AMBS – North West Business Breakfast

Dropping the C-Bomb. Competition, collaboration, coaching and culture. How to build a collaboration culture in your enterprise through performance management.

Date: This event has been postponed

Speaker:  Michael Brown – Chief Executive Officer at Asociat, entrepreneur, managing director, guest lecturer, writer, author. WINNER – gold for Business Book Awards 2021 Leadership for the Future award.

Humans evolved to be both competitive and collaborative. Like tectonic plates – these compulsions constantly grind together to create heat. This session looks at the barriers to effective collaboration, how to navigate around them and how to channel the urge to compete to allow collaboration to shine. Dropping the C Bomb will encourage people to look at performance management in a different way – by focussing on its collective impact in the organisation.

We’ll look at the accepted view of PM, we’ll challenge it, we’ll look at building better culture, how improved organizational culture can save the world, and which human behaviour wins out in an organizational setting – competing or collaborating.

About the speaker: Michael is a founder and long-term managing-director of creative industries businesses. He guided his last venture (MKTG/ www.mktg.com) to become an international marketing organisation with 32 offices in 20 countries.

He stepped down in December 2020 to found Asociat www.asociat.co.uk. Asociat helps brands to identify and actively address the needs of the communities they serve by forging community partnerships. Those partnerships might include taking on digital poverty or improving access to sports or music. Or it might be pro-actively improving the quality of living in urban environments.

Michael realised that business can and should be kinder and inclusive after he successfully completed a crowd funding campaign to create and launch, what is thought to be, the world’s first mental health drop-in centre inside a soup-kitchen. A social enterprise he now helps to lead.

He has a particular interest in the psychology of conflict and compromise.  This arose after he spectacularly fell out with his fellow shareholders in a business he led for a decade. The lessons learned gave rise to I Don’t Agree; Michael’s first book, which won GOLD at the Business Book Awards 2021 in the Leadership for the Future category. I Don’t Agree is now set of release on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka in January 2022.

“Who would have thought that a book about disagreement would be such fun? Brown’s thesis, zestily delivered, is that conflict is absolutely necessary in any kind of group, but we tend to be rather bad at it – shouting matches and shrinking violets never solved anything. I Don’t Agree navigates the barriers to constructive dialogue and challenges preconceptions of what a healthy culture looks like.”

– Adam Gale, Editor, Management Today

To order I Don’t Agree by our speaker: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0857197657

If you have any questions please email madonna.fyne@manchester.ac.uk