Phil Dickson

Philip Michael Dickson, Commercial Director

Age: 48. I'm middle-aged; my age has gone to my middle.

Role: To win clients and increase the revenue of the business; design and deliver innovative and commercially effective leadership, commercial skills, team development and soft skills programmes - all over the world; to lead my team of trainers and account managers in giving the best value to our wide range of clients and to retain their patronage through spectacularly great training courses and interventions.

Family: My wife Elizabeth and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary this month and we have a bright and lively 18 year old daughter who starts reading Politics at Warwick University in October. They are very supportive of me - especially when I spend some time away from home. My wife is a teacher so she appreciates the challenges of keeping people in a group focussed but I don't have to deal with discipline issues in the way she has to - which makes for much more of a challenge. I admire that. Although the best compliment is when she asked for my advice on techniques and activities.

In my life: It's a cliché, but our daughter Julia is a constant delight to me and my wife. Her arrival and being involved in her growing up has been a continuous source of delight and amusement. When she was born, I remember thinking that in my job I have to train strangers to become better at what they do and how they interact with other people, and I am really good at that. So with my own daughter, from the start I was going to apply all of my expertise as a parent in bringing up a strong, emotionally intelligent, constantly curious and ambitious person who could win people over with authentic good grace and charm. I can now reflect back on this and say - so far so good! Although Julia has to be credited with a lot of her own unique qualities that are nothing to do with her parents' genetics or pastoral upbringing.

Travelling to many fantastic places and capturing them photographically is a great thing to do; to capture where you've been to and express how it felt to be there.

Playing the piano is therapeutic, gratifying and great fun as well as a short-cut to getting complete strangers to buy you a drink in a hotel. It was a magnificent highlight in my life to come home and find my daughter Julia playing one of my compositions - that's not yet been written down - while she improvised a more effective resolution to the finishing bars. That really filled me with pride.

Another magical moment was, when she was 14 years old, after I had dragooned her into helping me work out some advanced graphics for the PowerPoint slides for a major client's team event late one night before the first day only to find an invoice from her on my pillow - for special technical support. I was both proud and a bit taken aback.

I paid her... in instalments.

What I love about my job: Winning new clients is the best fun you can have with your clothes on. We were recently awarded a very prestigious programme from Allianz who, although happy with their current provider, were aiming to upgrade the quality and the effectiveness of their New Leaders Development Programme. Our unique and highly energised approach has been massively successful and has been described as having the 'wow' factor.

The design and delivery of innovative and commercially effective courses where the delegates' feedback shows how they were finding a lot of success and progress as a result of the practical recommendations within our training sessions. That is very rewarding indeed.

It's also a great sensation to make my delegates laugh - I am incapable of being conservative in style of delivery and I am delighted that the groups we work with soon become acclimatised to my light-hearted, slightly self-mocking but high energy style with a lively (and sometimes silly) sense of humour.

Having a great laugh also with my colleagues on everything from the many funny stories we encounter on the courses and sales activities to the incidents that happen to me in my travels (I recently (inadvertently) set fire to my newspaper while reading it in a 4 star hotel restaurant. I didn't realise that low light was from a candle on my table! - that livened up the sober atmosphere of the place. It was like a set-piece from Dumb and Dumber!).

But the majority of the people I work with at Associated Training & Consultancy are lively, charismatic and great fun.

What I hate about my job: Indecision. It's the most infuriating part of this job when you are asked to design a proposal for a brief that is often complex and very time-consuming and then when it transpires that the contact or their manager needed to receive the training in the first place in order to make a decision. This makes me very frustrated.

What I am reading/listening to/watching: I read a huge amount - about 6 books a month I reckon (I used to be in publishing). I have just finished Christopher Hitchin's autobiography - Hitch 22. It is written in electric prose and is an illuminating personal journey through major historical phases in the past 35 years from one of those uniquely erudite and clever writers/authors/journalists who cannot be categorised. It has been all the more powerful a read to discover that he has just been diagnosed with throat cancer ("I burned the candle at both ends - but it was such a lovely glow") a few weeks after this book was released.

I always listen to a lot of Mozart and Bach - because they were like the Apollo missions or Concorde - we peaked with those guys and no one has yet been able to match or surpass the prolific output and consistent beauty and elegance. I get introduced to new tracks all the time from my daughter, Julia - recently she put 'Little Lion Man' by Mumford & Sons on my iPod. It's a magnificent song but I was rather shocked to discover that it contains swearing! Although coming from Glasgow - it soon felt normal.

Mad Men is nearly as good as The West Wing and The Wire for sumptuous production values and fiercely intelligent scripts that demand of you to commit to the fully rounded characters and compelling scenarios to penetrate the storylines and themes. It is also wickedly funny and cleverly knowing. I would also add that like Bach and the Concorde - nothing has topped Brideshead Revisited as the pinnacle of this art form.

The future: There have been a number of commissions from key clients such as Tarmac, Allianz and Airbus that will keep me busy and I am looking forward to attending the IBDG conference early next year to win a number of new clients.

I am also looking forward to developing some interesting new ideas and collaborations that Andrew Kay and I have been working on, which may yield some very exciting new developments for the business.



"The future is bright - the future is TARTAN!"




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