Sam Grayston

Blog

  • A year to change the world

    I return to blogging inspired and enthused…I’m going to try to blog every two weeks about my new position:

    Writing a communications and engagement strategy for The Co-operative Membership by December 2013.

    Clearly, I’m not going to talk about the details on here, but processes, ideas, thoughts, how it’s going and the like and share my revelations (or not!). The first being to think about why on earth an engagement strategy would even exist…

    In most other businesses, the idea of engagement is relatively simple – it drives trade. For our co-operative, engagement has to do more than that. Co-operative members engaging with a core set of values and principles does far more than just drive trade – it can lead to loyal ambassadors and advocates of a fantastic idea of members coming together to meet social, economic and cultural needs and aspirations. Awesome starting point then. In fact, it could be too huge! There are so many things that member engagement could encompass – I’ll need to focus on the core principles of what it means to be co-operative and the benefits that may bring to the business.

    Wish me luck!

  • Where there’s the will, there IS a way

    I believe that human beings have an extraordinary capacity to achieve incredible things. I think it’s mostly a question of will.

    EXPERIENCE

    There have been a few times through my working life where I’ve really gone for it. Given the space, time and inclination to work hard on a piece of work can produce some pretty big results or pieces of work relatively quickly. The kind of stuff that people say “wow, this must have taken over your life” has actually only taken me four days. Four friggin hard days. Four mentally exhausting days. Four days where I don’t do anything but the work at hand (no emails, calls, procrastinating). But no, it hasn’t taken over my life. Am I overdoing it or is there nothing that can’t be solved in a week (except perhaps building Rome)?

    A BIT SCARY

    To be honest, I sometimes find it a bit scary. Not scary like – “I’m going mad” or “what if I’ve spent four days producing crap”, but scary at the huge capacity of people. What if a person gave it their all ALL OF THE TIME? Think how much could be achieved. Think how good you could get at something.

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  • First one…keep it simple

    I’ve often toyed with the idea of blogging. The friendly little advice thing says:

    “tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it”

    …so I kind of have with the title – I plan to keep it simple.  (more…)