International Presidents Meeting 2009 – IPM

IPM 2009 or Global Leaders Summit 2009 (a more comercial name used to promote the conference) is the annual meeting where all AIESEC national presidents (from current term and elected to next term, as me) get together to:

- Elect the new President of AIESEC International and give confidence vote for his Directors and Vice-Presidents
- Start the global planning process, giving input to the global focus areas that AIESEC International for next year will have
- Prepare the elect presidents to lead the organization by leading high performing teams and managing well strategies and operations
- Help current presidents to wrap up their experience and prepare for next steps

But the above points really don’t describe the greatness of it. IPM is basically great because of 3 things: AIESEC International elections, presidents and content.

Elections for AIESEC International

When I joined AIESEC (back in 2005), I imagined AIESEC International people as the big super hardcore dudes. Respect, you know? It’s really funny when you see your friends, people that you have worked with, with all their qualities and improvement points, with all their successes and failures to apply to those positions.

It somewhat break the magic, but at the same time remembers us about the AIESEC magic: you will develop, it will be fast and if you are up to it, you can go sky rocket to the top.

And the AIESEC International President election, with 5 candidates, all of them current members of AIESEC International was a very special moment. It was very inspiring to hear those guys. It demands tons of balls to apply to this position, because it’s so much pressure, expectations and it’s there, in front of every AIESEC country, if you fail or win, it’s very public. I respect the people who applied.

AIESEC International President results announcement:


Aman Jain, candidate speech:


Directors announcement:


Vice-presidents announcement:



Presidents

First thing about IPM and the other AIESEC conferences is that IPM doesn’t look like a conference, it’s basically a meeting. You meet people and exchange tons of ideas. It’s a 10 days conference, but it passes so fast as 45 minutes Lost episode. You want always more, but it’s already over.

Around 200 AIESEC presidents, from 107 AIESEC Countries, this is something especial in itself. All of these people with the same role, sharing similar realities, problems, solutions, ideas. People usually say the AIESEC President is a lonely role, since you cannot talk about everything with your team. This conference is where all these people get together and identify “hey, I can talk to you! You understand me!” I myself already got some very good friends that are also elected presidents that I know I will talk a lot during my term.

Discussing the balanced scorecard


People from Western Europe and North America Growth Network


Content

I was agenda manager for the conferences here in Norway (and back in my local committee in Brazil) and one thing is very obvious: it’s extremely hard to make a conference to a too diverse audience. The magic of IPM is that everyone there is a president or will be. Thus, the content is tailor made and very relevant, doesn’t matter if you are in a weak or strong AIESEC country, hardcore management in financial crisis is all the same.

It’s been a long time since I didn’t have such an empowering AIESEC conference in terms of content also. I am more than satisfied and lots of sessions just blew my mind in ways that made my though “wow, I really don’t know anything”, “how I didn’t think of that before” and “jesus, these guys are doing a great job, I want to do that too”.

One extra point to the content was related to the AIESEC partners that were delivering sessions. At least the ones I attended - Tata Consultancy, Future Considerations and Time Management International - were extremelly useful. Thanks a lot!

IPM was the AIESEC conferenceexperience. (not to mention Rome, which is probably a point on next posts)