Last week I had the pleasure of working with the grade 11 students from AB Paterson school here on the Gold Coast involved in ABW, a business simulation competition. I had been invited to act as a mentor to a group of 10 students who were competing against 9 other similarly sized groups. I had no real idea of what was expected of myself let alone what I might find in the students. I was however looking forward to the experience even though it was with some trepidation. What I was overwhelmed with was a sense of pride in what I witnessed in the group of 15 and 16 year olds with whom I worked. The experience left me so proud of our youth, our next generation of leaders. It also reminded me of the capacity we all have within ourselves yet as adults we manage to stifle with our own limiting beliefs.

The group met on Monday morning at 9am and were presented two challenges for the week. They first of all had to run a business that they had taken over with a loss and over 8 quarterly periods had to get the business into a profitable position through a computer simulation model. Their second challenge was to identify a product they were going to develop and build. For this they were required to develop a complete marketing program around the product including oral presentations, a 30 second video advertisement, other promotional material, a prototype and to present the results put on at a trade stand at 2PM on the Friday at the end of the same week.

I can say quite honestly say that if I and 9 of my learned peers were put to the same challenge we probably would not have too much better. It was marvellous to witness the dynamics of the group as it elected the various management team members form within its own ranks and faced the task of getting on with the job.

I once listened to a guest speaker talk about how he personally faced the creative challenges in his own job by taking time out and putting himself into a state where he was thinking as a 6 year old. Why might you say, would he want to do this? Quite simply, in order to release himself of all the restrictive thinking and belief patterns we create within ourselves as adults. Have you ever noticed the free creative nature of small children? They don’t concern themselves with how much sense their idea makes – they simply create.

A pattern many adults live with is to seek practical sense in all our ideas where in reality we would be better served by creating the ideas freely and then deal with the practicalities of it all later. First of all let the creative juices flow freely.

I watched all of these school students in each of their groups come up with some most fantastic ideas and I honestly had to hold my own “practical” thinking in check and what resulted was pure genius. Sure at the end of the day most of their products had chinks in the armour but the ideas were brilliant and I am sure that some were worthy of further exploration – particularly my groups idea of a device attached to cars driven by youths that monitored the speed of the car they were driving relaying a SMS message back to their parents who could then disable the motor vehicle. It was all linked into a GPS tracking system and central computers but what a great idea.

Unfortunately my team didn’t take out any prizes but I am sure they all learnt so much about business, creative ideas and marketing but most importantly, they learnt so much about themselves and working in teams. They may not have been winners but they certainly were not losers for the experience.

I was fortunate enough to have the time available and I learnt much from the experience for myself. I would thoroughly encourage anyone who can find a similar opportunity to take it on for themselves. Sometimes being taken back to the very basics of business even if it is only in a simulated environment, we can still find lessons to learn for ourselves and that we can take back to our own businesses.
Document1Greg Tomkins Page 1 29/07/2007