As part of his executive development Scott Anderson of Luxfer Gas Cylinders, attended Cranfield’s Key Account Management Best Practice programme, so we spent five minutes with him to discover his thoughts on the programme.

*Originally published in December 2018. Updated for 2020.

Henry Ford is credited as once saying: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” Now, we’re not suggesting that ongoing training and development is some kind of elixir for youth, but it is true that you should never stop learning: professional development should be an ongoing process throughout your career.

*Originally published in December 2018. Updated for 2020.

Moving up in your career can be more difficult the higher up the career ladder you rise. At lower levels, progression is almost a given with solid effort and time, but something changes at the higher levels.

Whatever the eventual details and impacts, businesses need to treat Brexit like a recession.

Key accounts are customers who help their suppliers grow, and consequently, they wield significant power. Although they are the key to market share and revenue growth, the costs of serving key accounts can erode profitability unless they are thoroughly understood and managed.

The policy commitment to make Britain the first zero carbon nation by 2050 has all kinds of implications for supply chains, how they’re set up and run.

Strategic negotiation is a fundamental competence for key account managers. Many key account managers still struggle to move away from negotiations where price becomes the focus to negotiations based on a value focus. We have identified a number of different sources of value and looked at how we can present these effectively to the customer or client in order to create joint value.

Here at Cranfield Executive Development, we work hard to ensure that our leadership development programmes consistently deliver the value that businesses both need and expect. We get great feedback from course participants, many of whom are only too happy to tell us about the difference attending Cranfield has made within their business and to their personal outlook and career development.

‘Wrongful trading’ is what happens when a company takes on credit knowing it won’t be able to pay the money back when it falls due. The debt incurred becomes the legal liability of individual directors - for them to pay back, not the business.

While working with organisations undergoing change, we have noticed several common ‘truths’, which are often taken as read. In this blog, we look at seven of these and ask ourselves whether they really are the holy grail of successful change management, or whether they might prove pitfalls that can set organisations up for trouble.