A Week In The Life Of A Chairman – Day 4 Thursday

I listened to an archived radio broadcast today by Sir Michael Parker who organises royal events. He talked about his rules for organising events. A key aspect of my role as Chairman is organising events. It’s something I enjoy doing, but I often feel that my ambitions and visions are rather too grand. It’s little wonder then that Sir Michael’s rather grandiose, devil may care rules should resonant with me. Basically he maintained that:

1. Have a very big idea and then double it

2. If it’s easy to do then it’s not worth doing

3. If you are given more than one option, take the difficult one

4. If you are 100% certain that something will work, then you are not being ambitious enough

5. Never regard “no” as an answer and treat experts with caution

6. Try never to tell people what is supposed to happen and then they won’t know if it hasn’t

7. Always stand as close as possible to the principal guest (for us, that could be an author, an illustrator, a customer, a librarian or a reviewer) so that you will be first with excuses when things go wrong

8. It must be as much fun for everyone as possible

After listening to the broadcast, I glanced quickly at the plan we’ve developed for a Heritage Festival. I’d been wondering whether our ambitions were maybe too lofty, but listening to Sir Michael’s rules, I reckon we’ve got them about right. Having been reassured I spent some time further developing the plans.

I also spent time today advertising our oral history training and recruiting volunteers to help record histories. We’ve been developing our social media plans and this seemed like an opportunity to start putting them into action. Social media seems to offer the ideal opportunity to build relationships and make people aware of what’s important to you, so we’ve started to use it to raise awareness of the opportunities that we have on offer.

Despite promising myself that I would limit my volunteering time today, I found myself working in the graveyard yet again. It was such a glorious day and it seemed a shame to waste an opportunity.

My volunteer hours for today: 7 hours