John Bland’s long service award

This week the entire senior team of trainers at Global Integration is at the company team meeting. This time the team is meeting in Milton Keynes in the UK – the only  town in the UK (I believe) with a grid system, ensuring that our US team members feel very at home.

We, like many of our customers, work as a virtual team, so other than the normal company business – which I’ll report on later  this week – we make time for two important activities that we ‘miss’ in a virtual team: celebration and community.

The celebration element at this time’s event is John Bland’s long service award. John joined the company at the same time as Rod Farnan, now some 13 years ago, and the team went for a meal together to celebrate at the rather lovely (and very English) Paris House, Woburn.

John is the most incredible ‘achiever’. Many will know about his Olympic background, fewer will know that he has absolutely mastered the cello. which gave CEO Kevan Hall the opportunity to make some very bad orchestra jokes as he gave a presentation celebrating John’s achievements – which extend pretty much to whatever  he turns his hand to.

John is organised, reliable and determined to excel at everything he does, putting in the practise and effort to make things happen, and had prepared a small speech himself. His speech focussed on his enjoyment of his role at Global Integration, where he has the freedom to develop his own practise without having to do the business management bits (tax, accountancy, planning and so on).

We, in turn, are all pleased to celebrate being able to call John a colleague, and all benefit from John’s contributions to both course materials and the way we deliver

Our community activity is yet to come. We are indoor skydiving this afternoon (UK time). We won’t blog it – it’s about us having time to get to know and catch up with each other – but do keep an eye on some of our social spaces  for photos.