Who Is Ronald?

You need to know more about me to help you decide whether to read my thoughts, don’t you? I thought so!

Now middle-aged very happily married and living in Scotland. Says something to some people but does not say why my ideas about life have developed the way they have so read on.

After some disastrous times in my earlier life unhappy childhood parents unhappily married then divorced my own early and messy divorce, wrong career choices (not knowing what I really wanted) etc I never got anywhere for some years. went up a few ladders but the next throw of the dice always seemed to end up on a snake and sliding back to the basement level again. Recognise teh feeling?

Ended up living in Salvation Army hostels with homeless men for about a year but that straightened out some of my thinking about what I really wanted to do. Changed my thinking and career direction and rapidly went up the ladder to Chief Executive level dealing with all sorts of organisational problems and issues along the way.

After ten years there turning some companies around from near complete failure to successful growing organisations. This was largely by retraining managers to think in what the company needed not what they thought would be good for themselves. This enabled us to slash our training budget but get more informed management decisions to move in the right market led innovations. Tough decisions for many of them looking to get trained for new skills we as a company did not need but they quite fancied because it would be good on their CV Resume when they got qualified.

I simply showed them that if they were thinking of moving on in a couple of years they would stand more chance of getting a better job if they were leaving a very successful growing company than if they were leaving one which had just gone bankrupt because of their poor management decision making.

Help someone to achieve what they want and you will succeed in getting what you want from them. (Yes I know Zig Ziglar says it so much better than I do but I can’t remember exactly how he put it and cant find his quotation book at this time)

Spent a lot of time reflecting when I got there and realised it was time to change realising that There was no way of developing the management team any further and they needed to be able to work together without me. It also brought me the point of realising what I got most out of was developing people so they could work and live better and staying where I was working was taking me further away from that enjoyment and thrill.

I am now largely spending my time between running personalised training courses and coaching people. Some of this is on one ot one basis but also in team settings within the workplace. These two directions work fine because as one person develops their colleagues maybe going in different directions and often block progression.