Blue Riband Rabobank, from left to right: Darren Smith, Dave Taylor, James Matthews, Sarah Bailey, Ella Kempster, Kerry Peacock, and Jason Millard.

A fiendishly talented team from Rule’s clients Rabobank are celebrating their greatly improved performance at this year’s Microsoft UK Challenge event.

Careful study of the photograph above shows that having a Rule Financial logo stitched to your trouser leg is just the thing when competing in gruelling mental and physical contests in the Yorkshire countryside. As “Challenge virgins” in 2006 they came 111th in a field of 114, but last month, in a frenzy of intellectual and physical excess, they cracked the Top 40, coming 39th out of 122.

Raising over £500,000 along the way for the NSPCC, more than 800 competitors from Britain’s leading companies and organisations competed in three days of challenges designed to push executives to the outer limits as they devised strategies, cracked codes, built structures and solved puzzles, all the while cycling, orienteering and generally careering their way around the magnificent but tough terrain of the Peak district.

As the Microsoft publicity puts it…

“Competitors emerge from the challenge jubilant and with the knowledge that they have learned vital skills for business including communication, advanced decision making and strategy.”

                                SHOCK AND AWE

The top seven teams, among them squads from Dell, Lloyds TSB and, reassuringly, Airbus, will be travelling to the South of France later in the year to compete in the international stages of the event.  Meanwhile,  the overall winner of the British leg was none other than the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, which these days markets itself as AWE and hosts the largest and most advanced R&D centre in the UK, designing and manufacturing Britain’s nuclear warheads - obviously a useful training ground for moving extremely rapidly when the occasion demands.

 

Rumours that the victorious AWE team have atomic brains spark a series of protests