As Chair of the Executive Board, I wish to extend my compliments to you all.

IFTDO, being a federation of organizations, depends upon your active support and involvement for the success of its activities. The members of the Executive Board would welcome your guidance, suggestions and participation on how IFTDO can develop going forward.

Many of you will have extensive experience on developing organizations and people. We would like you to share these ideas and experiences with us to help bring IFTDO to the fore and be a more significant influence on international opinion than is currently the case. Please feel free to write to me at raybonarwhb@gmail.com.

Our flagship event is the Annual IFTDO World Conference. Next year, the conference is being organized in Warsaw, Poland from May 8-11, 2011 by Nowoczesnafirma and Obserwatorium Zarzadzania. The hosts are working with great effort to create a memorable event which will make a big contribution to the body of HRD and OD knowledge. In order to make this a world class HRD event, it is essential that our member organizations participate in terms of attendance and contributing papers.

Further The IFTDO Global Human Resources Development Awards have been instituted to recognize high performing and innovative organizations. These awards are a new development for IFTDO and recognizes at an international level those contributions to the development of HRD best practice and research. Ensure that your best practitioners are represented by nominating them now. An international award winner brings credit and recognition to the winner and their parent institution/organization. The announcement appears at our web site and in our Newsletters. We look forward to nominations from you all. Please publicize these awards through your Newsletters, web site and communications to your members.

IFTDO has been steered by my worthy predecessors. The members of the Executive Board devote considerable time on a voluntary basis to make IFTDO what it is. I must place on record my appreciation for all of them, more specifically, the immediate past-Chair, Ebrahim Al'Dossary, from Bahrain who took several initiatives during his term to revitalize and bring IFTDO forward to meet the challenges of the next decade. I follow a long line of very able leaders and every one of them has made their contribution to the development of the organisaton and in bringing new initiatives on stream to the extent that we have a viable and energetic body that is actively representing our member organizations in many forums concerned with organization and people development.

We have been working with 3-year rolling Strategic Plans and I propose to give further impetus to our activities through this initiative. The planning process is fully dependent on the input from members in terms of initiatives and helping us to identify opportunities that will fit into our long term strategy. I would welcome your ideas for the further development of IFTDO. Your ideas, no matter how small you feel they may be, may contain that spark or gem that will produce the seed that may have a significant impact on the growth and future of IFTDO.

                                                                                                                           "Ray Bonar"