It should be easy to make a pizza. After all, the dough is just a handful of simple ingredients - flour, water, yeast – and then there is just the oven time. If you apply the standard approach, you’ll probably achieve a base that’s OK... But nothing better.
Pizza bases vary enormously, in texture, presentation, taste and quality. The pizza is now effectively a world commodity, but the range, variety and quality is breathtaking – from breathtakingly delicious to gasp-inducingly bland. This spectrum of quality is a major concern to those who guard the origins of the iconic food and genuinely care for its heritage, the Neapolitans: so much so that in 1984 they formed the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana - the True Neapolitan Pizza Association – to protect and preserve the taste and texture of the authentic pizza. The AVPN lists all those standard ingredients: but the secrets of perfection are in the preparation techniques and the baking.
What has the humble pizza to do with organising training events?
Well, similar attitudes exist. Those that commission training events believe that Standardisation and Commoditisation are good things. After all, you know what you’re going to get and what price you are going to pay, you can budget better and model your costs more effectively so that you know what profit or R.o.I you are going to make. The approach also represents the easy option and usually the most straightforward. In other words, you get by with something that’s OK.
But more often than not, as with the pizza, the standard approach usually means blandness – uninspiring events that may achieve the turnover but fail to excite the customer, or in our terms, the delegate. Because the approach excludes the key techniques that make for truly effective events - creativity, inspiration, innovation, anticipation, exceptional support and service. I’d argue that ignoring any or all of these factors actually threatens what you’re really trying to achieve: inspired, motivated and well trained people.
More than ever, corporate training has to be optimised if it is to reinforce an organisation’s competitive advantage. But why go to great lengths selecting the right courses for your people to attend, the best trainer possible to deliver and inspire them, then care so little for the environment in which it is delivered? It puts the whole end product at risk. As with the pizza, it’s the base that counts most of all, and the best base for your event is an environment in which your people won’t be distracted by poor or unwilling service, facilities that don’t meet the needs of the trainers, extraneous noise or lack of responsiveness from those who staff the venue.
In a Conference Centre of Excellence, the base combines the best ingredients and advanced techniques - conditions that not only optimise the education process, but also give you those vital by-products of getting people together: effective and spontaneous networking and the ready sharing of best practice. We believe that those results, together with service that is intuitively supportive and rates that are truly all-inclusive, give the organiser real value for money.
To get all your ingredients right for a successful training event, call us on 0845 230 1414 or visit our website - or next time, ask your agent to book a Conference Centre of Excellence, for the very best results.
No comments:
Post a Comment