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From boardroom to barnyard
From Christian Mahne and Nick Easen for CNN
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Management teams are swapping brogues for boots and suits for sun hats, as executives turn to the farm in a bid to learn crucial business skills. Do you want to get your boardroom motivated? Well sending them to stoop over farmyard dung is now in vogue. Boardroom bosses are also enrolling in horse whispering sessions to learn the "art of approach" -- a useful skill for meeting new people at work and in bars. One cattle farm two hours out of Sydney is taking city slickers for weekend courses where parallels are drawn between talking to animals and talking to office teams. "We are trying to get people to relate the pressure they put on animals with the pressure they put on people in the workplace," Drew Mitchell of Bandusia Country Retreat told CNN. "The irony is that these (executives) want to be a lot more successful with their approach to a horse than they want to be with their approach to a human being." Teams of executives spend their weekend working with cowherds in a test of teamwork and non-verbal communication in an effort to improve the karma around the office water cooler. "Sometimes you find yourself doing these exercises and you think -- I don't quite get the connection," says Nicola Mann of Promina Insurance. But at the end of the weekend the course operators talk about how people approach and steer the farm animals and how this is relevant to their attitude in the work place. "If you're a bit forceful with people they'll back away like an angry cow. It got a bit confused and we backed it into a corner and it's so true, people react in the same way," she adds. Others in on the actThe Bandusia Country Retreat is not the only rural retreat getting in on the corporate act. Louis Wood offers corporate executives unusual management training seminars at his ranch in the U.S. Wood's two-day course, through the University of Virginia, takes the idea of the farm-office a step further by using his lessons in horse sense to understand group dynamics in the work place. His carrot-over-stick philosophy came from a life of wrangling horses on his family's Mountainview cattle ranch. It is now being used to train executives. In Africa big game instead of farm animals are the focus of corporate courses. More companies are investing in luxurious lodges from South Africa to Tanzania to provide the ultimate "time out" spot. Corporate clients from 3Com to Zurich Insurance have all used southern Africa as a destination for conferences or as an incentive destination for their top executives. But now on offer are drumming sessions, ranger training programs, motivational speeches based on bushman skills, as well as adventure and orienteering programs. "Over the last few years ... our corporate clients want to be more actively involved. They want more than just sitting in a 4x4 and watch the animals," Lut De Witte of Into Africa told CNN.
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