Sylvia's Journal

Today we are wrapping things up in Arusha. We will present the product of our week of work to serve as the input for the brochure that will be printed to announce this course for next November. I will be teaching it with one of my team mates. It is too bad I missed seeing him teach yesterday afternoon; no one told me and I didn’t ask. When I arrived for tea in the cafeteria I heard his voice behind the harmonica doors but by then it was too late as I didn’t want to show up in the back unannounced.

Instead I got to watch the Director General teach his course in organizational behaviour (here spelled with a ‘u’) to an evening class of MBA students. I arrived early hoping to find myself an inconspicuous place in the back of the classroom. Of course when you are the only white person it is hard to be inconspicuous, and so I ended up sitting on one of the sides of the U-shaped table, right between two students.

The class was about groups. The professor was a great lecturer and, more importantly so, a man with impeccable management and leadership credentials with an understanding of OB that I rarely encounter. It is therefore not surprising that when he took over the leadership of this institute, he has turned it around from a phlegmatic and inert para-statal, owned by 10 governments – one can just imagine – to a thriving institute that is expanding and attracting good people from all over the region, both as faculty and students.

Over tea one of my counterparts told many stories about what it is like to work here. Every year at Easter, some 75 faculty and staff, spouses and children travel to Dubai for a 5-day holiday. Once there, they split into groups with similar shopping interests. Dubai, after all, is about shopping. Since the institute is an intergovernmental organization, it has tax free status and employees can important cars tax-free. So there is a lot of car buying done there. This explains both the many shiny brand-new SUVs in the parking lot and why, when you get to Dubai airport, there are shops that sell cars and have show models parked right in the transit area. I was imagining the MSH equivalent of such a trip – like going to the Caiman Islands or some destination like that. Or maybe it would be Wall Drug?

The other remarkable story is about the institute’s Cooperative which practices the business skills taught here. It runs on a volunteer basis and invests staff member contributions in running the cafeteria and shop. It also employs the caterer for the dining hall and gives out loans to members, like a mutual savings institute. If there is a surplus at the end of the year, it pays out dividends.

At lunch yesterday we sat with more financial management students, this time from Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. There was much joking about senior leaders once they knew about the senior leadership course we are developing. It is quite striking how badly the top bosses are perceived. I asked them whether they would be like their bosses who they despise once they get to that position. The answer was, ‘Probably!’ as it would be their rightful turn to ‘take’ rather than ‘give.’  Maybe this is why the notion of stewardship is so attractive here to people who are not at the top – an ideal that keeps you going while you are down and which can be discarded once you are up on top.

At the end of lunch break I went to say hello to the Ethiopians, who always sit together, and of whom I had befriended a few. As it turned out, one of them is a colleague of me, from the MSH project in Addis. Another had applied for a job with MSH but had not gotten it; also at the table were two people who I was told I will see on TV when I come to Addis. They are comedians who are active in HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns. They each gave me a shiny colored business card with the promise of a great time in Addis, where I am slated to go at the end of April.