One of the great things about the company that I work for is we do some really interesting Corporate Responsibility stuff. My manager calls it
CSR in balance, meaning that he chooses initiatives that benefit both the community and as well as us, the employees, and in turn, the company. It makes sense. A couple examples of "extra-curricular" activities I've done already in my short time with Capgemini:
1. A community project with Raleigh InternationalRaleigh International gives people of all ages experiences that allow them to make a difference to communities and environments all over the world.
A couple weeks ago, 23 people from my programme spent a weekend in a big lodge somewhere in Surrey rejuvenating a nearby forest area for the community. It was beside a pretty poor council estate, and had previously been used by drug addicts, and filled with quad bikes, burned out cars, etc. But it's been under development for a few years so is now being used by the community in a good way now.
Our main task was to build a path through the forest to enable access for parents with prams, the elderly, dog-walkers, etc. Turned out this was quite a physically demanding task indeed, as we had to cart many tons of recycled motorway that we were using for paving. Lots of running around with very heavy wheelbarrows!
As well as definitely helping to foster a good team spirit and sense of community in our group, we were given quite a lot of responsibility in terms of deciding how we would structure the work and form work-teams to carry out various tasks.
LeadershipWe all got a chance to lead some part of the project for about half a day - this is where the value of the experience really comes in. As the first leader of the path building team, people turned to me to make decisions about how we would start this off. So very quickly and with no more information than everyone else, I had to decide how we would do things and adapt this as we saw what worked well and what didn't.
One thing that was really interesting is as everyone gained confidence in what they were doing over the weekend, the effective leadership style changed into less decision-making and a more nurturing style, supporting and encouraging people who were by now quite exhausted but still working very hard.
I think this is quite an accurate reflection of situations that would present themselves during the leadership of a consulting project: having to make quick decisions with limited knowledge, and later on effectively using the knowledge that various team members have built up.
In the end we all felt a really big sense of achievement as we saw the first members of the public enjoying our beautiful woodland path:
2. Bringing business to life for school students with Business DynamicsI took my first proper volunteering day on Friday, with a charity called Business Dyanmics that goes into schools all over the UK to get young people excited about the world of business.
I like getting people excited about things, so I was up for this.
With just a short training session behind me, and a basic activity plan, I was pretty much thrown in at the deep end, in charge of a class of 30 13-year old boys for an entire school day.
Quite challengingHaving had almost no experience working with children, this was quite a challenging experience to say the least. Very exhausting, but very rewarding.
The idea of the day was to split them into teams each representing a small company who was to design, prototype, market and pitch an idea for a new roller-coaster at a large theme park - all the time relating what they are doing to my own experience and stories of the exciting world of business.
On one hand, it is quite an easy crowd as they do automatically have at least some respect for adults and they are excited to have a school day that's not just their normal lessons.
But as soon as you bring out the interactive activities and they're in teams working away with paper and card and a single marble shared between the whole class, boy have you got trouble!
I did manage to maintain order for a time, but at one point it did just descend into chaos with teams trying to buy and sell people from each other, people being fired, others quitting, the marble mysteriously disappearing, and even the odd outbreak of minor violence.
It was certainly a blessing to always have a real teacher in the room to bring everything back to order every now and then. They are amazingly talented people and I now have *a lot* of respect for them.
But very rewardingI was very impressed with the creativity and enthusiasm of the students, and very encouraged that several of the teams realised that a key issue would be building and running their roller-coaster in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly way.
Seeing the final presentations and discussing with them what their key learnings had been during the day was really great. They talked about growing in confidence, learning about working in a team, enjoying the day a lot, and wanting to do business studies and even start their own businesses when they're older.
Certainly kids these days are slightly less respectful of authority and harder to control, but I do think they are also more entrepreneurial and have more of a sense of the issues in business.
But a couple things I did have to clarify - no, I have not been on Deal or No Deal, and no, I do not (quite) earn enough to own a Ferrari :-)
5 Comments:
ummm..
posted @ Sat Jan 03, 03:51:00 AMa) thanks for the post card!!
b) i need to go write my grocery list.
I've been trying to figure out how best to use to do lists and the like for the past couple of years and I think I sympathise with a lot of what you're saying. Stuff like GTD is no doubt great if you have the discipline for it, but the fact that you have to write down every little thing seems to cause more bureaucracy than the system is worth. I often find that if I write a to do list at the start of the day, there's a good chance I'll discover that in fact I shouldn't do anything on it and do something else altogether.
posted @ Sat Jan 03, 04:39:00 PMHowever, I still use todo lists for the simple fact that they get stuff out of your head. Once you instantiate a plan of any sort in reality, it suddenly becomes much easier to reason about, and you don't have to be subconciously reminding yourself about it's details all the time because you can always just check your todo list.
I'm currently using hiveminder for todo items as it's fairly powerful yet also quick to use. I don't break things down too much though so that I can concentrate on actually doing things. Maybe that's all there is to it. HTH.
I agree that lists are bad.
posted @ Sat Jan 03, 07:43:00 PMWhile I do sometimes do what you do with opening tabs of things and never reading them, I rarely go very deep unless it REALLY grabs my attention. The only lists I really maintain are the list of CD's and DVD's that I intend to buy (which is very short).
As for lists like "101 things to do in 1001 days", I think they are especially bad. When you do something, do you want to say "good, thats another thing off my list" or "wow, im really glad that I did that and ive changed in some way because of it"?
While we should always have goals, setting time limits on them tends to stress you out that they arent done, and can even rush you into doing something wrong or just too soon.
Live life as it comes, take part in the experiences it presents and don't spend half your life bogged down in writing down everything that you think you should do and forgetting all the things you have already done!
Whats important is friends and family, and everything else is just guff so you have something to talk about to people who may one day be friends or family.
Connie - thanks for your card too! It was lovely, and yes, I am not very good at answering machines!
posted @ Sun Jan 04, 12:49:00 AMMark - Thanks, I am going to check out those tools.
What strikes me now is the quite opposing viewpoints of Mark and Stuart (The King).
I think that boils down to the fact that Mark is thinking about lists as a productivity tool - something for getting things (i.e. work) done, whereas Stuart, your context is more related to personal/life-goals type lists.
So perhaps the answer is that lists are good for work and projects, but not good for life in general?
But should there be a difference? And if so, why?
Stuart - I agree with you that living life as it comes is a great philosophy, but are you saying we should set goals but have no time limit on them?
Perhaps the answer is to have to-do lists (even for life goals), but just not to take them too seriously or get at all stressed about them?
(i.e. have goals, ambitions and aims (even with time limits) but accept that many of them probably won't get done, and know that it doesn't matter)
I suppose my comment was based on your opening paragraph more than anything. The reality is that it is hard to (for example) do a degree in CS and not have a strong urge to organise and plan tasks. And in fact I do exactly the same thing in my current job, I do have to-do lists (although generally they are in my head except when something needs communicated to an underling). And shopping lists of course. But beyond that I have generally found myself getting lost when trying to plan anything else, or write down a list of tasks.
posted @ Sun Jan 04, 01:38:00 AMFor example my list of goals roughly sum up to marry some girl and bring up kids together in the north of scotland. There is no point in writing that down, or setting some finite length of time in which I want to achieve that, or trying to subdivide this into smaller tasks ( want to live in the north so need to move there, to move there need a job and somewhere to live, to get somewhere to live need x amount of money, to get x amount of money save y amount from pay). If it's that important to you then you shouldn't have to write it down to remind you, and if it's not that important then you either do it or you don't and it doesn't matter.
All that said, in some ways I could quite clearly be defined as a bum and you are (seemingly) on a completely different path from the one which i'm on. If you have a lot of things and want them done in a (relatively) short period of time, then list.
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