5th day – 22 June

Yoga at 6 – that is a challenge but I managed as I was the evening before the only one volunteering and so I had to…. There were not many who took the challenge…

From 8 am we had a long class with Fons Trompenaars about Diversity – he just came over to Beijing literally for 5 hours to talk to us before he had to head back to Europe – he indeed is an exceptional presenter (which made me forget the early wakening…) and he initiated a very fruitful and lively discussion at our table and this time about corporate cultures and all aspects of diversity and the dilemmas we therefore often face. A lot in this class was about reconciliation of those dilemmas. The key information in terms of this program can be summarized in the following statement which we discussed at length –

Leaders recognise, respect and reconcile differences !

At lunch we met for the first time the representative of our partner organisation – World Vision Ethiopia. His name is Belay and we immediately connected with him. We then spent the afternoon in our coaching classes which in my case were always with my team and the Mexican team, i.e. 7 people in total.

Our tonights Leadership Dialog was with Grace the Asia7 HR leader and Andrew Hollas, a Partner who spent 27 years in Africa many of them in Nairobi and he served from 1996 until 2006 as Senior Partner for Africa Central. He now leads the PwC Global Talent program Genesis Park in Berlin, which has been opened recently.
For the Leadership Dialogue we then met again with Belay and spent the whole evening including dinner together with him. I very much like his subtle sense of humour and his personality. He explained us a lot about the culture of Ethiopia and the do’s and don’t’s. Very interesting I can tell to hear about such a proud and old nation.

more photos are available at: http://picasaweb.google.com/Guenter.Blog/5thDay22June