Still way behind on blogging a whole load of stuff. From the East Midlands SSE new SMART SE project to CIC caps and the SE 100 index. But most of all I wanted to blog about our previous Fellows seminar.

We're running a series of 'M' seminars (money, macro, management etc) for SSE Fellows (those who've completed an SSE programme over the past 10 years) at the moment, and the first, on money, involved the charismatic and passionate Tim Campbell (of Bright Ideas Trust) who had some good tips around negotiation, around what to invest in (and about how Bright Ideas are judging this), about the influence of his own upbringing on how he approaches money, and about how steep his learning curve was in some of the financial areas. Our Director of Learning Marcia did a great job in getting some good questions from everyone beforehand, so that everyone could make the most of his time (which we got more of than we asked for). Here's a clip of Tim, who's also a social enterprise ambassador, talking about Bright Ideas Trust in a video made by one of their beneficiaries:

Following a charismatic TV celebrity and leading entrepreneur, sadly for our Fellows, came yours truly. I was talking about some tools to work with in the recession / current economic climate, namely the legendary Mission-Money Matrix (and a new recession version) for decision making / prioritisation / strategy…and a further partnership spectrum, which I think is useful for those looking at collaborating / partnering in different ways (which will inevitably be happening more, IMHO). It seemed to go down fairly well. See what you make of the slideset (and credit me if you use…!):

We also took photos of those who attended (and printed them out with our nice new Canon Selphy printer: neat bit of kit!). So hello to Mobeen, David, Mark, Andrae, Kathy, Jen, Rosa, Oleander et al, but star of the show was definitely Juliet's son who not only earned money by bringing Fellows tea and coffee throughout the afternoon, but also had the best photo taken. Clearly, as the caption says (Year of Fellowship: 2021), Jaan is one for the future.