‘Assimilation and Summarized Expression’
Mayur Kalbag is a Leadership Coach, Corporate Trainer & Author who regulalry does corporate training in Fiji. This will be his regular column in our Jobs section on Saturdays providing readers some useful tips. He can be contacted via email: mayurkalbag@ hotmail.com
Assimilation is the art and ability along with the sensibility and maturity with which an individual makes efforts to most effectively extract and then create a structured, concise, relevant and productive summarization of all the various things which he has extracted from a meeting or from an interaction with one or more people. Let me explain the relevance of the art of assimilation with a real-time scenario.
Three managers were working for an organization (based in Suva, Fiji) that made advanced machines to facilitate the manufacturing of clothes. These managers were from the Research & Development, Sales and Marketing departments respectively. They were on a flight to New Zealand to meet a new client, which was into large scale cloth manufacturing and exports. According to the plan one of the three managers was going to interact with the Chief executive Officer or CEO of that organization and the other two were going to visit their cloth processing factory and interact with the production manager so as to understand the ways in which their machines could fit appropriately into that factory and increase their production.
The duration of the visit was scheduled for two days and in this time they had to understand and make a report which later had to be presented to their General Manager and later the client as well. The two days were effective and the three managers later returned to Fiji. It was a Thursday morning and they all were called to the meeting room to make a presentation of all the things they had learnt, studied and understood from their respective discussions with the CEO and the production manager. The first manager stood up and started explaining what all had happened during his encounter with the CEO. After that, the other two managers also explained about their encounter with the production manager. “So, did you have a detailed look and evaluation of their production facilities?” the General Manager asked both the managers. “Yes Sir and we have also made the report on it” Saying this one of the managers handed the report to his boss.