IBM’s Corporate Service Corps focuses on building its employees’
skills, from leadership to teamwork to technical knowhow. The firm sends employees like Roberta Terkowitz to help local governments, small businesses, and nonprofits in the developing world. “We don’t view it as traditional charity work because employees go to places where we have an interest in building IBM’s visibility and where we need to better understand the cultural, political, technology, and
business landscapes,” says Ari Fishkind, IBM media relations manager, Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs. “The experts we send are highly skilled, although we often have them ‘stretch’ by performing technical work outside their comfort zone. We don’t just send techies;
we send experts in law, finance, marketing, business, and human resources.”
IBM has found that this is a more effective—and cost-efficient—way to build talent, he says. Traditionally, the company would send “a lucky few senior executives (and their families) abroad at great expense to an already-developed market,” Fishkind explained to me. “They would spend a long time there—probably only sticking to the company of fellow expats—and we’d also have to backfill their position. They may or may not have come back with super-valuable insights.”
Some 3,000 IBM participants from 58 countries have participated in more than 1,000 CSC projects in 37 countries, generating more than
$100 million in value for host organizations over a six-year period.
According to a 2013 IBM-administered survey of Corporate Service Corps alumni, the Corps is helping IBM employees develop leadership and problem-solving skills. Nine out of 10 employees who participated thought that this was one of the best leadership development
experiences that IBM offers. Eight out of 10 thought that it increased their desire to complete their careers at IBM. Nine out of 10 managers would recommend that other employees apply for the program, and 8 out of 10 managers thought it improved their employees’ motivation.
It’s not just a feel-good experience for the employees; the work also has a lasting impact. For instance, the Corps helped Nigeria design a
program to provide financial, health care, and literacy assistance to poor women and children. In Senegal, IBM worked with Coders4Africa to provide African computer coders with business training to complement their technical skills. As a result, three proposed software projects have received funding to build key mobile and cloud solutions in health care, agriculture, and field data collection. In Vietnam, a team helped a key travel agency increase its business while aiding the country’s economic development. In Brazil, IBM’s advice enabled a network of dozens of children’s hospitals and youth centers to become more efficient.
Terkowitz’s team of eight lived in a local guesthouse in Tanzania for a month, where she worked for the African Wildlife Foundation on a project to bring ecotourism and its revenue to villagers in Wildlife Management Areas of the Maasai Steppe. She came back from the experience
emboldened to leave her professional comfort zone. She asked to be transferred to a different part of the IBM business—Cloud Business Development. Her goal: to learn and apply the organizational and improvisational skills she honed in Africa in a less hierarchical area of IBM.
The Cloud group actually resembled something of a start-up, said
Terkowitz. Plus, there were no sales goals to meet, no one reporting to her.
“It wasn’t like I made a big change, and I didn’t make it right away. What I realized, though, is, ‘My gosh, I could do so much more than I ever thought I could do.’”
I love Terkowitz’s proactive approach to falling in love with her work.
Another IBM employee, Sharon Dinneen, a project manager for the department run by IBM’s chief information officer, has worked for IBM since 1996. While her office is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she works mostly from her home in Dunstable, Massachusetts, about 39 miles from Boston.
In the last five years, she has been assigned to two-week stints in China, Germany, and Ireland, and, most recently, was a member of an IBM Corporate Service Corps team that spent time in Izmir, Turkey. Team
members hailed from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Mexico, the United States, India, Australia, and Malaysia.
While Dinneen is a part of a worldwide team at IBM, most of her
interactions with co-workers are via telephone. So the chance to get out of her home office and tackle a different dynamic working with people face to face has been “personally and professionally fulfilling,” she says. “It has encouraged me to take risks, improvise, go outside of my comfort zone, and stretch my skills.” Another bonus: She finds that as a result of her
experiences, she is a “smarter listener.”
You too must take similar steps to get out of your rut. In Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way, author Bruce Rosenstein writes about ways to build your future beyond your current workplace based on management guru Drucker’s principles. Drucker believed, as Rosenstein writes, “If you are not satisfied with where things are now, do something about it. If the idea of a legacy spurs you to action, that’s fine, but I think it also means accepting the need for renewal and becoming a different person.”
This is clearly your time to accept “the need for renewal” and take action, or you wouldn’t be reading this book. As Rosenstein explains, Drucker said that individuals should think beyond a career to ask questions of
themselves, Rosenstein explains: “Who am I? What do I want to be? What do I want to put into life? What do I want to get out of it?” These are very basic and broad, but take them seriously. Spend some time formulating your answers, and write them down in your journal.