The African Management Initiative(AMI) in collaboration with iHub Consulting held a training on self-management at the iHub on February 11th. If there is anything that can be learned from success, undoubtedly it is technology alone is not enough. The great leaders of our time are not only innovators with their peculiar genius and technical expertise, but they are people who have also found points of overlap between their genius and strong leadership. Genius alone is not enough, yes it makes innovation a lot easier but the steed that is a great intellect must be bridled with the efficient machinery that is management, of self and of relationships. AMI, recognizing the opportunities in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have designed a training whose aim is to provide management skills while substantially eliminating the prohibitive costs. It’s just like doing a MOOC online, only with experienced facilitators and a group working on the content with you. What should you expect if you were to attend the next AMI training?
Everybody has failed at something
Regardless of the fact that we would be hard-pressed to find a man who never has failed, we romanticize innovation. We love quintessential success stories and it’s more attractive to believe that it is great genius and pure luck alone that make the great men and women of our time. We know how Thomas Edison failed 10000 times, but we don’t care to know anything about the failed experiments and why they failed, we only care about the celebrated instance when it finally worked. However, failure ensured Edison iteratively innovated. Failure taught him the 10000 ways that don’t work. We rarely, if ever, talk about failure. Understandably though, at the peak of success, nobody wants to talk about their failures and that’s OK. However it’s important to talk about failure, to deliberately undress the problem to its bare bones and ask, “What went wrong here?â€. The AMI training takes participants through the process of examining projects that failed and asking why they failed, because it is only by knowing the mistakes that were made can we ensure that they don’t happen again.
The power of the group
If you’ve ever seen geese flying (or any other birds that migrate in groups) you would know they do so in V formation. Groups are important, it’s true, but only groups that function in a certain way. The accountability/mentoring that can come from working as a group, more often than not, may make the difference between failing and succeeding at your goals
Keeping the main thing, the main thing
We live in an app-saturated world. We have apps that can track projects, clients, schedules, to-do lists, calendars, exercise, financial transactions and anything else you could possibly think of. Despite using all this tools to helps us manage our time, more often than not we find ourselves deviating from what we had set out to do in the first place. The AMI training teaches great strategies to help you ensure you are not lost in an endless sea of to-do lists and tasks that aren’t contributing to the overall goal.
The next lab dubbed “Success at work in 21st century Africaâ€, is set to be held on Tuesday, March 11th 2014 from 9:00 AM-4:30 PM at the iHub and it will cost Kshs. 4250. You can pay a Ksh. 1000 down payment before the day of training and the remainder on the material date covering training, snacks and lunch.
Sign up here for your own experience with the AMI learning lab