Contemporary Eugenics; the notion of ‘Limpieza Social’

I would like to share with you a story which recently made me wonder ‘What kind of plastic bubble word has I been living in?’ Unaware of what is going on outside of my relatively safe European reality.

To start with I would like you to think for a moment about the Second World War and the idea of Eugenics that Mr. Hitler strongly endorsed. As you probably know eugenics refers to rather biological idea of ‘cleaning species’ from inadequate individuals. When applied to social science by Natzi, it proclaimed that human race should be redeemed by removing those who threaten its purity: Jewes, Poles, Gypsies ec. Yes, we all know it from the history lessons and one could think that we have learnt this lessons and the history won’t repeat itself.

As I mentioned in the previous post recently I’ve begun to work with NGO in Soacha region of Bogota. The other day while visiting the community I was talking with a guy who has been working for this organisation for 2 years and I was asking him about some security issues. He said that recently the security has been a bit improved but 2-3 years ago the situation was very bad mostly due to limpieza social(social cleaning). Not familiar with the notion I asked what does this phrase stand for. He explained me that ‘social cleansing consists of serial killings of people who have been economically pushed so far toward the fringes of misery that the more affluent members of society classify them as "undesirable," "throwaway" human beings’( from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_n8_v30/ai_14682952/). How is in charge of these ‘cleanings’? As surprising as it may sound that would be police…To understand the scale of this procedure I recommend you the article quoted. The picture that emerges is scary for couple of reasons from which me, personally strike most 2 of them:

1) The division of society into ‘good/useful and garbage/unusual’ is sanctioned by politicians of the country.

2) The solution to poverty and related to it violence has been identified as ‘using more violence’.

Moreover I think that such movement is not limited to Colombia and Brasil. Considering the recent happenings in London and general atmosphere in the European Union towards closing Shengen in order to protect Europeans from illegal immigrants the question emerges: If there was no law protecting marginalised people against murders how many of them would be slaughtered on the streets of Paris, London, Berlin? Of course this examples are even more complex due to race/ethnicity/religion dimensions that merge with poverty issues.

Why do I write about this? Because I am interested in your opinions about these issues…Is the violence an answer to the poverty problem? If not, how to change peoples’ perception? What actions should be taken on governmental/individual level?

Social Business- from practical point of view

My last post touched upon issues related to social business and microfounds. As I mentioned, these are the issues that recently have been keeping my mind busy :) Althought I read about these concepts, have seen films about it I have never actually seen and experienced this idea in practice. I hoped to do so while in India, but working for TCS kept me busy pretty much all day, all evening and sometimes during a part of the night.
However now, being in Bogota, Colombia I decided to finally give it a try and get engaged with an NGO that is helping people by 'teaching them how to fish instead of giving them fish to eat'. After an extensive reseach (btw, do you know that there are many companies that charge foreginers for volunteering? Yes, you need to pay if you want to work for free and contribute..how crazy is that?)I found Ahmsa (http://www.ahmsa.org/?lang=en), met with people who volunteer with this organisation and yesterday I got an amazing opportunity to see their work.
To do so we travelled to very South of Bogota where according to some of my friends is not smart to be once it gets dark.After around half an hour I found myself in one of the poorest parts of Bogota. Judging on the information that many local people spread about this area I was expecting at least armed gangs strolling the streets...to my surprise what I saw was a normal life: guys hanging around, couples romancing, kids playing in the streets, women gossiping in front of their houses. Don;t missunderstand me- I'm not naive to think that there is no violence and very heavy social problems over there, but what I want to start with is that demonising such places, spreading the 'red alert' sort of thinking of part A and part B of society leads to hudge exagurations and deepens division in society leading to extremelly dangerous social exclusion...

Having said this, I finally had a chance to see how this sort of NGO work. I visited for example the textiles company where people produce items of clothing. What organisation helps them with is financial support for machines that tailors need to do their job, training, getting vendors and ideas on how to improve the process to make it more productive, to employ more people and increase thei incomes. This help may involve for example writting professions business proposal for a clothing company to get their interest and sing a contract that will bring more job fr people and improve their lifes. The other business is an internet caffee run by very young boys who wante to do something different in their neighbourhood. Ahmsa helped them to get the computers, to get experts who would teach them how to use and maintan them ec...These are only few exaples of how social business works to help people sustain themselves. I hope to get involved with the organisation and should this happen I will share more ideas that I find inspiring.

“How am I and how do I change the world?”

Recently a friend told me about a workshop (called “How am I and how do I change the world?”) at the Hub Winter School in Sao Paulo (Brazil) on a topic called “Ontology of Language”, which basically says that we, as human beings, are constituted by the language and through the language. We give sense to the world; interpret the reality and ourselves based on our language. Our history is supposed to be told, spoken – and as a story, we can reinterpret it.

Professionals are coming out in the market as ontological coaches to help people understand how they build interpretations about their existence and how it affects their way of being. Each one has a “unique” combination of culture, history, knowledge, characteristics that influence who we are and how we see the world. As a consequence, how we relate to others and to ourselves will be based on that.


How do we interpret our world? How do we see ourselves? How do we communicate what we see? Am I effective in communicating what I see and what I am to others? How do I judge things and people? What are my beliefs and how they limit or expand my understanding of the world?

If we are going in circles in our lives with the same stories or problems, maybe it is a good opportunity to take on these cases and through them understand our mindsets and limitations, in order to amplify our perceptions.

The Ontology of Language also believes that by being aware and effective in our communication, we cooperate better and as a group or an organization, we leverage on our impact. For a reference, the work developed by Marta Magnus (ontological coach in Brazil):

• How do I observe the world? How does it open or close possibilities of action to me?
• What are my main obstacles to learn and how that affects my life?
• How do I listen to others and what is the impact of it in my relationships and life results?
• How do I approach and behave in front of different situations of conflict, unforeseen situations? Am I effective?
• Which are the necessary elements to build and reinforce our confidence, understanding it to be a basic emotion for coordinating our actions?

Social Business Model

The topic I’d like to mention today is not related to HRM, but I find it very interesting and in a line of objectives of our blog :)

In Poland there’s an annual competition organised for students in collaboration with big corporation, NGOs and governmental organisations. Representatives of these institutions prepare case studies from various areas such as finance, IT, HR, marketing and others. Students who propose the most interesting solutions to the problems presented in case studies can be offered an internship in one of these institutions and ,depending on the performance during this internship, they may be also offered a permanent employment. Recently there has been a new subject area introduced to this competition called ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’. I believe that the notion of CSR has gained a big popularity in recent years and now majority of people how take at least minimal interest in issues related to business must have come across it.

I personally heard about CSR for the first time around 4 years ago when working in AIESEC I was a part of the team responsible for organising conference about it. The main objective was to spread this business idea among students and increase awareness about CSR among entrepreneurs. At that time I was really excited about CSR and thought of it as of a ‘human face’ of corporations. However recently, having a bit deeper insight into this concept I came to realize that like 90-100% of companies’ activities CSR is also profit-reassuring initiative. In countries such as USA or UK a company that does not brag about their sustainable processes, environment concerns, employee engagement ec.. take a financial risk in two aspects: Primarily because rich consumers when having a choice between a product which is known to be produced in sweat shops in Bangladesh or a product developed in a collaboration with local communities are more likely to choose the second one. Second of all for an employer branding reasons; recruiters are aware that the generation of todays’ 20 something year old employees do care more about working for fair employer.

Now, how is the contents I mentioned in the beginning relevant? This year’s CSR case study was to invent a CSR strategy for company X. Main objectives of the task was to indicate was would be the business advantage (profit advantage) from implementing it. And that made me wonder….s there a third way? Is there a way for the company to actively help to address societal, environmental and other problems that such idea deprived of profit-making objectives is an utopia? Then I came across of Social Business. The short film attached to this post gives a basic introduction to this concept.

The discussion I would like to being is related to the questions: should corporations engage in social business or rather give money to organisation that specialise in this and (are supposed to) have a better KNOW-HOW? And if social business is a good idea than what has to be considered while implementing such strategy? Recently I read an report from the conference organised by Harvard Business School about these issues. Once study regarding micro founds in India was an excellent example of how a good initiative can bring about side effects when various context surrounding it are not considered. But about this I will elaborate next time :)

Link to the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C3XQ3BTd4o

Importance&Responsibility- HR in the face of economic crisis

Recent economic crisis which effects are still strongly influencing enterprises but most importantly people around the world has brought about discussion on the difficulties that Human Recourses departments have been facing. However in this whole debate on whether or not employees’ number and money for stuff’s development should be cut one important point is missing; namely the questions of what was the role of HR in causing the financial crisis in the first place and if HR executives are to be blamed did the learn the lesson? In my opinion an interesting starting point for this discussion is included in CIPD’s report ‘Next Generation HR’ from 2010 which authors write:

“The perils of HR simply supporting organizations to deliver their short-term strategies were clearly demonstrated by the excesses that fuelled the global financial crisis. Many a commentator asked ‘where was HR?’ when unsustainable business strategies supported by unsustainable reward strategies were being advocated by executives who stood to gain. As one HR director said off the record in response to this question: ‘We were doing what we were told as well as we could.’”

It is remarkable that the collapse of Lehman Brothers was a starting point in reveling deep problems of USA’s and UK’s economies. Why and how is this related to the Human Recourses? In these countries, characterized by Anglo-Saxan, laissez-faire economies the role of state in regulating Employment Relation is far less significant that the role played by internal companies’ departments, in this respect HR. Nevertheless the question arises to what extent HR is actually fulfilling its function given the scope of responsibilities? I quoted the CIPD report because I find extremely significant the comment given by the HR director: ‘We were doing what we were told as well as we could.’” Such approach means that either this person was not interested in taking any responsibility for the problem caused (which surprisingly in this context would be more optimistic scenario) or that in spite of high executive position the HR director was not actually having any significant influence on what was going on in the company. It is difficult to determine which scenario is the real one, however whichever we choose there is no doubt that it were HR practices in financial institutions of remunerations and incentives that created an incentive for management to go one step too far in financial risk management. Having said that let’s have a look of what happened after 2008; according to Guardian (January 2010):

“The world's biggest investment banks are expected to pay out more than $65bn (£40bn) in salaries and bonuses in the next two weeks, reinforcing the view that it is business as usual on Wall Street and in the City barely a year since the taxpayer bailout of the banking system”.

This makes me wonder if:

1. HR still plays barely support function in financial institutions and the HR Directors do not determine the bonuses-culture? If so how and why this should be changed?

2. If the HR has an active part in determining this culture of greedy what are the possible consequences of sustaining such model? Have we not learnt anything? Why and how this has to be changed?

I am interesting what are your opinions about that and I will try to address these questions in next posts. J

Competencies and Organizational Performance

Recently I had to initiate the annual appraisal cycle in the company I work for. It was quite challenging, mainly because the system was not believed to be fair and we were running against the time, without a proper organizational plan in place (Balanced Scorecard) and with the responsibility of delivering workshops on goal setting to the whole company (500 employees).

Once workshops were done but goals not properly set and I had time to breathe in some knowledge, I stopped by a famous book store (Livraria Cultura) at Paulista Avenue and bought a great book that I recommend for the ones who want to understand more on what is organizational performance, how competencies are linked to that and how is it connected to the Balanced Scorecard Strategic Planning. The book is called "Competencias & Desempenho Organizacional - O que ha alem do Balanced Scorecard" (Competencies & Organizational Performance - what exists beyond the Balanced Scorecard).


By reading it, some insights have already sinked in:

1) Results are multiple as they are related to different stakeholders: communities, clients, employees, government, owners, suppliers,...expect different results from the organization. Also, success is not only about financial gains, success is in the eyes of who sees it...

2) The development of individual and organizational competencies are the "roots" for the performance of an organization.

3) Performance exists as a consequence of a strategy and should be measured upon actions taken to see whether they are correct (means result achieved) or should be reviewed. It is not the system that leads to performance but the quality of the strategy and the capacity of the organization to implement it.

4) Strategy can be oriented towards: operational excellence, product innovation or/and service orientation.

5) Performance assessment programs should be linked to programs for retention of key resources and high performers.

6) The strategic planning should be communicated to the employees.

Thats it for now! New insights to come while I keep on reading... =)

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Alain de Botton addresses our common assumptions on success in our career in an innovative and brilliant way. Please check it out on TED:

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success | Video on TED.com