Thursday 18th September 2008

A 2008 McKinsey report has found that companies who have more women on their boards, more higher status women (CFO/CEO), and more women on the senior executive team, on average, outperform their sector in terms of return on equity, operating result and share price.

A report for Intellect, the IT Trade Body clearly shows that there is an equivalent case for gender diversity in the IT sector.

In this Merit Event, Gillian Arnold, Chair of the Intellect Women in IT Forum will discuss the business benefits of including women in your IT organisation, and the ways in which you can attract women to your business to be part of your successful organisation.

Gillian has twenty-eight years experience in the IT industry, the last eighteen being with IBM. She has broad experience in customer facing technical, sales, business development, strategic marketing and consultancy roles.

She proved her expertise in managing and establishing teams for new products and teams with cross-industry and cross platform experience across EMEA and the UK and is currently a Technical Manager in IBM Systems Group.

Gillian Chairs the Intellect ‘Women in IT Forum’, sits on the board of Directors for the UKRC for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology, and contributes IT women’s groups, such as the BCS Strategic Forum for women.

Register for this event on the Merit website.

Registration
11:00am - 11:30am

Presentation
11:30am - 12:30pm

Lunch/Networking
12:30pm - 13:30pm

Venue

ICDC Lecture Theatre
Liverpool Innovation Park
2nd Floor, Faraday House
360 Edge Lane, Liverpool
L7 9NJ

World-renowned artist collective Artists Anonymous are offering local businesses a unique chance to promote themselves at this year’s Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.

The Biennial attracts over 400,000 visitors, many of whom are visiting the city for the first time, and with Liverpool as incumbent European Capital of Culture, the number is set to increase this year.

Artists Anonymous’ exhibition, Communication and Association, is to be held at an impressive converted warehouse on Greenland Street, owned by the Biennial founders A Foundation. The building will also play host to the Biennial opening party and the public talks programme, as well as several high profile exhibitions. Communication and Association will contain a number of TV screens upon which local businesses are being offered the opportunity to advertise their products and services.

As part of Liverpool Chamber of Commerce’s initiative to promote Liverpool based companies and organisations through arts sponsorship during 2008 and beyond, your promotional video will be a central part of the impressive installation in A Foundation’s amazing 730m2 Furnace exhibition space.

Liverpool has a proud history of cultural philanthropy, from Lord Leverhulme, to Sir Henry Tate to the Moores family. The city’s current status as European Capital of Culture makes 2008 the perfect time to join this famous lineage. Artists Anonymous bring with them an impressive roll call of previous supporters including Bacardi, Blackberry, Deutsche Bank, Pioneer, Red Bull, Samsung, and Vanity Fair. Why not add your name to the list?

For a small sponsorship commitment of £500 or £1000, your company, through its video advert, will become part of what will be an exciting and unique public forum. From the opening party on the 19th September and for the following ten weeks of the Biennial, your video will be shown over five hundred times.

Communication and Association is also supported by Arts Council England, The Contemporary Art Society and Goethe Institute London

For £500 your Company’s video will be included in this impressive exhibition.
For £1000 a double length or twin video presentation will be included plus the following benefits:

• Banner/board on display
• Inclusion in publicity material and press releases

Spaces are limited and time is short so contact A Foundation as soon as possible to obtain more details and secure your company’s place in this high profile cultural event.

Please contact James Hutchinson at jamesh@afoundation.org.uk or 0151 706 0600 for more details.

12pm - 4pm 23 October 2008

What’s the carbon footprint of your company? If like most companies, you don’t know, come along to this workshop organised by the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce in partnership with Groundwork Merseyside, which is designed to empower you to measure and reduce your carbon footprint.

How will it benefit my business?

The main benefits associated with carrying out a Carbon Footprint Assessment are:

-    Cost savings identified as a result of improving business resource efficiency
-    Improved company image & improved corporate social responsibility credentials
-    Accessing new contracts
-    Achievement of stakeholder demands
-    Integration with existing Environmental Management System
-    Improved supply chain management

What is a Carbon Footprint Assessment?

A Carbon Footprint Assessment is a method of calculating the direct impacts your business has on greenhouse gas emissions. The Carbon Footprint Assessment Tool (CFA) devised by Groundwork Merseyside looks at the following aspects of your business:

-    Staff Travel
-    Business Travel
-    Energy use
-    Water use
-    Waste production

The Carbon Footprint Assessment will then produce a reading specific to your business, enabling you to measure what your current impact is, benchmark that impact and set in place an action plan to minimise your impact over time. The CFA report will include information on carbon offsetting, renewable technology and green energy supplies.

Cost

This seminar gives you the tools to calculate your own carbon footprint, and costs only £7:50 to cover administration

Please come prepared!

In preparation for the Carbon Footprint Assessment Workshop please ensure that you bring the following information:

12 monthly bills for the following (if applicable):
-    Electricity
-    Gas
-    Fuel oil
-    LPG
-    Waste Transfer Notes
-    Waste for recycling
-    Water

In addition to the above we need information on staff and business travel.  Forms for this will be provided on registration.

This information is essential to the accuracy of the carbon footprint calculation and will enable you to carry out an accurate Carbon Footprint Assessment during the workshop.

You can also come prepared by downloading and completing these two forms to help us assess your travel costs.

Business travel records

Staff travel records

Book your place

You can book via the Chamber’s main website or by contacting Esther in the Policy department on 0151 227 1234 or by emailing esther.sumner@liverpoolchamber.org.uk

£150k’s worth of prize money and professional services to be won

Steve Morgan is today launching The Morgan Foundation’s 2008 Entrepreneur Awards with over £150,000 of cash prizes and services on offer to the winners.

Following the huge success of last year’s inaugural awards, businesses and entrepreneurs from Merseyside, West Cheshire, Shropshire and North Wales once again have the opportunity to compete across five categories for a potentially major boost to their enterprise.

Designed to encourage a whole new generation of entrepreneurial role models, the return of the awards for 2008 were today being marked at a launch at Barclays in Liverpool.

With Steve now chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, and the Morgan Foundation providing substantial annual support to the club’s Wolves Aid charity, the initiative has this year been extended to include the Wolverhampton area.

With main sponsorship provided by Barclays Commercial, there are dual launches to this year’s award scheme, with today’s event following a similar one held at Molineux Stadium yesterday.

Having launched his business life by using a £5,000 loan from his father to help found one of the UK’s most successful house builders in Redrow, before moving on to a variety of property and leisure based businesses,  Steve is now hoping to help similarly ambitious entrepreneurs and young businesses achieve their potential.

Applications for the various categories must be submitted by September 12 with a panel of distinguished judges then selecting the finalists. For more details, and to download an application form, visit: www.mf-awards.co.uk

Those individuals or companies short-listed will then be assessed and a short film made of their businesses to be screened at the Awards Ceremony at Carden Park Hotel on November 20.

The final judging panel for the awards will include Steve himself.

The above photograph shows:

Nick Ashfield (Winner 2007 - Best Potential Business, Championship Miniature Golf), John Powell (Barclays Commercial), Steve Morgan , Chris Larkin (Winner 2007 - Best New Business, So Baby)

One of the things that’s common across pretty much the whole world of work, apart from biscuits, is access to lots of paper. Despite talk of a ‘paperless office’, we all know such a thing doesn’t exist. And who’d want it to? Paper is very handy. Portable, cheap, recyclable, versatile. Like a PDA, but thinner.

So, it’s nice to come across a post like the one over on Lifehacker that lists Ten Printable Paper Productivity Tools. These tricks show you how to turn a humble (hopefully recycled) sheet of office paper into a range of handy doo-dabs to make your life easier.

They include:

• A paper CD case - by far my favourite, offering cheap and customizable decorative oppprtunities for those home-burned CDs
• Printable graph paper - for when you absolutely, positively must have a neatly proportioned diagram
• A paper wallet - yes, a wallet made of paper
• A 3-D 12-sided desk calendar - to relive your Dungeons & Dragons youth
• A mini paper pocket organiser - for organising you life, not your pockets

Plus lots of other calendar / organiser / chart thingies to reign yourself in with. Plus lots of suggestions for others in the post’s comments.

Check out the full list here then get printing and folding!

On Friday, the Chamber’s Chinalink team sent out and invitation to a luncheon event. This message was subsequently duplicated to everyone on the mail list. Liverpool Chamber of Commerce would like to apologise sincerely for the inconvenience that this email has caused to all recipients

An error in the dispatch of the email has caused it to be sent on multiple occasions to all members. This was an honest mistake by a young member of the Chamber’s staff and we are working hard to mitigate the consequences for Members. This has never happened before and our ICT team have already put preventative measures in place to avoid any possible future recurrence.

It seems that the reason for this problem is a Microsoft SBS Server issue. This occurs when an SBS Server has been implemented in a company and the required patches have not been installed. The result is that if emails are sent in the TO field and an address within this list is incorrect, the offending server will continue to send to all in the list.

After examining a number of the messages in question, it is clear that although the Liverpool Chamber’s mail server sent the original email, it was then propagated and re-sent to all members by the offending SBS mail server(s) and that, sadly, is beyond our control. It was a regrettable mistake by the member of staff in question to send any mail in the TO field and this is being dealt with internally, but it is worth noting that while we started this sorry affair, Liverpool Chamber’s mail server was not responsible for the problems that have occurred.

We are now actively involved with external companies whose servers have the outlined problem and are working with them to solve the problem, in the meantime if everyone could be patient and please not reply to the offending emails as this adds to the problem of people’s mail boxes getting full. If you require further information or assistance please feel free to call our switch board (0151 227 1234) and ask to be put through to the IT department.

Regards

Jack Stopforth

Chief Executive, Liverpool Chamber of Commerce

Network Rail are running a new taxi sharing scheme, so passengers arriving at Euston can get where they’re going faster, save money - and cut their carbon footprint too.

• Weekday mornings between 8.00am and 10.00am - if there are long queues
• Collect a destination zone voucher from a Taxi Share Marshal
• Go to the priority loading bays
• A Marshal shows you to your shared taxi
• Pay the driver the fixed fare shown on your voucher (see map to right)
• Each passenger gets dropped off in turn, according to the best and quickest route decided by your driver

For more information, please speak to a member of Network Rail’s station team or visit www.networkrail.co.uk/euston

Liverpool Chamber is looking for member companies to act as resident experts in their fields for a new online resource.

As part of our ongoing web development programme, we will soon be introducing an ‘Ask The Expert’ feature on our main website. In it, we would like Chamber members to post questions about their industry and have them answered by another, approved Chamber member with the relevant skills and knowledge to help.

So if you’re business is well-established, experienced and willing to give a little time to help others, we’d love to here from you. Plus, of course, your company could gain some good exposure within both your chosen field and the wider business community.

We’re looking for representatives from all business sectors - manufacturing, law, IT, retail, supply chain, service industry, PR / Marketing, everything, in fact. If you think you might be interested, please contact the Chamber’s web editor, Nick Jones, at nick.jones@liverpoolchamber.org.uk for more info.

North West Fraud Forum

Through a unique public and private sector partnership the aim of the North West Fraud Forum is to combat fraud by raising awareness in the region.

Membership of this not-for-profit organisation is open to any business, organisation or individual and currently includes Government agencies, fraud practitioners and potential victims of fraud. The Forum provides the opportunity to share experience and best practice and holds a series of events, free-of-charge to members, where industry experts impart their knowledge and advice.

Anyone is encouraged to visit the Forum’s website where we publish news, details of scams and prevention tips to promote fraud awareness. Access to the website is at: http://www.northwestfraudforum.co.uk

The Technotheory blog has an interesting post on using a simple rule to stay on top of tasks and emails: if you can do it two minutes or less, do it straight away.

“When you read your new email do you read all the messages once and then go back through them?  I do it, too, sometimes-but it’s the death of getting things done.  So here’s a reminder.

It’s totally cool to cherry pick which messages to deal with first based on the sender or subject, leaving the others unread.  But once you’ve started working with a message, deal with it now.

By dealing with it, I mean get it out of your inbox.  Maybe you should delegate it to someone.  Maybe you should respond with your calendar availability.  Maybe you should schedule a task to deal with it later.  But deal with it and archive it.so that it’s out of your inbox never to be stared at five more times.”

Read the rest of the post here. It’ll take less than two minutes to read, honest.

Agree? Disagree? Take two shakes of a tiger’s tale to let us know in the comments…