The Roadshow Begins !

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Last Saturday, 28/2 was a busy day for my team and I. Rassa, Emily and I left for UiTM as early as 8am.

I was invited by the Professional Accounting department to give a talk on Corporate Responsibility (CR).

There were at least 300 Professional Accounting students at the vast auditorium. They were from various professional bodies - the UiTM accounting students, CIMA, ACCA and some other universities as well.

It was a well organized event.

Sharing the podium with me was my good friend, Adelina Iskandar (Ad), GM of Syabas - the water supplier and Ms Sumithra Nair from DiGi - the mobile company.

Both Adelina and Sumithra spoke about their respective organizations' CR initiatives.

What was extremely interesting about Syabas was how Adelina articulated her company's "raison d'etre" or reason to exist : the entire business was, according to her a Corporate Responsibility : the way "we deal with our customers, the way we solve their problems and even they way we educate them about our product - water" !

Ad's presentation was peppered with jokes and many light moments. Her slides were slick.

Sumitra from DiGi was astounding. Sumithra spoke passionately about DiGi's CR initiatives. How their CR starts from their doorstep. How DiGi has designed their office space -the open office concept and how this contributes hugely to an innovative and creative environment.

Sumitra also spoke about their company policy on employees, their Deep Grees program which focuses on Climate Change and others.

One thing with DiGi - its not just a company selling a product. Its a company building a cult !

When my turn came - I spoke about the the importance of CR. I asked if in the current Global Economic Crisis should the CR budget be cut and nearly all the future accountants responded with a NO ! What a relief !

To me, CR is about Incubating Future Customers. Since the purpose of any business is to create the customer - its important to have a well thought through CR Strategy : at the intersection of business needs and social wellbeing.

I then spoke about The Global Entrepreneurship Week.

I gave a whole presentation on this amazing week and how I feel entrepreneurship is important - even in the current economic times.

Entrepreneurship is about being FREE ! Its the best CR you can give anyone.

With that I ended my session at UiTM. I had to leave almost immediately as I was speaking at another event 10 mins from UiTM : I was off to a SIFE event.

Michael Reyes from Money Tree was speaking about his programs when we arrived at Intekma. Michael is a passionate speaker and he has some very innovative programs under Money Tree.

We all then had lunch and Zul, Country Manager for SIFE then introduced me to the audience - mostly SIFERs and about 20 of them.

I spoke about GEW and encouraged SIFE to play a pivotal role in this years GEW.

Michael Teoh then spoke to the Sifers on how they should or could leverage on Sife, its name and network to promote SIFE and themselves.

A very engaging and enterprising guy Michael is. He is young and has many achievements to his his name. Will be speaking to Michael soon to have him profiled in this blog.

Thus, last Sat went by fast...

Next Sat, 7th will be different. I will be leaving to Kansas City ; for the GEW Host Conference.

Will report more from there.

Cheers