It all started with a letter. I had worked for the Department of Agriculture in New Zealand for 39 years and I was fast facing my retirement age but a letter from Dr John Woods changed all that.
He asked me if I would come to Bangkok to fill a senior United Nations position. I hadn’t applied for it, it came out of the blue.
I was getting bored with my work, and my assistant director Peter Thomson was better qualified for the tasks than I was, so I resigned after 29 years service.
For the next 23 years I travelled and accepted any job I was offered. I stopped working at 82. I had a lot of fun and quite a bit of excitement.
We were in the middle of a military coup in Thailand. There was a civil war going on in Sri Lanka and fighting in Bangladesh. I enjoyed the experiences all the same.
I carried out 10 missions in Bangladesh. I would fly in on a Friday, on their day of prayer, and start work training on Saturday and Sunday. I worked hard. It wasn’t easy. I was training the staff of the Academy of Planning and Development and the senior staff of a dozen Agriculture Institutes.
I received a letter from the Director-General of Agriculture from New Zealand congratulating me on my retirement and hoping I enjoyed my well earned rest. I found his letter most amusing.
Let’s see how many missions I undertook during my ‘retirement period’.
I made 50 trips to Singapore (32 workshops for the Singapore Institute of Management University). I clocked up a few trips on my way to Sri Lanka as the New Zealand High Commissioner for Sri Lanka lived in Singapore and I needed to report on my way in, and on my return out.
Four trips to Samoa. The longest was for seven months after cyclone Ofa.
Three missions to Taiwan as a technical adviser for the Food and Fertilizer Centre.
Bangladesh, ten missions.
Sri Lanka, ten missions. The longest was for three months, for the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation, FAO Rome.
Two missions to Vietnam, two to the Philippines, and two to Indonesia. One mission to Lao. That’s not a bad collection for a retiree.
People ask me which country did I prefer working in. It had to be Singapore for a number of reasons.
They taught me much. They published many of my books – I had four good publishers in Singapore. They challenged me with my workshops and at the end they carried out a comprehensive evaluation as to the effectiveness of my training. This meant that I could try different training techniques to see which was the most effective.
Believe it or not, it was through working in Samoa that got me work in Singapore. Let me explain.
After Cyclone Ofa Massey University asked me to go to the University of the South Pacific in Samoa and teach agriculture extension – how to stimulate food production.
I was halfway through that training when the Vice Chancellor sent for me and said, “Geoffrey you use to be a manager. Next year all these final degree students will be returning home to be managers. Will you train them in management skills?”
We searched the libraries for a suitable reference book with no success. My students asked if I could recommend a text book. I said I couldn’t but I would put my lecturers notes together and write them a book. I did, and I called it “Survival Skills for New Managers”.
The rights were purchased by an English book publisher, Kogan Page in London and they least the rights to about eight other publishers, one of which happened to be the Singapore Institute of Management.
Someone at SIM wrote to me and asked if I could turn it into a training programme for Asian managers.
I did this, and I would fly to Singapore for a week about every six months. I did this 32 times and often I would go on to run similar workshops in other countries. Asian managers taught me a lot.
One thing often leads to another and you know what they say; “An expert is anyone from out of town.” Don’t retire. Carry on working, you can learn much and have a lot of fun.
Geoffrey Moss (mossassociates.co.nz)
Another Handful of Tips 