A one-day training and workshop was arranged in the Novotel in Saigon Square in collaboration with Ace Management Services Ltd. The event was attended with enthusiasm by the personal care, home care and pharmaceutical sales people from Behn Meyer Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Philippines - and, of course, Behn Meyer Vietnam, who hosted the proceedings.

The session started with team exercises that involved brainstorming on achieving international teamwork. All the teams concluded that the top three challenges connected to this topic involved differences in culture, language and time zones with participants putting forward similar recommendations to overcome these challenges.

Dr. Ian Charles Turner A.I.S. M.B.A., Director and Academic officer of AMS, then helped the teams with the management of “building bridges”.

The members of all four teams worked together planning and discussing all the individual ideas. They built bridges of their own strategic design to meet target specifications that were limited by time and material constraints. The bridges had to cross rivers, enabling both traffic to pass over them and big vessels to pass underneath. In reality, these are the very strategies that will bridge the identified differences between Behn Meyer countries so that information and ideas can be successfully communicated at both ends.

The teams shared their successes in the activity and discussed what they should have avoided or overcome. The winning team generously shared their prize with the others – and everyone had a lot of fun!