Tuesday, April 19th, 3:24 p.m.
Es un día maravilloso por dos razónes: uno, la chica ha llegado en el piso y parece limpia; dos, hoy fue el primer día en que yo tenía que BAJAR la temperatura del agua para mi ducha! (Ya se, ahora que es primavera, el agua en mi piso esta caliente ... wtf?)
Bueno, tengo bastante cosas a decir de mi fin de semana, entonces lo hago en inglés porque no tengo todo el dia para hacerlo.
Today is marvelous for two reasons: one, the new girl has arrived in the flat and she appears to be clean (at least as far as her own room goes); two, today was the first day I actually had to TURN DOWN the hot water in my shower (Yeah, I know, now that it's spring, the water in the flat is hot ... wtf).
OK, I have a lot to say so I'm just going to jump in. This weekend I went to Geneva to go to an AIESEC conference called Connect. The topic of the conference was leadership, and I feel that although I was barely able to make it to 20 minutes worth of the lectures and workshops given on leadership, I got to see leadership in action.
Every AIESEC conference has an OC, an organizing committee - a group of core people who put it together, deciding on logistics like accomodation, food, as well as thematic things like which speakers and how to get them. Depending on the conference, this is quite a big job. Our conference, for example, had 160 people. Now, every conference also has an extended OC - a group of people who help with everything during the actual conference. I was a member of the extended OC for Connect, so for the 3 days of the conference, I helped with everything from making badges for the participants to moving furniture to meeting the caterers to doing dishes to mopping THE ENTIRE site. It was really hard work but I had a ton of fun because I was working with all my favorite Geneva people.
The conference was held in a place called BrainStore in Biel, Switerland. I mention this because I was offered a job there as a project manager! BrainStore is quite an interesting company - they produce ideas. Yes, that's right, their product is ideas. Companies like Nokia (their latest) or others employ BrainStore to come up with new ideas - ideas for products, or for new products, or any host of other things. And the way BrainStore does this is quite interesting: they have a huge workshop, with over 600 people, who essentially brainstorm in different ways. BrainStore ensures that this group of people is very diverse: CEOs, teenagers, lawyers, artists, retirees, you name it. During a workshop this group will come up with as many as 3,000 ideas. The BrainStore staff then whittle them down to around 30, usually -- thirty really good ideas. Then they have a process for how the pick, etc. etc. I'm a little hazy on this part, actually. The point is that the entire company is about creativity, which I think is really cool. And it shows in the site; the upstairs of BrainStore has a very interesting layout. There are no walls separating the different rooms; they have hung beige curtain/screen things to separate the space. There are flip-charts all over the place so if something comes to you while you're walking to the bathroom, for example, you can jot it down. They have different sorts of spaces, i.e. a library-like room with comfy sofas, etc., and a room with lots of funny-shaped tables and normal chairs. They have strange bicycles which you can ride (I think they help you think creatively or something), and little plastic stools that look like tree stumps.
Anyway, the first day of the conference I was approached by one of the BrainStore people because they had heard that there was an American on the AIESEC staff, and they're looking for a native English-speaking person to be a project manager. It's too bad I'm not looking for a job, because I like everything about the company - what they do, how they do it, the BOSS (she was incredibly helpful AND gave us the space for free! AIESEC didn't have to pay), even their job application (which includes questions like "How much does a full-grown alligator weigh?" and "What are the first names of the 7 Swiss cabinet members?"). The only thing I don't like about it is the location: Biel is a bilingual French/German city but it's rather industrial and it's rather more German than French ... this begs the philosophical question: Do you work a job you love somewhere you don't particularly like? Or do you work a job you don't particularly like in a place you love? (i.e. right now, me in Barcelona). It's an interesting thought to ponder.
Being on the extended OC showed me a lot of interesting issues surrounding leadership and decision-making. Because the core OC didn't have a clear "leader" - it was 6 or 7 people working together, and the extended OC even less, sometimes decision-making was difficult. Here are some of the highlights of what I learned:
1. If there is no clear "leader", there is no one who definitively knows things - and worse, there is no one who knows who will know. For example, at the end of the conference we needed to know which flip-charts were ours, and which belonged to BrainStore. If there had been a clear leader, we could have just asked that person, and if they didn't know, they would at least know who did know.
2. Hierarchical structure is not necessarily a bad thing, if it is not done with the assumption that those on top are superior. No structure = chaos.
3. Teams. Working in teams with one person as the clear head of the team appears to be the most effective way of getting things done. In other words, if I ever organize a conference, I will have ONE OC member in charge of, for example, food. This person will know EVERYTHING about the food - they will be the ones in charge of finding it, buying it, meeting the caterers, and they will have a team of extended OC members to help. Thus, if anyone has a question about food, there is no question about who to ask or who would know. This person would always know. My core people for this conference would have been in charge of :
A. Food
B. The site itself (whose flipcharts, how was the furniture laid-out)
C. Money (God, what a nightmare when there are two cashboxes and two sets of keys and no one to remember who put what where)
D. Accomodation (someone to liase with the hotel, to remember who had special needs, etc.)
E. Cleaning
4. Policies. When there is no clear leader, there are no clear policies. For example, I sold drink vouchers. And when I sold them, I told people that if they bought a 10 franc voucher and only spent 8 francs on drinks, they would get their 2 francs back. However, the next day when some people when to collect their money, they were told that they couldn't get it back. When there is no leader to make clear policy decisions, everyone just makes up their own, and this is problematic.
5. Information flow. Information is difficult to distribute when everyone is running about doing every which thing. When you have teams with team leaders, you can hold a meeting with just the 5 team leaders, telling them important information, which they can then distribute to their team.
That said, I would like to mention something very good that comes out of having no clear leadership: you take responsibility. If there is no toilet paper in the bathroom, you take responsibility and you go and find it and put it in the bathroom. This was, in a way, difficult for me to adjust to: we did things without asking permission or checking with someone first -- there was no one to check with. If the dishes needed to be done, I did them, because I was there and I knew that if I wasn't going to do it, they weren't going to get done. The point is that I learned how to problem-solve on my own, without waiting for someone else to tell me to do it. Decisions had to be made, so we all made them. Perahps it would have been more convenient if there had been a leader to tell us to do it, but I think we all learned a lot because there wasn't.
So there you have it, my experience with leadership. Other exciting news is that I finally got my stuff from Geneva; I had left a suitcase full of stuff in Geneva in December, because I didn't know where I was going. So I took an empty backpack with me this time and filled it up with things like my leather jacket, black pants, cute skirts, fun shoes, and shorts -- things I have been sorely missing. So, yay! "New" clothes and a new outlook on how to run a conference. All right, I'm off to work.
Language spot:
There is no word for "mop" in French; it's just "wipe the floor." For some reason this really bothered me; I always wanted to correct them when people would say "OK, let's wipe."
