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An Important Lesson About Relationships: Never be Surprised by Surprises
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An Important Lesson About Relationships: Never be Surprised by Surprises
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This guest blog article, by Laura Asiala, Director of Corporate Citizenship, Dow Corning, originally appeared on Dow Corning's Citizen Service Corps website. It turns out Dr. Phil Mirvis was right: relationships are one of the most important things we gain through an international corporate volunteer (ICV) program, like the Dow Corning Citizen Service Corps. In 2010 we were just getting started, and I had written a brief for CDC Development Solutions for our first program that was very broad.. As a specialty materials manufacturer, we were looking to immerse ourselves in under-served markets: no desk jobs for us! No teaching (well, at universities anyway). No information technology system or data base development. We wanted to be in the field. And, we wanted to work on projects that would lend us the greatest amount of insight for our future business: renewable energy, affordable housing, sustainable agriculture, and/or sustainable transportation. Would there be any organizations with projects to fit that remit that could benefit from a diverse group of employees with collective experiences in manufacturing, sales, marketing, product development, logistics, maintenance, and/or quality? It turns out there were! But not in the way we expected it. A good point to make here: when you enter into a new space in any part of your life, you should not be surprised by the surprises! Dow Corning is one of the world’s leading suppliers of materials which are critical to a host of renewable energy sources: wind, solar thermal, and photo-voltaic. We’re especially invested in the manufacture of hyper pure polycrystalline silicon, which is the material of choice for solar cells. It was reasonable to assume that the team from CDS in India would find a solar project for us. Nope. It turns out that while electrification is, of course, a huge issue in India, the issue that we were called upon to serve was renewable energy in the form of clean cookstoves. CDS proposed two projects in this area to us.
I almost sent the projects back. I almost said, “Can’t we do something in solar?” But my colleague, Vice President Mary Lou Benecke, with her characteristic brilliance, said, “We said we wanted to learn. This is what they’re recommending. Why don’t we go and learn?” So we did. It turns out bio-mass is still the leading form of renewable energy, especially in the developing world, and the economic, ecological and health issues of traditional cookstoves are endemic. During our first ICV program, we also worked on a project with Ashoka for affordable housing. We remain in contact with all of the people with whom we worked with that year. Yes, specific business ideas and opportunities have come from our goal to gain insight for innovation, but we couldn’t have planned for the reach that came as a result of the relationships we built. The point about relationships is one about networks and the ability to touch—and be touched—by people who are living, sometimes it seems, in a parallel universe. Cookstoves? I would hazard to guess that not more than a half dozen people amongst my 12,000 colleagues would have been able to identify it as one of the world’s leading sustainability challenges prior to our work in Bangalore, India in the fall of 2010. Only two years after we first learned about this issue, we’re now allied with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, further contributing through financial and human talent—continuing to discover, serve, and gain insight for innovation. I’m on my way to the U.S. State Department—the second time in two months—to join Kris Balderston, Special Representative for Global Partnerships at the State Department and Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer of USAID for a panel discussion on the power of these types of public-private partnerships. We’ll be leading a breakout session for a number of U.S. ambassadors at the Chief of Diplomatic Mission Conference. Think how close I came to missing this chance for us to make such a contribution. I almost sent that proposal back! Don’t let the surprises surprise you. Welcome them. That’s the insight we should all be after.
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We worked with Envirofit in developing their marketing approaches. We worked with Sustaintech to help them scale their manufacturing, and especially in solving a specific quality (welding) issue. This was a great example, too, of the way we were able to engage employees on the home front, with only 10 people in the field. Our in-field employee volunteers didn’t know how to solve the problem, but they knew who did. An email with an explanation of the problem went off to the shop at our Hemlock Semiconductor site in Hemlock, Michigan, and within about 24 hours, the team received suggestions from fellow employees which they were able to put into place.
