| Arriffin Mansor early involvement in management training was when he was appointed as the Honorary Treasurer of MAP in 1978. He also assisted Medec, ITM in running courses on finance and costings. In 1981 he became a trainer in Inchcape Training Center where thousands of Inchcape staffs were trained in sales and other competencies. In Telekom Malaysia, he conducted workshops for hundreds of the company's executives and managers in finance. He also lectured in universities and colleges such as OUM, UTM, UMCced etc etc What did he find common in all these sessions?
Most of these institutions conducted training using the traditional approach i.e white board and lots of written notes for reference and case analysis. Substantial time were wasted on writing materials on the board and using calculators to compute and solve cases. For example, Arriffin spent 5 long days to conduct finance courses for Telekom executives and managers. Since the trainers and trainees are bogged down with calculations, little focus were given to strategic overview of the subject matter. No sensitivity analysis or what if situations were discussed and trainees produced by this system are dogmatic in their thinking. The more important strategic concepts and its linkage to the corporate goals were not discussed. As a result, we produced narrow minded less creative executives unable to encounter competitions.
Arriffin planned to use more time on strategic mind development where the trainees spent more time thinking of the strategic overview of a problem rather than bogged down to calculating figures.
He used excel ready made templates and models to shorten the mechanics or the calculation process. He successfully converted most materials from hard copies into soft, thereby shortening the training period by more than half and increasing its effectiveness by many folds.
In addition, the trainees shall be given templates and models for their further reference and have the freedom to apply these models at their workplace.
It would not be long when Malaysians undergoing his programs would be much more strategic in their thinking having a good grasp of the total management systems with the corporate objectives clearly embedded in their mind.
The hard work and experience we have accumulated has put us where we are today - the first computer based management trainers in Malaysia. You are getting more than two for the price of one.
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