I'm a little humbled to be the cover story for Professional Marketing Forum Magazine (PM Forum). My blog this week is simply my article they have run this month on the importance of teamwork in the face of adversity. Here it is.....

So I’ve been busy working with one company over the past few weeks. The topics have been around Vision, Mission and Values.

For years when I was working in Corporate World, this area was always a little bit of a mystery to me. It was always lots of words. Often crammed in on some matrix structure onto one page to get as much detail in as possible with lots of explanations.

Got a moment?

Listen to this great reminder to slow down and enjoy the important things in life read by my talented school friend Pete.

It took me most of the weekend to get my head around what I experienced last Thursday.

I felt very privileged to be invited as a special guest on a day organised by the Good Lab and Newco and compered by Oli Barrett MBE) where the Innovation Leaders from the UK’s 10 largest charities were treated to an amazing day long safari of experiences.

As I find myself getting increasingly involved with speaking gigs, projects, non exec roles and consulting projects, I’m having to be increasingly careful with my time.

When I worked in a large corporate many years ago I used to be pretty cynical about corporate values. Words. More words. What did they really mean. Did anyone really care about them? They were something that was paid lip service to once a year and then ignored.

So, its been just over 6 months since we completed sailing around the world. One of the things I reflect on was that for the 2 years ago, we were virtually in a news black out.

Way back in early 2007, my previous business Trovus was only a few months old.

We ran an event in partnership with a small distribution company VADition. One of the team running VADition was charismatic entrepreneur Barrie Desmond. I think back then we had 30 or so people in the room to talk about the power of communities.

I’m feeling like a novice. Like when you start again at a new school and you’re the bottom of the pile and you need to figure out how things work. It’s a strange feeling and you find yourself asking for a lot of help.

The date was 13th June 2009. The location. My sisters garden in Kent, England for her birthday party.