There are just 31 days to go until the launch of Business Week 2009, sponsored by Language is Everything.
Business Week is one of the biggest festivals of business in the UK, and the line up of speakers for this year's event includes John Cleese, Dave Stewart, Alistair Campbell and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston.
Language is Everything will be involved with proceedings throughout the week, and on the Thursday we're holding two events headlined by Tim Sanders. After making his name at Yahoo!, where he created a futuristic in-house think-tank called the ValueLab, Tim has become a best-selling author and compelling speaker on business trends and social responsibility.
We'll also be finding out the answer to the following question: is it possible to learn a language well enough to have a basic telephone conversation in 20 minutes?
The Language is Everything Challenge will see three contestants given 20 minutes to prepare for a basic telephone task. The tasks will be kept secret until the day, but they will be something like phoning a library to find out what time it closes.
The catch is that the library will be in somewhere like Latvia, and the contestants will not be allowed to use any English.
As part of their 20 minutes' preparation time, each contestant will receive intensive language coaching from a professional linguist.
The three languages that have been chosen will be kept secret until the day. All we know is that they will be from 'off the beaten track' of language learning: French, German and Spanish will not be included.
Carolyn Burgess (our chief exec) said:
"The theme of this year's Business Week is 'can-do', and this one of the ultimate can-do challenges.
"Can it be done? Yes, it can. A lot of people say that we're no good at learning languages in this country, but we'll hopefully prove that this is simply not true.
"Will anyone do it? That's a good question. The exciting thing here is that things could go terribly wrong. This is not something that will be taking place in a 'controlled environment'. It will be taking place, via telephone, all over the world. We're not saying where yet, but it could be Cairo, St Petersburg, São Paulo ... or anywhere."
The line up of contestants will be announced later this month.