Manager

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Manager

In spite of the maturity of our team (mean age around 25 years), the extremely Old French Gentleman (he must have been nearing 50 years) in charge of the Fertilizer Programme at FAO in Rome, felt that he wanted to learn from our experience. So he flew from Rome to Algers, which is rather unnecessary as you can practically walk the way, so short is the distance.

Here, the training given by my parents became useful. I had been trained by my mother in understanding the whims and demands of bosses. My father had taught me the importance of respectfully listening to the boss, however preposterous his ideas were, and also thank him with the deepest and most sincere gratitude for the huge progress and dynamics he had provided; You could always laugh once the boss was gone and of course you just went on doing things as you intended and forgot all the Bosses instructions faster than his shadow evaporats.

In this case it was different. The Manager was a Frenchman, all the tricks I knew, he knew ten times better. Still that did not prevent our boys team to do our best.

So when the Manager took in into the Alger Hotel were he used to stay (le Saint-George), he found to his surprise flowers and a bottle of whisky. He was surprised that the Hotel had so much improved its management style. Usually they were working under the belief that if the customer was handled the right key to the right room, that could be considered as four star Service.

We worked during the day at our Alger Office in the Agricultural Department. Your rank in the Agricultural Department is clearly indicated by the distance of your Office to the toilet, in our case, if our working Office had been any nearer to the toilet, it would have been inside the toilet. In Algeria, water is scarce and they have a kind of a taboo about excrements, as a result, while the toilet is considered as an essential part of the building, it has the same status as a cathouse in a City. So our Office was rather odorous.

We compensated for these minor inconveniences by putting our three desks next to one another and soon discovered that this alignment made for a rather good ping-pong table. We were also very mindful of the scarcity of paper and any scrap paper was rolled into a ball that was used for Basket Ball practice, the waste paper baskets being very convenient when on top of the filing cabinets. I do not remember whether I have mentioned to you that we were International Servants of The United Nations, did I

Back to the visit of the General Manager from Head Quarters?

Initially, for me he was just another Boss, just be careful, say the right things, look respectful, do my job. I did not know he was going to change my life with one sentence;

The Focal Point of our work was the Farmers Field Days. during these meetings, farmers would gather on fields where demonstrations had been installed, the farmers comparing field grown the traditional way with the way proposed by the Programme.

Normally, you would jump into it. Here we were, trained by our Universities, trained by the FAO Organization, all we had to do was to show the farmers that crops grown with our methods yielded more than crops grown with their traditional methods.

Would it work?

Would you like some unknown person to come into your House and demonstrate to you that his way of washing the dirty clothes is more efficient than the way you have been told and trained by your parents? Of course not!

So we could not come stamping into villages and proclaim that we were the saviours who would teach them to make food. They would listen to us in a very polite way and then laugh at us as soon as we left. So what were we supposed to do?

What the Boss wanted us to understand was that we were to work for and at the service of the farmers. Farmers would come to the Ministry and request that a Crop Demonstration be installed on their farm. Installed by themselves.

Then, the farmer would invite the community to come and look at the demonstration parcels, some grown without anything, some grown with fertilizers and improved seeds, some simply improved; At harvesting time, the community would harvest some control plots and check the yields.

Our Boss made sure that we understood that would we ever engage into the kind of speech starting with:

<< look you farmers how much better the crops are with our methods than the traditional methods >> and out days as FAO Officers would end.

The farmers, truly, knew much more than we did and we had to understand that if they stuck to their methods there must be some reasons.

I hope I will never forget the day our Boss went with us on a Farmers Field Day and we looked at the harvesting of a tomato crop.

Using fertilizers, good husbandry methods, a complicated word which simply says that you should not plant too many tomato or too few, it was easy to see that the improved methods gave much better results; what was there to discuss, was it not obvious?

Then the farmer told my boss :

<< using these fertilizers, I will get twice as many tomatoes as I used, but what is the use of getting these tomatoes when I can do nothing with them >>

Do nothing with them?

<< these tomatoes are sweet, here we eat bitter tomatoes; You cannot make the Chorba soup with sweet tomatoes, you need bitter tomatoes, I will never be able again to sell tomatoes if I sell something that will make a disgusting Chorba>>

We, the youngsters, would have launched into counter arguments, I am not sure quite what they would have been; that was not the way of the Boss, his reply was:

<< How right you Are! >>

Our boss fully agreed that tomatoes with fertilizers did have a different taste, that they could not be used for the Chorba soup, in fact he sort of took support on the argument of the farmer and thanked him for bringing out this very essential fact and making his experience available to fellow farmer to avoid mistakes.

As is normal with human beings, the farmer having objected to the use of fertilizers with tomatoes, seeing that his experience and knowledge was respected turned to the fellow farmers and started explaining again his opinion and a group discussion started.

Now, my Boss had what he always had wanted and what he knew would come. The problem was now in the hands of the farmers, the Ministry and FAO had shown them what could be done, now it was up to them to weight the advantages and disadvantages of the methods.

The farmers were no fools, they rapidly saw that part of the market in Alger wanted sweet tomatoes. But that is not the point, there could have been no solution.

What my boss gave me for the rest of my life was never to contradict someone, especially someone who is older and more experienced than I am.

More, my boss wanted us to understand that one should never tell a man what risks he was to take. The assistant manager put it in another way he called it the golden rule

<< he who makes the Gold, makes the Rule>>

So, if a farmer was to risk his money investing in seeds and fertilizers and new methods, if everything went wrong, we would not be there to rescue him once he was in trouble, it was his life and his decision.

<< How Righ You Are!!!>>

<< Thank you for Sharing with me Your Experience >>

and I became, from country to country, from seminar to seminar, the trainer who would bring the trainees to the point where they would formulate themselves the Golden Rule, in their own words, in there own time, in their own applications.