Report: Meeting Ressort Internationales April 2009

Iceland Insights Feb. 2009

Iceland insights with Arthur Bollason

In a very interesting and entertaining way Arthur, who is a writer and author of special Icelandic Travelguides as well as the PR Director of Icelandair, explained us the specifics of Iceland.

The 15 participants from 4 countries were asking him some challenging questions, which led into some insights into the Icelandic culture. Summarizing, the meeting was showing especially the advantages and disadvantages of living in a small nation:

• Disadvantage is the lack of experts as well as the political and economic cliques which can be seen as reasons for the catastrophic impact of the financial crisis to the country.

• Advantage is the strong social network within the icelandic society, as well as their identification with their own traditions and history, which will contribute to overcome the current crisis.

So what else did we learn?

How could they get into such a crisis where they are in now? Well, in the end it "all the problems of Icelanders are family problems". This is what he explained with various examples during the meeting.

It is commonly known that with only 6 connections most of the people are related to each other all over the world - in Iceland you only need 1 connection - being such a small country basically everyone knows everyone else. This comes down to sitting in a bar in the evening next to the Prime Minister...

Also, in Iceland a lot of people have more than 1 profession (because they are only about 350.000 and need to cover all work in the nation) - so they are very flexible and know a lot, but sometimes are not specialised in the profession - like the heads of Banks and the Central Bank who didn´t have a Bank career before.

So, how did Icelanders perceive the crisis - and why did it take until January to have demonstrations on the streets. During the "Pot and Pan revolution" in January Icelanders, for the first time since 1949, had riots at all - so the concept of protesting on the streets is not known. Looking at the people, the crisis had a specific impact:

• October: the whole country was in shock

• November: shock turned into fear

• December: this is Christmas time, so people didn´t bother with daily problems and put the trouble aside for the time being

• January: the fear turned into anger as measures were not taken by the responsibles.

However, in Iceland there are "no sad people", and humor helps to get out of it a lot faster, therefore the hope that the country will get going again fast is pretty high. And they have experience in moving fast - about 50 years ago the country was rather agricultural oriented, then they changed rapidly into a country where you wouldn´t find too much differences to the Scandinavian countries in lifestyle.

Arthur told us about a lot of other interesting details of the country were beer was prohibited until 1989 (when the Finance minister was caught smuggling beer into the country and changed the law to avoid sanctions). Who could think of men using "I'm a teacher" successfully in flirting...

Report: Meeting Ressort Internationales Nov. 2008

Active Listeneing training with Kai Roer (Oslo)

On Thursday, November 27th 2008, members, applicants and visitors gatherd to have an evening the Norwegian style. The evening was a great success: 23 JayCees and guests from six different nationalities were present, participants were more than satisfied with the evening.

The evening was split into two parts:

During the first half of the session, Kai Roer, a very well known trainer in the JCI world, gave us some input about Norway (with Norwegian specialities - ever tried brown sweet cheese?!?) and helped us to understand about typical behaiviours in and out of business, e.g. why you find few Norwegians in the office after 5pm. Thanks to our Finnish member Lasse we extended the session to the entire Scandinavian world.

During the second half of the evening, the participants of the JCI Frankfurt information evening joined the group. Kai Roer then held a one hour-Training about "Acitve Listening". It was the first time when Kai held this training and it was a true success. The training was very interactive and Kai's training proved to be very useful. Kai also liked it a lot as he described it in his blog.

Afterwards, most participants continued the evening by a glass of beer in the "Neuer Volkswirt".