Is it for me?
I tend to get very excited about Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives particularly when I can bring something in and get something out. As a result, I was very motivated for the SAP Social Sabbatical in Ethiopia and I was particularly excited because it is a fit with the strategic direction of SAP. In short we make the run world better by putting up our skills to help a social enterprise, which hardly would have access to our expertise and then we also apply the learning from the assignment to our responsibilities back at SAP.
The process started back in April with the virtual calls announced to everyone, then you have to ‘press the button’ that is, make up your mind on whether you want to participate and why, make your application and submit it. Considering, you don’t know exactly what you are going for, you don’t know the country, the culture, the food, the organization and the people you are going with, it must be very clear for you the reasons why you want to go and whether you are willing to manage all these uncertainties.
In one hand I was very influenced by Hans Rosling book, Factfulness, which was the book I was reading at the time and I was very appalled by how biased my vision of the world was. Second I wanted to put up my skills to the benefit of a social enterprise because these organizations lack core skills which can help in executing their vision to improve people’s life. Also I know for sure that by being in another country, working two full weeks in a different country (Ehtiopia) and organizational culture (social enterprise) together with SAP colleagues from different locations will surely bring relevant skills for my daily job.
After all SAP is a global organization with employees from everywhere across the globe working with companies from the whole world and that… that is my daily life.
