Two of us attended an HR Directors Summit in Birmingham last week. This is one of those events where organisations like us pay a lot of money on the promise of a number of guaranteed one-to-one meetings with the great and the good of the HR world. New business speed-dating if you like. It was an experience. The down side is that it involved two days shut in a hotel at the NEC wearing a suit and a fixed grin, manning a stand that looked good (no, it really did) but few people wanted to stop at because they were really there to learn about flexible benefits or open learning or something. So the opportunities for constructive networking were actually fairly limited. That said, we did have 16 prearranged meetings of 30 minutes each. We had spent a long time preparing for each of these and, on the whole, were rewarded with constructive conversations on topics that mainly centred around Employer Branding and Internal Communications. It’s not an approach to business development I would recommend for the faint hearted and it is early days yet as we begin following up the leads. But we hope the investment proves worthwhile and will keep the blog updating with news. Watch this space!