Business Trip Week

We had our first "Business week trip" from 10th MAR - 14th MAR. The idea of these weekly business trips which happen three times a year is to get face to face time with distance students , listen to special guest lectures , seminars and have fun..:-)
We had two speakers in this trip:
Dr. Andy Grace of the MathWorks to talk about Model Base Design-Concepts
and
We had session with Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Former Chairman of IBM which was great. Its interesting to see the simplicity needed to do task at a CEO level. He talked about management and leadership. Some of the point I wrote during the session are:

1. What do managers do:
Managers create great processes, use information to team's benefit, create compensation/reward channels. He added time-management to the equation and talked about how "meetings" are such a killer of time. Managers should become colleagues during problem solving process (be with their team during weekend when fighting fire) and should become Boss when its about accountability.

So management is finding what are different processes in an organization and how to make them better.

2. On Leadership:
> They create culture, climate, possibility and opportunity to win.
> Leadership is to make others do what they otherwise don't do (inspire, motivate).
> Leaders do not preside they are along side with their people.
> They don't take credit for other's work, there is always enough credit to go around for all.

He also talked about values, behavior when dealing with people, being open and aware and seeking and giving good advice.

One hour session had experience from his life before during and after his IBM days.

I could meet my Product Design and Development team and talk face to face and discuss on our future product ideas and concepts for the course assignment. We had couple of evening get together parties, some sleep and lot of fun.

Jaldi Vapis..:-)