Inspiring in every direction...

I've just returned from a fantastic evening at the First Women Awards  it's an evening recognising trailblazing women in business and the public services - it was a stunning evening and the buzz-word of the evening was 'talent'.
We at On Purpose are all about talent, we talk about the importance and value of talent and as you know we focus on leadership talent in the Social Enterprise space - so it was a real pleasure to get dressed up and listen to other people talk about talent in different ways! This evening's awards were recognising women so there was much talk of breaking through the glass ceiling and how values and styles can be so different between men and women.  Did you know that in Norway they recently committed to increasing the number of women at Board levels across all organisations to 40% and they've already achieved 30%? A stunning shift - but whilst we in the UK are still lagging behind - if this evening's room full of women are anything to go by we will definitely catch up!

We're often asked why our 2010 Associates are all women. And it's an easy question to answer - whilst the applications were 49/51% split - and there were male counterparts right through to the second interviews - at the end of the day the best of the bunch were all women.

So i've spent the evening hearing of tales of global success - some started out hatched around the table - in the case of Specsavers it was a table tennis table in a spare room in 1984 - now Mary Perkins heads up a global empire of around 1400 stores and over 26,000 staff. Others are where women entered into established industries and are now global leaders where women 'rarely go' - i was particularly touched (maybe it's the engineer in me) by Angela Strank who entered BP in 1982 as the first female geologist and now heads up their Global Technology arm (in her time she's delivered roles such as opening up a market in Angola).

I'll write more of some of the other winners soon - but for now - i look forward to being at the 'First Women Awards' the year ,in the not too distant future, when there is more talk of social business and one of our On Purpose alumni is receiving an Award (to the roars of joy of the others that will be at the table supporting her!).