Wednesday 20 January 2010

Where Did You Go For Lunch?

I started this blog to give an insight into the life of a UKOUG director. Today was the first board meeting of 2010 and it was defiantly different.

Ann Power who has been a director for 5 years and is responsible for HR and very important in our Apps community, works for Thales, and today's meeting was hosted by Ann at their new flagship building in Crawley.

It was a very busy day, we had our annual board appraisal to look at, we take this very seriously and use a questionnaire provided by the Institute of Directors, and it looks at all the areas that a board has to address to ensure the success of their organisation. Completing the questionnaire was a few hours work for each director. Then we look at the areas we score low on, and even more the areas were we don't agree on how well or otherwise we perform.

Today we also look at the governance of the organisation, and what that should include. Then we looked at how to encourage innovation from both the staff and our members, what new membership products should we introduce? You tell us please.

However the most memorable things of the day were totally unrelated, it snowed hard, all day and we all worried about getting home, however none of the snow settled but the piece de la resistance was the treat Ann arranged for lunchtime. She had arranged for us to go down onto the shop floor and see the flight simulators. Amazing, and we even went into one that was in use, and landed in Kuala Lumpur, not bad for a quick lunchtime trip! We even looked at the computer power behind the simulator. I would love to have photos in this blog but for obvious reasons camera phones etc were banned. We must say thank you to Ann but especially to Robert who was our guide.


UPDATE - Thales have sent us a few pictures of what we saw

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