your money in the moving products and sell them and so on. But it seemed that both of this week’s teams didn’t quite grasp this. For this week the teams were yet again mixed and ... Read more

Building a Personal Development Plan and Free Personal Development Planning Tools

Personal Development
One of the key things anyone should have is a personal development plan. The aim of a personal development plan is to help you to lay out your ideas of where you want to be in future and how you are going to get there. In order to build an effective personal development plan, you ... Read more

Business and Leadership Lessons From the Apprentice – Biscuits

Lessons From the Apprentice
This week the teams were tasked with bringing another new product to market, this time biscuits, and it was clear that lessons from previous tasks had still not been learnt. The teams were mixed again this week with Zoe taking charge of Venture and Helen Logic. Half of the teams were sent to a development ... Read more

Business and Leadership Lessons from the Apprentice – Selling in France

Leadership, Lessons From the Apprentice, Sales and Selling
This weeks task saw the team picking British products and selling them to French retailers. After a re-jig of the teams, Lord Sugar placed Tom in charge of Logic and Susan put herself forward to be in charge of Venture. The first job of the day was to split the teams and send one half ... Read more

Why Use Role Play in Learning and Recruitment

Training and Development
Role play is a learning tool where two or more people act out scenarios. One or more person will play the role of a specific character and the others will simply play themselves and interact with the characters. Role play allows those involved to interact and brings a different dimension to the learning experience. This ... Read more

Business and Leadership Lessons From the Apprentice – Freemiums

Lessons From the Apprentice, Negotiation Skills
In this weeks task, the teams were asked to produce a free premium magazine and sell advertising space in them. These free magazines that have come to be known as Freemiums are a massive business due to the volume that is given away and makes money from the advertising space that is available. It was ... Read more

Find Your Drive and Motivation and Don’t be a Plodder

Attitude and Behaviour, Motivation
Do you accept that OK is good enough? Without goals and motivation we will never strive for more. Have you become a plodder? In this post I share how I once felt like this and how I changed it.

Leadership and Business Lessons From the Apprentice – Rubbish

Lessons From the Apprentice
This weeks task was all about rubbish! More specifically it was about Logistics, Planning and knowing the value of time and product. The task was to collect rubbish and make a profit from it. Trying to charge more collection than it would to dump as well as looking out for a valuable product that could ... Read more

How to Manage Change and Make It Stick

Change Management, Managing Change
How to manage change and make it stick. This post looks at some of the reasons why change fails and ways to manage change more effectively and successfully