And wow how good do my back and shoulders feel. Well played Ceridian. Well played.
So here I am after lunch sat listening to John Vincent talk about creating a high performance culture. John started by talking about how for most of his life his mindset had been about competitiveness, fighting, challenging, and battles.
And then he realised that fighting was not the same as winning. That challenging could be done without fighting. And he learned a martial art to help him embed this in Leon.
I have to confess that I had not heard of Leon, and I might be in a minority here. They are heavily south east based, which explains it to some degree, and have no presence north of Birmingham.
John learnt that he needed to pick his fights, and not get stressed by not being able to fight all the fights. If you try to do it all, you spread yourself too thin and you are constantly trying to fight and become addicted to fighting battles, some of which you will win but many of which you won't.
John recommends choosing ONE thing to focus your energies on. He gave examples of four different types of people who will hinder your efforts to focus on one thing, and this was good advice and entertaining also. For Leon, the one thing to do well was to help people eat well. Everything else then flowed from this, and it worked. This clarity of vision helps to sell the brand to employees, who get it.
The Leon story about creating positive change and a positive working culture was very interesting and if you have followed the event on Twitter you'll see some soundbites from the talk John did that I've done a screenshot of here:
John closed by saying his role as CEO is no longer one of commanding, but about ensuring people (his employees) are well. 
A great talk.
My next session, and final one from the day, is on data analytics. Jennifer Burnett from Cornerstone led the session and kept saying dating analytics, which I think is an entirely separate field of research.
In this session I developed an unfortunate tickle in my throat and kept coughing. I hate being that one person in a conference who is coughing, but in this session I was that person and it was difficult.
Jennifer talked about how organisations can move from reactive, descriptive analytics to predictive and prescriptive analytics and recommended a few areas where organisations can focus their efforts. Sourcing talent, identifying future leaders, retaining talent, reducing non compliance, and enabling talent mobility. Both predictive and prescriptive analytics can help with these challenges.
What was interesting is how she felt the HR team and capabilities need to change, something I've also blogged about, but which she developed further. You need someone who can understand what data drives the business and the critical success factors. Someone who can align KPIs with the data and map the strategy and design data models. And someone who is skilled at data validation and analysis. These could be one or two different people or more, but they will require different backgrounds and it's quite likely they won't be professionally qualified in HR, but may have a social science background or a mathematics / statistics background.
This was another interesting talk on a developing area of interest for me.
And that, dear reader, is me done for the day. I'm off now to do some practicing for my own speech tomorrow. Have I mentioned this already?
Gary
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