News

Sewa Beats'actuality

13/04/2007 - Sewa Beats, Leadership and the WEF

03/01/2007 - A Thumping Great Event!

18/12/2006 - US companies choose Sewa Beats for relevance

04/11/2006 - Practice what you preach

28/05/2006 - IMD recognizes Sewa Beats as an effective learning experience

20/03/2006 - Oracle Partner Network around the globe — Sewa Beats team building programme

16/06/2005 - Leadership development and team building in the Baltics

15/03/2005 - Reading FC motivation and team-building with Sewa Beats

25/05/2004 - The Sewa Association brings together 350 participants and raises 10’000 Swiss francs during its first charity event in Geneva

20/03/2004 - Sewa Beats – improving more than just work performance?

 

Sewa Beats, Leadership and the WEF -top-

The World Economic Forum’s prestigious Global Leadership Fellows Programme develops the future leaders of the world’s eminent public and private institutions. It builds on Fellows’ leadership experience and academic excellence.

Each year, the WEF selects and hires exceptionally talented individuals to join the Forum as Global Leadership Fellows for a three-year programme. Designed to be both practical and analytical, the programme provides leadership training and offers valuable insights into global and regional agendas. Sewa Beats has been commissioned to develop and run leadership sessions as part of the programme.

Not unsurprisingly, all 69 highly qualified Fellows come from top rank institutions that Sewa Beats is well used to collaborating with. Sewa Beats’ facilitators have extensive experience working with strong talent, and they know exactly how to develop the leadership skills of groups of high potentials quickly and effectively. Compared with academic and traditional experiential approaches, Sewa Beats offers participants a radically different understanding of leadership. Through its dynamic drumming sessions, the company provides a key element – emotional learning – that business education institutions are usually unable to provide in-house.

A Thumping Great Event! -top-

Yet again Sewa Beats continues to push the boundaries of motivation and team-building. On 25th February at the "600 tambores por Africa" event held in L´Auditori in Barcelona , the team took an audience of 600 people of all ages and turned it into a thumping, 600-strong orchestral team. Sewa Beats and the ensemble created a magical piece of music together and really set the auditorium pulsating.


On stage, Sewa Beats’ six facilitators led the audience through an incredible hour-long sound journey, filling the whole room with Africa and the elemental power of its culture. The sense of connection with the joy and passion of the continent was tangible and it was abundantly clear that all the participants enjoyed an unforgettable evening.


The EUR 9000 raised by this event will be used to provide food, love and hope for children living in the Orphanage Africa Home of Children in Ayenyah, Ghana.


Sewa Beats is committed to achieving its social responsibility objectives and is very proud to contribute to one of the key countries that inspires its work. And last but certainly not least, the Sewa Beats team thanks "Tambores for Africa"  – the four women who worked non-stop to achieve this reverberating success.


For more information please visit: www.tamboresporafrica.com or e-mail:
teresa@sewabeats.com

The project remains open to donations: collaborate!

Barclay’s Bank
Account Name: Orphanage Africa

Account Number: 0065 0076 69 0001028129
IBAN: ES 0200 6500 7669 0001028129
BIC/SWIFT: barcesmm

US companies choose Sewa Beats for relevance -top-

Why is Sewa Beats repeatedly approached to run sessions in the US – the home of ‘Corporate Drumming’?

The concept of using African drumming as a training tool for business managers first surfaced in the USA. Energetic, racy and culturally ‘cool’, the idea quickly seized the imagination of HR managers across the States with ‘Corporate drumming’ offering a vivid alternative to increasingly staid mainstream management training sessions.

Competitors quickly sprang up and, in Europe, Doug Manuel, Sewa Beats’ founder, realised that the medium had huge potential for delivering serious management learning. He put together a formidable intellectual package in collaboration with first class management development specialists which he merged with a world class team of facilitators. From the start, Sewa Beats emphasis has always been on excellence in leadership and the building of teams.

Success was sustained after Sewa Beats worked for Europe’s two top business schools, IMD and INSEAD, and it became evident that this medium when combined with hard management practice delivered real results.

Its main competitors both in Europe and in the US take a different view and think of Corporate Drumming more as stimulation and entertainment rather than as a means to drive managers to experiment with leadership and team building in a safe, yet fun and exciting way. The result is that increasingly Sewa Beats is being asked to fly over to the US to run sessions.  In 2006 alone they have run programmes in the US for Continental Airlines, Progress Software, and Areva.

Practice what you preach -top-

Sewa Beats teaches managers how to lead, build and manage teams. The company has dozens of corporate clients who are recognised not only as leaders in their field but also as companies that have advanced managerial competencies. That Sewa Beats is successful and enjoys extraordinary levels of repeat business is due not only to the professionalism and focus of its facilitators but also to its ability to evaluate and re-evaluate its own performance.

Sewa Beats therefore continues to make a serious investment in its own team of facilitators, staff, and consultants. In early November 2006, it took its staff and consultants away for a team building and training weekend in Crans Montana, the Swiss alpine resort.

Before embarking on a full day’s skills training, the participants spent a whole day and evening doing experiential and team building exercises. The event was run by Paris based consultancy Pragmaty.  In the best traditions of team building, all the participants were removed from their comfort zones.



In Sewa Beats’ terms, this meant that nobody went near a drum.  The final exercise was for everyone to cook Thai food for their colleagues – not exactly comfort food for a group comprising West Africans, English, Swiss and Spanish!

IMD recognizes Sewa Beats as an effective learning experience IMD recognizes Sewa Beats as an effective learning experience -top-

IMD: Sewa Beats — ‘an innovative way of developing leadership’

World-leading business school, IMD has just published Mastering Executive Education,  a highly stimulating and informative book offering organisations a new way to design and deliver effective executive learning. Focused on driving high-impact executive education, it identifies and refreshingly describes what makes an effective learning experience. In short, while the theory and content of a traditional executive education programme may be great, if it’s delivered in the emotional equivalent of a monotone, the absorption and application levels are going to be less than desired.



“High-impact learning is underpinned by four key drivers: emotional highs, energizing roles, real-world context and 3-dimensional learning,” states IMD. To anyone familiar with Sewa Beats’ energy and its super-stimulating style, this description clearly explains the success of its executive education methods.

In a section that talks about Sewa Beats’ participation in IMD programmes, the authors explain Sewa Beats’ vivid teaching, describing the emotional impact of the sessions and providing colourful examples of the uplifting and clarifying effect that Sewa Beats learning has on participants. The section concludes with a punchy report on the outstanding results and take-home learning from one of its leadership sessions.
Readers of this lively and useful book will be left in no doubt that IMD has once again side-stepped orthodoxy to create a forceful new way to increase the pace and potency of executive education.

Oracle Partner Network around the globe — Sewa Beats team building programme -top-

Oracle continues to work with Sewa Beats to open their Oracle Partner Network days and help them communicate their team-building message to their Network partners. Over the last 2 years Sewa Beats has run their team building programme for Oracle in Warsaw, Copenhagen, Munich, Milan, Dubai, Madrid, Utrecht and Istanbul.

In 2004, during the opening session, the more than 500 partners were truly surprised by a brand new experience — the chance to drum together – and Sewa Beats continue to surprise the partners. In just 20 minutes, and with each of the attendees provided with a professional African drum, Oracle´s partners used rhythm and drumming as a metaphor to highlight the importance of working synchronously, and to understand that together they are unbeatable.

Michel Clement, Senior Director Oracle Partner Network & Value Added Resellers – EMEA, said: "I have been impressed by Sewa Beat´s ability to deliver on their promise and drive an audience of over 600 people to team up and achieve what seemed totally impossible to everyone of them before. This helped us a lot get the members of the Oracle Partner Network to understand that together we are unbeatable."
Sewa Beats team building and leadership seminars have gained real acceptance with large, reputable corporations around the world. Its management development services are proving not only effective but are motivating and pleasurable too.

Leadership development and team building in the Baltics -top-

The demand for easily transferable leadership development methods is growing across Eastern Europe.

Since the beginning of March 2005, Sewa Beats has started to work in the Baltic region. The company’s first project was to spend a week running sessions around various aspects of leadership development for an in-house company programme. It then ran sessions for an open enrollment programme for professionals organised by leading Latvian consultancy, Triviums. Participants came from a wide range of local and international companies including various local banks, RIMI and STATOIL. Feedback on the leadership development work was excellent and the participants were especially impressed by the power of Sewa Beats’ unique methodology for experiential learning. There was so much interest that Sewa Beats continues to be invited by the participants to run leadership development and team building sessions for their companies.

Reading FC motivation and team-building with Sewa Beats -top-

Team-building for companies is one thing, doing it with a top England soccer team is quite another. The client’s need for success is critical and the results are immediately apparent.

Sewa Beats was asked to work with Reading Football Club at the beginning of March 2005. This is the first time the company worked with a football club and it was a huge success. Reading F.C. had not won a game since Boxing day 2004 and they felt destined to lose their forthcoming match against West Ham – the reason was that West Ham’s coach was Reading’s former coach. He therefore knew the Reading players well and of course knew all their tricks, tactics, strengths and weaknesses. The Reading team’s management asked Sewa Beats to run a team-building session on the Monday prior to the big match and, on the following Saturday, they beat West Ham 3 – 0. Result!

The Sewa Association brings together 350 participants and raises 10’000 Swiss francs during its first charity event in Geneva -top-

The Sewa Association is an NGO affiliated to Sewa Beats. It was created in January 2004 with two main objectives: to bring the joy of drumming to disadvantaged communities across Europe and to raise funds for specific charitable projects around the world.

At Geneva’s Palladium, an original event was organized by the Sewa Association to raise funds for Terre des Hommes Switzerland.

Together, some 350 participants of all ages – each provided with an African djembe drum - assumed the role of both performer and apprentice within a gigantic African percussion workshop. Under the direction of Sewa Beats’ team of professionals from Burkina Faso, the United Kingdom, Spain and Switzerland, who had come especially for the event, even the rank beginners quickly got the beat.

It was a matchless experience that allowed the participants to discover the djembe, but also to taste African delicacies and help needy children. The total proceeds (10'000 Swiss francs) were donated to Terre des Hommes Switzerland’s’ ASECD project (Association to support children in difficult circumstances). An undertaking that provides health, nutrition and educational support to 90 impoverished children in Burkina Faso.

This huge success and the high demand has encouraged all sponsors and collaborators to organize a similar events around Europe. We will keep you posted. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact the Sewa Foundation for further information at info@sewabeats.com

Sewa Beats – improving more than just work performance? -top-

The Sewa Beats team was delighted to receive this surprise note recently:

Hi there,

I just came across your website and thought I'd email you to let you know how attending a Sewa Beats session changed my life.

On 29th Nov 2001 I was invited to a Sewa Beats session at the Tabernacle in London. Searching for someone to accompany me from work (Expotel Hotel Reservations at the time) I asked around and a female colleague from the Sales department volunteered.  We had a great time, enjoyed the night, and became great friends.

We got married this April in Spain and to this day we can still remember the rhythms that we were taught and often talk of that night.

All the best and great to see that you are going from strength to strength.

Dan


Beat that for a team building success!