May 2013 Blog Posts (12)

OK - there's a guy called Darren Shirlaw I saw about three years ago presenting at a Refer-On Networking Jamboree at Mercedes-Benz World (about 200 yards from where I'm sitting typing this now, in fact). It was the early days of the downturn and he was forecasting the progress of the coming economic slump, based on looking back at past recessions and identifying the patterns on financial charts.

Yep, I thought it sounded pretty…

The arrest of four people following a raid on a restaurant in Leatherhead in April is a timely reminder of the importance of immigration status checks by employers. In this case, four Bangladeshi men were arrested for over-staying their visas, and a fifth was escorted from the premises pending a decision on whether or not he had the right to remain in the UK.

You may think you have nothing to worry about – all your employees are British nationals so it’s not…

According to the 2012 Skills and Employment Survey, feelings of insecurity and pressure at work among UK employees have reached a 20 year high. Worries over the possible loss of their jobs are highest among public sector workers, who are also anxious about being transferred to less well-paid, less interesting work, with less autonomy. This probably reflects the effects of the Government’s austerity programme on public sector budgets. But the…

I was watching a video last night by “Brian Tracy talks about the Keys to Success” and it got me thinking about one of my boys. He is 11 years old and currently going for his grade 7 music exam which by any standard is amazing.

He has passed all his grades with Distinctions, again, amazing. So after listening to Brian Tracey, who, explains how being an expert and…

The irresistible rise of LinkedIn continues... although I suspect that around 200 million of those with a LinkedIn profile rarely visit the site!  It has become a major player on the networking scene, and certainly the most important forum for career advancement and headhunters.  

Whether it can move on and realise its plans to become a general purpose business forum, and thus generate massive revenues, is an interesting question - especially as Networking in Surrey is a kind of…

More evidence that Google+ is aiming for the Facebook market?

At the Google I/O conference this week, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, announced new photo features for the Google+ social network, which he claims "sets it apart" from other social networking sites .

"Our goals are to make people happy and get technology out of the way," Gundotra told ABC News. "You know what makes people happy? Great photos…

One day . . .  two frogs called Norman and Bertie were enjoying a day in the barn sheltering from the hot sunshine outside when suddenly . . . 



The wood shelf they were on broke and they both slipped and fell into the farmer's bucket of milk below.



Total nightmare!! They were trapped and couldn't get out . . .



They kept swimming around to keep from drowning. Every once in a while they would try to climb out,but the side of the bucket was…

Negative online reviews are no fun. Receiving one for your business is like a swift kick to your pride. They can linger in your online directories and search results, and cause potential customers to run for the hills.

(Nielsen says... 70% of customer only trust a business with 6 to 10 reviews.)

However, these reviews can also be used to your advantage – as long as they are surrounded by a plethora of positive feedback.…

On the face of it, you’d think resigning from your job was pretty straight forward. You just pick up the phone or walk into your manager’s office and say “I’m leaving. Bye bye!” Simple, right? Wrong! As with most things in employment, there’s more to it than that.

I just received a link to a blog post which I thought you might find interesting about websites and how we use them. What does it say about the NiS website, I wonder? Read the first two tips here, then there's a link to read the rest of the post on the…

Hello NiS friends,

I love reading Sheryl Sandberg's"  book "Lean In".

Sheryl is Chief Operating Officer at Facebook and was previously on the Board of Starbucks, and Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google.

In December 2010 she gave a TED speech…

I read some statistics earlier this morning which stated that 99.9% of businesses in the United Kingdom were designated SME and the vast majority of start-ups were as a result of the melt down in job retention by large companies.

That latter statement appears to be very true, but what's even truer is that these new companies, very often one-man bans like the denizens of Networking in Surrey, have gone from an environment where they're…