Team working under difficult climatic conditions

It's not getting any better is it? My punctuality on the blog front, I mean.

This time around, my excuse is that I was despatched on a management training course at Ashridge College.

And I have to say it was a damn good excuse too. Very hard work and worth every minute.

For those of you familiar with this sort of thing, it may be of moderate interest to you to know that Animal Pharm's publisher is:

A) A Pragmatist, Activist and Reflector, in precisely equal measures

B) Red-Blue, with a Red-Green-Blue conflict sequence

C) A SHAPER and to a lesser extent a plant and a resource investigator

And that's just for starters...

Ashridge's Introduction to Management Course was, without doubt, the most practical and valuable training course I've ever attended. And course tutor Barbara Banda was extraordinarily effective and inspiring. I'm still faintly astonished by how much I learned and how quickly.

I'm also deeply chuffed to be able to say that I am already seeing results in terms of more effective working relationships with one other department in particular.

Ashridge is also, incidentally, probably the most beautiful business college in the world. I grant you I haven't seen very many - three or four at most. But nevertheless I feel pretty damn confident in that assertion.

On the Thursday morning of our course, we woke to hear that almost the whole of the UK was blanketed with snow. And the college looked pretty much exactly the way it does at the top of this page. Stunning.

Mind you, it did mean that the staff struggled to get to work and Barbara arrived a little over half an hour late.

But no matter, we put the team-working sessions and the previous evening's workshop on work-life balance and time management to good use.

We built a snowman...