War on Jobs

"War on Jobs" is a quote from Mike Rowe, from Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs.

He uses it to refer to the trend that only certain types of jobs are acceptable in the market.

Economic migration: brain drain or brain gain?

I have been invited to attend the European Business Summit (EBS) - http://www.ebsummit.eu - in Brussels this Thursday.

I will be in a workshop discussing the topic of "Economic Migration to Europe: brain drain or brain gain?"

And I would like to know your opinion to share it with the audience and policy makers of the European Union.

The question is:

How can the EU provide access to opportunities for international young people without negatively affecting developing countries and positively impacting the socio-economical development of the Union?

Drop me a comment and I will take your inputs to the right forum!

What matters to me

By someone else

Re-discovering, re-defining

In less than 5 months my contract will finish and I have already started to put together some toughts on how and where to move forward.

I started with my CV, which I mentioned in the post Job Wanted, and now I feel that I am moving forward for a deeper research on my values, interests and passions.

I have done a lot of reflection this week, mostly fueled by the fact that my team got quite shaken with the pressure of IPM and we all needed to review our behaviours, their source and their impact in the whole.

As part of this exercise, I tried to bring together what I call my fundamental values. Those behaviours or that environment that I constantly try to build around me to make sure I can perform at my best:

1. Trust. I trust you and I suspend my judgments until I give you the chance to understand my context and explain me yours.
2. Loyalty. I stand for my organization (AIESEC) and my team (AI), therefore my behavior seeks to make these entities more meaningful.
3. Freedom. I take team goals as mine and I achieve them in the way that better fits me considering the connections with others and taking care of the team resources.
4. Reach out. I ask for what I need, I communicate my admiration, proposals and complaints to the right person (individually) at the right time because one day I want to be a agent of positive change.
5. Integrity. I do what I say. If I fail, I apologize and take responsibility first, then I do something so that next time it will happen as I promised.
6. Forgiveness. Crashes of expectations are opportunities to tune relations to a higher level and for me to understand where you are coming from.
7. Authenticity. I tried to be humble enough to show who I really am and to try to make myself better everyday.
   

And these are my main interests:

1. Growth and achievement. I believe that if something is great then my responsibility is to bring it to as many people and organizations as possible. That could change the world.
   
2. Supporting others. I can easily empathize with the passions of other people which encourages me to make myself available to support them achieving.
3. Networks of People. I see them like the key milestone for great achievements.
4. Sharing of resources. Enabling the flow of individuals, money and knowledge around the networks of people.
5. International environment. Committing and achieving with individuals from different countries/territories.
6. Hardcore management. Desigining and implementing strategies, culture, structures, JDs and training for people to perform at their best and make sure the organization achieves.

I find this process of discovery more emotional than I expected. I find myself getting easily excited about new opportunities and generating thousands of great ideas on a daily basis. At the same time, the fact that I can't start right away makes me slow down and then feel ungrounded.

At the end I like it, I feel that I have an blank page in front of me and than in my hand I have all of these colorful pencils very sharp and ready to be used.

Trust and Sense: Presidents' Meeting in Italy

I am back from the International Presidents’ Meeting in Italy.

More than 100 countries and territories where AIESEC is present sent their representative to (1) define the global priorities for the next year, (2) elect a new global leadership body, (3) agree on the global framework of operations (regulations) and (4) share their best practices.

It is by far the most challenging Congress I have attended.

Can you imagine how hard it is to run a global decision making process in the context of the global financial crisis?

If you read the Economist, you could summarize the Congress in the last two editions: “The return of economic nationalism” and “The bill that could break up Europe”, with the difference that we managed to arrive at a positive agreement.

The representatives arrived to Rome really focused on their country and their needs which made it hard for conversations to be productive. As the time past, the bonds built started to give results and we started to listen to each other and made decisions that supported our intentions.

Later on, the new Membership Fee Model –(this model determines the expenditure each country/territory generates to the global organization and considering the country/territory external and internal capacity, it defines their Membership Fee)- that encourages productivity and achievement of results stretched the organization since some of the European countries were not ready to take financial responsibility for their operations.

Fortunately, the Global Network understood that their markets have constrained and that the changes that we expected all of us to implement were bigger than planned. In the end, in order to move into a phase of efficiency and productivity, the Global Network stepped up to support each other and make sure that we end our meeting with the best engine to achieve the goals of 2009.

My reading of the Congress is we are aware that this is the moment to take a better competitive position by building strategic partnerships with organizations that we have considered competitors in the past.

I am very very excited about the future of AIESEC. We are moving into an era of innovation and creativity to make sure that our understanding of the market is translated through actions into a better competitive position, distribution of resources (talent and money) and leadership to make our organization more efficient and impactful.

None of this would have been achieved if two fundamental pillars of all conversations wouldn’t have been present: trust, which gives time to listen, and sense, which conquers bright minds.