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Simon Berry

Simon was a Director of NCR Ltd before
moving into interim management and
consulting twelve years ago. Since then
he has worked on change projects with
organisations including Intel, Sterling
Commerce, Amdahl, Wincor-Nixdorf,
Thomas International, HSBC, Carl Zeiss
Vision and Competex either as trainer,
coach, mentor or project lead.
Fundamental to all his work is the art of
holding critical conversations.

The Origins of TalkOpenly

TalkOpenly was founded by Simon Berry in 2009. Here he
describes what led him to do so.

"Over twenty years ago I was working for a large IT
company. At the time one of our customers was taking us
to court for several million pounds in compensation due to
the fact they believed we had misled them about their
system's capability.

I was assigned to resolve the issue but for quite some
time I made no progress. The client answered my phone
calls with simply "I have nothing to say. I'll see you in
court" or a string of expletives about how incompetent my
company was.

I was somewhat young and inexperienced at the time and
was not relishing the next few months. It was quite
obvious that a court case would help neither of our
companies, but I was unsure how to avoid it.

A few weeks later I had a call from a 'project manager', Paul, from the customer asking to meet up. It seemed
that their US corporate office also did not relish battling it out in court and had sent in their own troubleshooter
(significantly more worthy of the title than I was!!).

We met and I was enormously impressed with the way he handled the situation. I was left in no doubt that my
company had played a major role in creating the difficulties but he also recognised the role his organisation had
played getting to the stage we had. Never once did I feel personally attacked nor did I feel as though I needed to
be guarded or defensive. We focused on what needed to be done from then on rather than looking at the past
and apportioning blame. Three months later following a lot of late nights from a lot of people the issues were
resolved. One year later the customer was one of our biggest advocates.

Pauls handling of the situation was exemplary. He was able to get the most cynical people onside. He got great
results and he built great relationships at the same time.

I have been fascinated been fascinated by the art of communication and conversation ever since. I learned a
great deal forom Paul and have worked to hone my skills in this area ever since. They were of immeasurable
benefit in my corporate career and have been of even greater benefit in my subsequent consulting and interim
management
career over the last thirteen years.

I set up Talk Openly to help people develop the same skills and confidence in addressing performance issues
that Paul demonstrated all those years ago."