COMMENT
COMMENT
Fiona Russell-Horne Editor-in-Chief - BMJ
here’s one thing this industry seems to do better than any other and that’s talking. The business benefits of the networking and socialising opportunities this industry presents have been well documented, but sometimes, it takes something like the annual industry conferences to really hammer it home.
Happy talky-talky T
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
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The chance to mix and mingle with like-minded people in the loveliest venues is a great perk of the job, (though, as I am constantly telling colleagues, that still doesn’t make it a holiday). It also has other benefits in that conversations sparked up in informal settings can sometimes take you in different directions, with people that you have either not met before or had the chance to really talk to outside of a formal business setting. I’ve never yet returned from a conference without having met someone whose business was new to me, or with ideas for features, articles, interviews and directions. Sometimes it takes those informal settings to learn new things about people you’ve met before - occasionally quite surprising. None of this is news to anyone who has been to any of the industry conferences, whether they be the old style BMF Conference (and the NMBS version), the all-industry four-way coalition that was THE Conference or the new style biennial All-Industry BMF and NMBS. Nor is the fact that getting everyone together in one place means you can see people in three or four days that it would take months to get round when back at the ranch. These events aren’t just about the informal networking though of course. As someone who was involved in arranging THE conference I know how hard it is to find conference speakers who are interesting enough and relevant enough to drag people into the conference sessions and keep them there, while not falling foul of the quite-interesting-
but-what’s-it-got-to-do-with-my-business shrug. Or speakers for whom your event isn’t just another stop on their merry-go-round of making money by telling other people how to run their businesses better. I’ve seen a lot of those in my time. I can remember a handful of them.
The underlying theme of last month’s BMF All- Industry Conference, which is reported on in these pages, was talking. Sure, most of these events revolve around that, but this time it was centre stage – quite literally. Nick Knowles wasn’t just thanking the industry for their contributions to his DIY SOS programme, he highlighted the benefits of exercise and, yes, talking and opening up, in combating mental illness. Johnny Benjamin and Neil Laybourn: the latter talked to the former at just the right moment when Benjamin was at his lowest ebb. Lord Prescott: the need to talk and listen across the political spectrum, Neil Lawrence: the work that Gibbs and Dandy and the wider Local Merchant Group has done in making people from different businesses across the country feel part of the whole group by talking and listening to them. Then there was Michael Caulfield, sports psychologist, who took the idea of talking and listening, allowing your friends, colleagues, family and employees to open up and super-charged it. Along with his dog, Sparky, Caulfield is becoming the go-to man for sports people and sports managers who just need a chance to talk to someone who they know will listen to them and not judge.
One of the many, many things that Caulfield said that has stuck with me, was his description of a football manager chatting with one of his players who kept batting back every question with yes, all good, yes, no problems. Until - Manager: Seen anything of Sparky lately? Player: Yeah. I love that dog. I love those talks.
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www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net July 2019
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