NDUNA - Executive Advisor to the Chief

NDUNA is the proud winner of an EU tender on personal coaching programs for staff at European Environment Agency.

The aim of the EEA is to ensure that decision-makers and the general public are kept informed about the state and outlook of the environment. The EEA vision is to become recognised as the world’s leading body for the provision of timely, relevant and accessible European environmental data, information, knowledge and assessments.

A book worth reading, if you want to frce yourself out of the European etnocentrism and get going in Asia, including China and India:

A note from Kishore Mahbubani:

For over two decades, I have lived the life of a nomadic intellectual, absorbing ideas at great intellectual watering holes, like Davos and Aspen, Ditchley and Pocantico. Initially, I was overwhelmed by the confidence and energy of Western intellectuals. They had sharp minds, always producing new insights as they spoke.

It has come as a huge personal shock for me to see this same group of Western intellectuals now becoming totally blind to emerging new realities. At a time of rapid change, these Western minds remain complacent and smug. I tried to puncture this smugness in my speeches and columns. Sadly, I failed. They could not see that we are moving from a monocivilizational world to a multi-civilizational world.

These failures taught me a lesson. The only way to persuade the West of the need to change mindsets was to try and develop an alternative weltanschauung. That is the ambitious goal of this book. If we do not wake the West up from its intellectual complacency, we are headed for trouble.

Learn more of Kishore Mahbubani, a leader to pay attention to.

At NDUNA we help you define clear goals and set a specific time frame for you to obtain these goals. Some call it coaching, advising, motivation, mentoring or whatever. To be honest, we do not care too much about what you call it. What we care about is helping you to achieve the professional goals that you desire within a limited time frame. That’s what makes us effective.

An example When I started coaching Christian (name made up) a couple a years ago, he was a manager working in a global organization. Christian had just turned 40. He stated that his goal was to find out  whether he was a ‘true leader or not’ as he put it. If not, he would focus on specializing what he was good at like developing balanced scorecards and strategy maps. If yes, he would use his talent to climb the leadership ladder in the organization.

In the first session we talked about role models within leadership. After Christian mentioning a few I asked him to think of a leader who had meant the most to him. Christian then told about Oluf, a very wealthy farm estate owner who always paid attention to the lowest raking workers in the hierarchy: the boys, helping the grown up workers. Having been one of the boys, Christian now talked with great passion and admiration about Oluf. Oluf was a success. He was respected, he had ‘made it,’ Christian told me.  The very idea that Oluf could be so rich and powerful and at the same time show true respect to the lowest ranking workers made Christian reflect on the values Oluf was living his life by.

The values Wisdom, Truth and Trust kicked Christians leadership career in the right direction

That made Christian identify his own values and measure to what extend he had lived by these values so far in his professional life. Christians values were Wisdom, Truth and Trust. When measuring the extend of how much he had been living these values, Christian realized that there was a lot to gain both professionally and privately by focusing more on these values.

“I wish I could be like Oluf,” he said. “What would it take?,” I asked. That question sparked an avalanche of actions that Christian wanted to carry out. Suddenly he could see his rather weak communication to his boss and peers on who he was, what he wanted and how he would get it. Now he could see where to start, what to do and how to go about it. That session launched a series of action plans and action points that made the organization respond right away.

To cut the story short, Christian now holds a senior position as a regional sales director in the same company. He got what he wanted. Clarification on his leadership career , motivation to kick start it and a new job serving at a higher level with more satisfaction.

This blog post was inspired by an Christmas email from Christian thanking NDUNA for the help provided some years ago. 30. December 2009. Søren Leth-Nissen