Live:smarter

This week the Corporate Citizenship team have been holding a week of events to encourage employees to get involved in their local communities.

flyer

It’s been a great week, seeing existing volunteers, volunteer to spread the word about what they are doing and what they get out of helping others.  It’s also been a time to recognise the effort these people put into the interests they support.

Yesterday I was at the Bedfont event and listened to a very passionate talk by Alison Hall from Seeds for Development, a charity she set up with her IBM colleague Tamsin Miles, to help women in Uganda recover their lives from the war that ravaged the country. It was a fantastic example of storytelling from the heart, not zealous, just sincere and honest.

However, the events also helped people do something, no matter how small or big, in their own community too. IBMers and do many employees from all sorts of organisations, have a huge variety and depth of skills that can be put to good use in schools, medical centres, youth clubs or charities. The resources there to help people get started are vast, both inside and outside the company. Hopefully over the last few days the CC&CA team and volunteers have shown and inspired others how to make use of them. Not just through the regular IBM created programmes of which we have many but to come up with a new idea, share that and make use of the skills and willingness of the people they work with.

One of the initial ideas of the events was to show that smarterplanet doesn’t need to start with a 1-to-1 with the Prime Minister or by implementing a traffic congestion scheme. It starts with each one of us. With our ideas, our influence and our own efforts.

What about permission?

Note to reader: I left at 1pm as I had another engagement so I don’t know what happened in the second half. Do tell if you know.

At an event yesterday organised by The Alternative in deepest Soho I was annoyed to discover that the place had no wireless access and my 3G card didn’t work as we were in the basement. Avery nice basement but nonetheless reception was rubbish.

tribe - Projeto Salamandra

The event was entitled “The New Brand Tribalism” and not being able to pump up my pc to tweet and share with the world what was going on was incredibly annoying. My tribal behaviour towards this brand was no off to a good start.

Note to all event organisers, wireless is as much an essential these days as tea and coffee.

My initial thought before going to this event were that I wonder how much people like Seth Godin and a whole host of others would come up. Not once unless I fell asleep.  Seth has his critics and I’m no fan-boy but c’mon, give a word for those that came before.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I didn’t feel that there was anything “new” here. Lots of talk of being authentic but the also more on being controlling. To my mind that sounded like, try and look like you are authentic. Kind of the opposite of being authentic. I was expecting more about giving employees brand permission, about employees being involved in the decisions that matter to them, the stuff that makes me come to work.

There were some mentions of brand ambassadors but it felt like that some gimmick or other had to be run so as employees would then go and talk about it. Quick fixes fade quick too.

Actually one statement that stuck in my mind went something like, ” We can take the tribal behaviours and control and shape them for the business.” To me that sounds like they way you kill it.

Great chats though with a couple of gents, those were insightful conversations on what is really happening, success and failures, fear and desire.  Wish I also got to meet Joanne and Rach who also attended.