People oriented versus Results oriented or Do it for fun or Do it for the money

When we start analyzing an organizational culture, we always end up with two different kinds of culture: a culture mainly focusing on people and a cuture mainly focusing on results. Great cultures are always focusing on both, meaning focusing on people so that they can generate great results for the common good of the organization as a whole.

AIESEC is in my view one of those organization and that is why I am still active in this network today. AIESEC gives you the opportunity to develop yourself so that you can contribute to the organization's goals. But we really need to be careful not to damage this balance in our focus on both people and results.

The day we start only focusing on people and on what they want we will end up becoming a student with no real purpose except pleasing our members. A typical kind of organization that only focus on pleasing people are drinking student clubs.

But, on the other hand, if we focus too much on results, either we will scare people that want to join because they won't feel capable of delivering those results or, if they are capable of delivering those results, they will start asking for money and AIESEC will be considered nothing more than a SME present on campus.

One of the motto in AIESEC is "work hard, play harder". I usually recognize a real AIESECer by the fact that for him or her working is always like playing and playing is always like working.

How about finding a nice tea bag in the sales materials that you receive?

Great idea coming from my SEC teammates this afternoon. They put a tea bag in every envelope that they send to our prospects with a written letter inviting them to enjoy a cup of tea while reading the documents that we sent it to them. I found it an awesome idea! Although I don't know if it is possible to implement this idea in Belgium as I don't know if tea is a quite popular drink in Belgian companies, I might give it a try. What do you think?

My second cultural shock in the UK

UK people eat ice cream with a mix of chocolate and mint! Beurk!!

My first AIESEC "cultural shock" in the UK

I am doing quite a lot of matching for AIESEC UK at the moment. I am still a bit surprised by the way they sell the Global Exchange Programme here. They focus a lot on the starting point (for them cold calling) and not so much on the end result (having interns coming to UK for their AIESEC internship). They/We planned to call 2000 companies this summer (which I think is quite ambicious compare to what we do in Belgium) but they only plan to raise 10 or 15 internships (which I think is quite unambicious compare to Belgium). Oh and I forgot to mention that we are (only) five in the team with me as a CEEDer to do this. All of them except one are on the picture with the AIESEC Warwick interns during an intern drink. Netheless to say we are working hard at the moment :-) I really hope we will get some results at the end of the day: my fingers are crossed...

The reborn of my blog: Second week of my LCP XP, first week of my SEC XP

Well I know it is not the first time I am trying to create a blog. My first experience with blogger.com was not the best: I was facing a lot of technical difficulties. I hope this time it will work fine: I have already noticed some good changes to the posting process...

Why creating a new blog now? Because I am (again) overseas and people back home are asking me to keep them updated about my CEED XP. I am currently doing a summer CEED in the AIESEC UK Summer Exchange Center. This center is basically handling the Exchange Area from UK LCs when the members are on holidays. More about my experience and the challenges I am facing here in my next posts.

For 15 days now, I have also been officially president of my Local Committee in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. I am really happy so far with my Executive Board members. We had our Local Planning Days at the end of June and I think I manage to make them quite excited about the year ahead. We will see how it will go but I am quite optimistic.

I am also quite impressed by the motivation coming from the future MC (National Office in AIESEC) in Belgium. They seem to be quite knowledgeable. I am looking forward to see the organization growing again this year.

If you can't wait to have more details about what I am going at the moment, feel free to post your questions on this blog (except if it is too personal of course :-))