I have returned inspired and humbled after spending a week in PNG in my role as a University of the Sunshine Coast Adjunct. Although I was there teaching leadership, teams and marketing for the Australia Awards at times I felt I was the one doing the learning.
Lesson 1
Challenges: We can all write a long list of business challenges or reasons we haven’t gotten started on ‘that project’. Listening to the stories of two dozen women who have experienced what we euphemistically describe as ‘domestically compromised’ situations, on top of the unique challenges of government transparency and minimal infrastructure, I realised that in a country like Australia we have few excuses.
Lesson 2
Leadership: The principles of good leadership and equally the characteristics of bad management transcend culture and context. Communicating a vision, investing in your team and planning to overcome challenges look different but work the same in any language.
Lesson 3
A little training goes a long way: Having snoozed through my share of accounting and finance subjects in my comfortable first world undergraduate and MBA courses I can only imagine the challenges that some of our students faced learning financial ratios and ledger transactions. But, just a few simple financial management principles allowed students to gain powerful insights into their businesses, and in some cases face some hard questions about break-even points and profitability.
Lesson 4
Learn from Teaching: Having been fortunate to learn about ‘teams of teams’ first hand from Stanley McChrystal, and seeing Japanese competitive collaboration up close, I felt able to explain these concepts using some simple examples from clients in a landscaping business.
