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LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS
a meaningful way, much of the burden being carried by the IIW Secretariat. In light of this,
the Board of Directors approved 11 strategies of the Business Plan for implementation in
the first 18 months, to achieve IIW’s objectives towards one of its goals, ‘to promote IIW
and its Member Societies and services in various regions of the world to the mutual benefit
of all’. The persistence of Mr Chris Smallbone (Australia) in trying to get regional activities
into the Business Plan was finally rewarded when this was included, in principle, with a
later amendment to the plan and presented at the Annual Assembly in Lisbon, Portugal,
in July 1999; an action that required the WG
Regional Activities
(WG-RA) to produce the
elements of its own business planning for review and approval before finalisation.
4
The IIW Business Plan, initially, was predicated on a short time frame
in which amendments to the plan and analysis of its progress were reviewed
over a 12 month period, which was specifically tailored to suit meetings
of the Board of Directors and the General Assembly. It did commence in
an official capacity after the Lisbon meeting in January 1999 and the first
progress review of any description occurred at the GeneralAssembly meeting
in Florence on 14 July 2000, where specific presentations on various aspects
of the Business Plan were given, including contributions on the environment
by Mr Bertil Pekkari (Sweden) and on regional activities by Smallbone.
The general consensus regarding the Business Plan was positive overall and four
important resolutions were approved by the General Assembly that reflected the growing
importance of IIW activities outside of the traditional Europe and North America.
5
These
were that:
◗
IIW develop a brand name for the products and services offered to
potential countries;
◗
the IIW IAB and WG-RA link in their key strategies on the promotion of
the IIW qualification programmes throughout the regions of the world,
particularly developing countries;
◗
regional activities be incorporated in all activities of the Business Plan;
◗
all willing IIW Member Societies administer agreed activities of the IIW
WG-RA in a region of the world on a voluntary basis.
These resolutions would eventually provide the foundation for the success of many
of IIW’s objectives in the years to come. The Business Plan, to be enacted over the years
2001-2005, was to proceed on the basis of a continual review process with incremental
changes made as a result. In common with the Business Plan, revisions of the Institute’s
Bye-Laws and Constitution were also carried out for the first time since those documents
were introduced after the transition to a single Secretariat in 1995. Dr Martin Prager (USA)
was to play a prominent role in the drafting and wording of the Constitution and Bye-Laws.