Amazing work experience from last week

Dear friends and family members who are not familiar with AIESEC!
Beware that this posting contains a lot of AIESEC jargon that you might not understand. My apologies for that. :( But if you are interested to find out more about them, feel free to e-mail me individually and I’ll be happy to explain them to you.


This week I had some of the best meetings, some of my best realizations and some of my best achievements in my work with the non-corporate sector.

Every Monday morning the AIESEC International team sets individual weekly priorities (3 work related ones and a personal one) that we will focus on throughout the week. And every Monday, during the MMM (Monday Morning Meeting) we report one by one whether the priorities have been met or not.
So, for this week all my priorities were set around getting inspiration and inputs for my non-corporate work through my individual meetings and making the name of AIESEC well-known in the networking meeting I was invited to.
I must say, these are the things that were my weakest points in my non-corporate plan in the beginning. I got the feedback that my plan lacks the strive for innovation, lacks the aspiration to do networking, and I was strongly suggested to even add a line to my individual plan about bringing innovation to the non-corporate area. Also, one of my personal goals for the year is to develop my networking skills.

So, what happened during this week?
First of all, instead of two meetings I had four (one with UNESCO, one with Spiros – friend of Petroula, expert at EU funds; one with Gabitza about our non-corporate contacts in the Education field that I am managing, one with Eva Varga, my Hungarian mentor in non-corporate relations) and besides that the Management Team meeting was also extremely productive while we approved the grants to be applied for. Basically I presented the potential grants, the Management Team gave feedback and ideas on how to polish these grant applications, and in addition we came up with twice as many great innovative ideas than the ones I presented!!!! I got sooo excited! I felt like sitting down immediately and doing all those things at once, at that very moment!!!
Also, another priority of mine was to sort out an old Tempus application that was done by a University and with AIESEC participating as a consortium member but we didn’t get involved in it until now. So, basically the money is already there, the application has been selected, it’s just the matter of offering our work to the consortium.
And guess what work is needed from AIESEC in this Tempus project? To develop online MBA courses about IT!!!! And as the AI IS team is developing a new global IS system right now, it clicked!!! …. Isn’t this something that the AI IS team is already doing? Isn’t their experience and learning as big as an MBA course about developing a new IS system in a global organization, effecting over 95 countries? Also, through this new IS system all organizational subsystems will be measured, which was not the case in the past! Are we aware of what kind of huge thing we are doing now in the AI IS team???? All of us got extremely excited about the idea!!!!
And during my other meetings not only have I received inputs to my work but by now I am more clear than ever on the direction of the global non-corporate area on a long term basis. I don’t have all the answers but after my meetings this week I know where to find the answers. And it’s such a great feeling that the direction we (my predecessor Geta and I) took – somehow, unconsciously – was right! And another cool thing: all the things that I’m doing in the non-corporate area will contribute to my other favorite area of work: Financial Management Subsystem of AIESEC – in other words: how to achieve that the global organization (including all MCs and LCs) is financially sustainable? And I think some of the answers came this week…

And the cream on the cake was my study trip to Brussels on Friday.
As we got selected as member of the Dutch Anna Lindh Network, I got invited to a study trip to Brussels to meet the Belgian Anna Lindh Network and learn together with them.
The meeting exceeded all my expectations!!!!
I have made the name of AIESEC extremely well-knows, I got the chance to make a 3 minute presentation about AIESEC in front of 10-15 NGOs that have a huge interest in the EuroMediterranean region, and of course I put an emphasis on our activities in the Middle East, the challenge of diversity and cultural dialogue between the Western and Arabic world, and after my presentation several people approached me. :) E.g. a man from a University in Palestine said that he wants us to establish AIESEC in Palestine. And by the end of the discussion I invited him to AIESEC Symposium, too, which is a one day event, organized by AIESEC International, to be held in Cairo in February 2007.
Also, I could talk to the VIP guest of the day – Gianluca Solera, the global network coordinator of the Anna Lindh Foundation, who came directly from Egypt to Belgium. And besides the fact that he heard my AIESEC presentation, I shook hands with him afterwards and told him about the Symposium and that we were applying for a grant to the Anna Lindh Foundation. And even if we don’t get the fund, we would like to invite him to the Symposium because we believe we can contribute to achieving the objectives of the Anna Lindh Foundation – most importantly: dialogue between cultures, multilateral cooperation and exchange of people between cultures.

Also, during the day I had the opportunity to talk to some senior people from the EU and get to know more about their internal structures and priorities.
Of course we can see all these things on their website as well but the website is sometimes very complicated and it’s not that easy to find the relevant information, so it was extremely useful to hear the EU priorities from the mouth of such senior people.
And two of them were from the Middle East and Gulf Working Group where they prepare the agenda for meetings between the representatives of the countries of this region, and they confirmed what we unconsciously felt - that there is an extreme need for cultural understanding and dialogue between Western and Arabic/Islamic cultures these days.


And in the same time it confirmed for me that what we are doing with our Expansion initiative in the Middle East is absolutely brilliant, we should focus a lot on the diversity in our organization and with these multicultural activities we are writing history in AIESEC – shaping the future of the organization and truly moving towards piece and fulfillment of humankind’s potential – the vision of AIESEC.