The Fish Story

Of course, the traditional AIESECer definitely is thinking about the fish philosophy - this book of 100 pages that has exactly four things. There are actually different opinions about it. I found it quite good but was critized by my team members who regard the book as low level and mediocre. So all the ones that have thought about the fish book when reading the headline, make up your mind to which category you belong... Anyway, this is not the topic today.

What I was referring to is a sociological experiment and mystery in the same time in our office. No, it is not about Arturs process of self discovery - just joking Arturo. It is about Ernst entering Moksha, no another joke. It is as well not about Alexis discovering more about this conspiracy theories (there are this rumours that everything is somehow coordinated by this secret conspirative organizations - Alexis thinks that even the change agent came out of some of those organizations - me personally I really dont believe in that stuff, I would more believe in this men in black thingie with the alien tribe in the safe deposit locker - probably we are exactly the same and the world is one of this lockers, so all those conspiracy clubs are just some group of random strikers that are anyway controlled by aliens). But this all is not the topic.

It is about the aquarium that we have. Yes. we have an aquarium. Have a look at the picture of it. You can see one of our LC members visiting the office and having a look on the new whale we bought some days ago. Anyway, what matters is that the fish we had inside somehow died. And until now we werent really able to figure out why the died. Furthermore there were as well fish that simply disappeared. And this is the whole mystery our brains are not able to fully understand.

It all started with one fish out of four dying at the beginning of our term. This was ok, as anyway we wanted to close the chapter of last years team, so a radical cut was maybe a good sign. He actually died in a quite cruel way as he somehow got into the pump of the basin which caused some serious problems with his guts. After that we had three fish, one big one, one cleaning fish (quite ugly) and one smaller fish.

The cleaning fish was the next one to die. He actually simply disappeared over the weekend. We searched him but couldnt find any sign. We thought that during the cleaning and rearranging of the stones of the aquarium he probably somehow scratched too much on the surface, digged deeper and ended up below the stones.

But now the miracle comes. He wasnt there when lately we cleaned up the whole aquarium, put the stones out and searched for him. We were confused. After one day in the new clean aquarium suddenly out of the two fish the small one disappeared as well. It was clear for us:

IT's the BIG FISH

I always didnt have a good feeling with him. He had this grin in the face and seemed to hide something. He looked nice, but thats just the surface. He is a pure killer, a murderer a bad fish. So we decided that we have to do something. We have to give him a counterstrike! So Artur and I went into this fish shop and bought three new fish, where one is the crucial one:

HINNERK, a "lionsheadfish"

This fish is one of the most weird fish ever seen. Just check out this illustrative pic. Hinnerk reminds us somehow of one of our LCPs, but we wont mention the name of course. Hinnerk will play the role of a guard, a counterpart, a stronghold, a wall, something that blocks the killer. This is the strategy against him. We will see whether Hinni (how friends call him) is able to control the other fish. We truly believe in his potential.

The journey starts now...

getting to know your future

I do not know a lot of places where you get to know the future already before you know how your own future looks like. hm?

Meaning that you do not even know where you are going, but you find out that you definitely need to move as somebody else is going to be at the place where you are currently. In AIESEC the situation is like that. Some days ago I got to know my successor. It is an interesting concept that we have here:

You start to feel that you are performing, you finally established some regularity and patterns in your work, you begin to realize where you strenght lie, you found out how to move others, you see the benefit that your work is creating - you begin to have an impact. and SUDDENLY you begin to see that your term is going to end...

The organisation has already decided upon the future and you do not even know where you should go. I think it is a really interesting situation. You are somehow forced to make up your mind about your own future before you really want to do so. But maybe one has to see it from a different point of view.

Maybe life is realizing much quicker than we do where we should go and therefore finds some push to make us think more. Maybe this is to really start the thinking process on which direction one should take. To put it in other words: in order to start the future somebody just has to delete your past and present... and thats not a bad thing at all

Benedikt reflects on FUTURE

I would like to invite to to have a look at Benedikt's thoughts about his first big AIESEC conference ....

Steering Team Reflections

Hey dudes,

My collegues seem to be really lazy with blogging... So let me share some of my thoughts and things that are currently happening in my life. I already can here the team bitching about it: "of course I cannot post something, I dont have time. You as the president anyway dont have a lot of things to do, thats why you are all the time blogging and making videos."

anyway, my general thought is that I had a reason to apply for MCP - beeing able to blog was not really included, but it is a nice side effect.

so. I am sitting here in the newly arranged AI office, our headquarter in Rotterdam. actually I think it is really looking better than before, they have a nice carpet, they have some relaxation area, etc.
but I think they main beauty part in this office is the diversity of the people. To have a multicultural team is easily said, but the atmosphere and the beauty that comes out of it is undescribable.

In steering team meetings I have the pleasure to sit at the same table with the following nationalitities: Estonia, Canada, US, UK, Venezuela, India, Poland, Turkey, Hong Kong - truly global. Still it is impressive how similar the mindsets are when it comes to crucial discussions. The variety of viewpoints and perspectives doesnt change the common mindset of the people at the table. I doubt that the ambition represented in this table is copyable, is applicable in any other organisation or enterprise. If you ask me what makes AIESEC unqiue it would be something like I described it above - although the viewpoints everybody is adding to the discussions are diverse, controversial, sometimes lead to hard debates - the ambition of everybody still is the same.

The level of discussion culture in a multicultural environment, the deep talks, the courage to not only scratch the surface, to dig deeper, to discover more about what is beneath us. Not beeing afraid of blowing away walls, not beeing afraid of saying NO, not beeing afraid of saying YES, not beeing afraid to express every single view point even if you are the only one standing out of a million people... no hesitating, not resisting, not compromising with what one really wants, letting it go, crying, lauging, loving

Isn't that the true soul of our organisation: Opening eyes, opening arms, opening ourselves to discover more about who we and the others actually are?

The opportunities that lie beyond us are amazing. discover

Life in the MC

Guys,

blogging is nice. but having a video of the MC online is even nicer. In order to give you a real (visual) insight in what is going on in the (core) MC we developed a short video . Find out more about the following things...

• how does the MC office look like
• what are the guys currently doing
• what is happening if peter is not in the office
• and much much more

Please download the video under the following link:
mcvideo.wmv (26 MB).

yours, peter

Gaining knowledge

In AIESEC we talk a lot about learning, which is one of the main focus areas and goals of our organization. I for myself experienced learning or personal development within AIESEC in a lot of occassions, that were quite different. I guess the biggest impacts for me happened on conferences. I still remember my first one, an X-Meeting, targeted to prepare people to go on an traineeship (that was the name of interships long time ago ;-) ).

The MC this year choose as scoreboard item to ensure personal development of the MC members. We regard(ed) it as highly important to be able to combine personal development with professional development. And I am one of the strong believers in the fact that "only" by working in the office you do not always learn and develop.

We are a group of nine people with diverse backgrounds and interests. Thats why we established knowledge days / hours. So the MC is grouping together and one of us shares her / his passion, which can be virtually everything. The goal is to challenge our worldview and get to know something new, that we probably never heard / thought of. For me this is a good way to eliminate my black spots, which I strongly see in some areas.

So the next knowledge sessions will be around topics like "symphonies" (Ernst - the specialist - will tell us how such major pieces in music are composed and at the end of the day we will listen to one) and history (Artur will tell us something about a certain time period as he is passionate about that topic) and finally it is planned to talk about "impressionism" and after that visit the current exhibition in Leopold Museum.

Yesterday we had a session on the topic "Trends in the world and implications on business". I prepared a powerpoint based on a huge paper developed by the World Resources Institute, UN Environmental Program and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development regarding the current status and trends in the next 50 years of following topics:

• People and Tomorrow‘s Markets
• Innovation
• Natural Capital
• Connections
• Roles and Responsibilities

We discovered a lot of black spots, believe me. In case you are interested in the session, you can download the ppt here. After the knowledge gaining the MC went to the discovering your talent session - meaning that we went to Karaoke, an interesting experience. The biggest hits were Rosamunde, Blau blau blau blüht der Enzian, Just a gigolo (now you can guess who sang what). Although we had several offers (one of Sony BMG) Alexis, Sascha, Ernst, Reini and I decided to continue our AIESEC career and then probably start off as a Schlagerband.

All in all a very interesting evening - I enjoyed to look over the "Tellerand". How do you gain knowledge within AIESEC guys?

yours

peter

Good Morning,

good feeling to be in a 'Blog', especially in THIS ONE! :) See u all in the afternoon.

Kisses, Marcy

MC blog online

Welcome to the MC blog!

In the future you will find here on a regular basis information on what your MC currently is doing, how we are feeling, etc. Stay tuned!

Weekend@countryside@Kärnten

For the sake of order - and to do a bit of promotion for next time - I am posting the link to a small picture gallery of the event.

This weekend can officially be called an AIESEC-event, as we had there: an AIESECer, an Alumnus, a Trainee, an ex-Trainee and many others.