As I had mentioned earlier, we are doing a Training the Trainer Programme for facilitators in the outdoors.
Add value to your outdoor programmes with these skills and tools for facilitating active learning.
Empower Activity Camps and Wide Aware invite you to participate in a three day trainer-training programme designed especially for providers of outdoor training. Continue reading »
In a mood for mischief. Was looking around at various sites and blogs. The Mumbai Hikers Blog, Lonely Planet, wikitravel.org, Trekshitiz …. and I was wondering what do I write on my blog. This is what came up – my intense need to know.
What is it in the outdoors and adventure travel that calls to people? Honestly there is mud, mosquitoes, snakes and other creeps. There are no easy lifts and clean beds. Food and cooking is primitive. We exhaust ourselves climbing a mountain and risk life and limb to come down again. So why?
Why is the world so passionate about (to quote some inquiry emails I get) weekend gateways, hiking, treasure hunt riddles clues, rappling, climbing and so many other things that they don’t even know how to spell? What about those things tempts them? What makes them leave their warm and cosy homes in pursuit of strange hardships with even stranger people? Continue reading »
Empower presents a unique management development opportunity …
LEADERSHIP IN ACTION
A Powerful Learning Experience for Senior Executives
EMPOWER is proud to offer you a three day residential programme presented by Dr. Roger Greenaway – a widely experienced training consultant from the UK who specialises in experience-based learning. Roger’s doctorate was a study of ‘Powerful Learning Experiences in Management Learning and Development’ but this is no academic programme that we are offering to you. This is an experience-based programme that recognises that managers are already talented at learning from experience and it builds on those talents.
The programme works at 3 levels:
Powerful learning experiences will include:
As a result of participating in this programme you will be better able to:
On this programme you will not be presented with theories of leadership or models of teamwork: you will be experiencing teamwork and you will be experiencing leadership. And through the guidance and facilitation of Roger Greenaway, you will be able to maximise your learning from these experiences and return to the workplace with the tools and the understanding that will make you a better team player, a better leader, a better learner and a better facilitator of learning.
Venue.
Empower Activity Camps, Sutarwadi, Off KOLAD on Mumbai Goa Highway. (See route map on our website www.empowercamp.com)
Dates
0800 hours Sat 18 Oct to 14 hours Mon 20 Oct 2008.
Your Investment
Cabins (twin sharing) – Rs 35000/- (plus 12.36% service tax)
Swiss Cottage Tents (triple sharing) – Rs 30000/- (plus 12.36% service tax)
Cost includes boarding, lodging, training, certificates, caps and stationery. It does not include transport. If collective transport is required, that can be organized at additional cost, as applicable.
Limited vacancies. Please register early to avoid disappointment. Last date for registration 15 Sep 2008.
For registration / queries, please contact
09423093607
Roger Greenaway is an outdoor facilitator and the person behind the immensely useful site on the subject – reviewing.co.uk – a man whose writings I have read on and off for the last three years, and emailed a few times with appreciation and link exchange requests, etc.
Imagine my surprise this morning to receive an email from him saying that he was planning to come to India for the first time in October to conduct an outdoor management training program at Empower Camps. Sushil Bhasin, one of the owners is someone I have known for years and we are in fact currently in a dialogue about doing some training programs together.
I promptly called up Sushil to gossip about this new coincidence. As we caught up with current stuff, I discovered that Sushil had set a goal for himself – that of being the first outdoor training organization in India to do work with international facilitators!!! How absolutely amazing.
In our busy lives, we are so fixated with creating our own images, and glorifying ourselves, it is rare to look for resources and opportunities to widen our experience, quality of work and talent sets. Not only did Sushil have this in mind, he actually pulled it through. This programme is tentatively scheduled for October. Continue reading »
I read this post Work Happy Now! » Give Employees the Power to Impress Customers and compared it with a really bad experience at a local coffee shop last month. Gauri, Ashish, Asha and I (friends from ISABS) went out for a coffee after one of our regular meetings. Should have been an uneventful situation, yet, it wasn’t a good service experience.
Recently, I helped conduct a training programme aimed at looking at existing entrepreneurship and building on it in a team of managers in a leading bank. What struck me was the extreme efficiency of the team. They were performing at peak, yet there was little excitement in the group.
As the programme evolved, and we looked at different ways of understanding the preferences and choices of the team, it became increasingly clear that there were dreams and highly charged emotions bottled up in the group. Their perception of their working boundaries was of one that didn’t allow for mistakes, and their mode of operations was SAFE. While thier high efficiency ensured sustained performance, the monotony was literally strangling the life-giving forces in this vertical.
An incredible point in this programme came toward the end, where one of their seniors visited briefly, and during one of his conversations with the group, put it bluntly – “business is about going with your gut. There aren’t always logical explanations and guarantees. Sometimes you do things because you want to do them.”
Looking at this guy as he spoke was an experience of freshness, lightness and excitement about the work. There was none of the heavy air of confinement and no second-guesses about results. Just a happy acceptance of sheer temptation of certain exciting possibilities and a willingness to invest image and effort into making them work.
Unsaid at that time, I registered what I found different about this happy man who actually had far more responsibilities than the others – this was a businessman, not a manager.
I extend this philosophy to all I do in my life – if it doesn’t excite me, my investment of effort is not going to satisfy me, no matter what it is. Some things I may do out of necessity, but it is important not to lose track of priorities – it is the excitement where my focus needs to be.
When I work with small businesses, it is one of the greatest challenges to find such engagement. The fear of failure suffocates and overcomes all the charm of getting into it in the first place. The key is to know that failure will happen, but it is the opportunity that we need to keep our sights on.
Ownership isn’t only about owning responsibility and protecting. Ownership is also the commitment to take things ahead because it is the owner’s dream.
These days, more and more of my friends seem to turn to me for guidance and help with websites. Not just friends, even places I work for. For example, ihave recently joined Resonate Consulting on a parttime basis, and they are unhappy with their current web hosting providers and wish to move. They are some of the most talented Organization Development Consultants in India, and their site looks nice, but has little functionality and costs a bomb. We are still struggling to see how we can add simple things like a blog.
Now, at the risk of sounding really obvious, it is easier to take some time and research and choose a good hosting provider. Really, there IS no excuse. It is far more inconvenient after having a site somewhere to shift hosting providers.
There are plenty of service providers out there that are very good, and websites that can provide comparisons, tips and reviews on the different web hosting available. This site can prove a good resource in gaining information and reviews about the different hosting providers out there and the kind of services and budgets you can expect. For example, what is the best choice for blog hosting, or if you are on a budget, or for heavy traffic, and so on. You wouldn’t buy a dress without checking it out, would you? So do you really want to buy the platform for your image without research?
