Inside Global Integration

From here on in, Friday is the day we ‘dress down’ on the Life in a Matrix blog. It’s the day when we can let you get to know us as a company and as individuals – and hopefully we’ll get to know you better too…

Having kicked off each week with our ‘Matrix Monday’ literature reviews, and shared some thoughts on our subject matter over the course of the week (if you’re on Twitter, look for  #matrixmonday), we thought we’d keep Friday as (mostly) the day we  post some of the things we’re doing as a company.

Kicking this new series off  today is something of a round up, with the promise of more to come.

Many read with pleasure about Phil Stockbridge’s charity trip to the Rainbows4Children project in Ethiopia. I caught up with Phil this week to ask him about his trip. In a fairly cut off part of Africa, about as far away from the hubbub of city life as you could get, what stood out wasn’t the cultural difference, which is what I’d expected.

“There were the challenges of rural Ethiopian infrastructure – intermittent water and electricity –  of course, but what struck me,” said Phil, “was how similar the problems are to those faced by the corporate groups I normally work with. Working across cultures, in teams of people with slightly different group and personal aims and views, presents a common set of challenges. The setting, of course, is unique, but that’s true of every single situation.”

Last week saw one of our regular team meet ups.  As our senior consultants are almost constantly either on the road delivering training and consultancy, or preparing to do just that working from home.  As a global virtual team ourselves, we practise what we preach, and get together periodically to discuss ideas, share learning, and generally push forward what we’re doing to keep our content fresh, relevant and challenged for relevancy.

This time we spent some time looking at creating some interactive games, looking at some of the newest ideasthat Kevan Hall has encapsulated in his new book (Making the Matrix Work, published at the end of this year, launching in January), and our community day (important for bonding the team and solving individual queries) was, excitingly, spent gliding  – hence the picture.

We also celebrated Rod Farnan’s long service award – more on that one next Friday, once I’ve prised some photos out of the team.

You may have noticed that we now have an ‘About Global Integration’ page on our site – it was pretty hidden on our old one. The welcome video on the page is one of the new ones to the site. Recorded by CEO Kevan Hall, we’ll post it up later today with a transcript for those who are unable to access YouTube in their country.

To round things off, whilst we’re on the subject of videos, some may remember the very first video we had in on the global working video competion last year. The young man who submitted it, Rhys (aged 11 at the time) caught the attention of CEO Kevan Hall. Rhys wants to be Formula One racing mechanic, and as Kevan’s had an abiding interest in cars and rallying, he sponsored Rhys to attend a course for young mechanics in Vancouver over the summer as a thank you for letting us extend the competition deadline. Rhys has promised to blog his experience  for next Friday as well. (His video entry is here: Global Working: Racing Mechanics.)

Photos of the Ethiopian trip and the gliding will be on both Flickr and on Facebook early next week. So there’s plenty to stay tuned for!

Let us know if  ‘dress down Friday’ works for you.

Claire Thompson

September 2012