Global Development

About a year ago our CEO Sam Palmisano delivered a speech in Washington, DC, that identified the transition of IBM from a multi-national company to a globally integrated enterprise. As IBM operates in a globally integrated fashion around the world, across our geographies and across our functions, it puts a significant premium on corporate citizenship and the way in which the company involves its employees in communities to add significant value and to improve capability in the places where we operate. That was the genesis of the Global Citizens Portfolio; to operate in new and unique ways around the globe to combine corporate citizenship and business strategy. When it was announced in Washington, there were three initial programs that made up the Global Citizens Portfolio.

One was the idea of the Corporate Service Corps. This was a new, creative and innovative way of developing global leaders for the challenges and opportunities in a global economy. IBM made a commitment to take the best talent, the best emerging leaders in the company, and to give them an opportunity in the developing world, operating in teams to engage in a program that would have a triple benefit. There’s benefit to the individual by developing leaders who have a broader understanding about local cultures in the developing world and how problems there can be solved by engaging with NGOs and governments around issues involving economic growth. Second, it provides specific amounts of benefit to those communities. To have teams of emerging leaders doing problem solving activities in places like the Philippines, Ghana, Tanzania, Vietnam, Romania and Turkey enables a significant amount of progress in solving these problems. Finally, it provides a significant benefit to the company by expanding the number of our best emerging leaders who have a global perspective that includes on-the-ground experiences in the developing world. We are now 11 months after the announcement, and we have our first teams actually in the field. The commitment that we made initially was to prepare, train and support 600 emerging leaders in this way over a three-year period. Based on the excitement over the initiative, we’ve expanded our target now to 1500 leaders. So this is really a departure from how companies have previously done their leadership development. It’s a new model, it's received an enormous amount of attention, both in the media, on university campuses and around the world. These teams are truly global in nature. They represent over 30 different countries and the range of skill areas in the company. It really is an opportunity to demonstrate a new model, and that's just one component of the Portfolio.

A second element and something equally creative and innovative is the idea of creating Personal Learning Accounts. When the Global Citizens Portfolio was initially announced, this was referred to by one commentator at the Harvard Business School as a new social contract where a company and its employees would jointly contribute into a matching account that would support their personal , life-long learning. This is a recognition that the world has changed, that people need continuous learning for the new skills and opportunities that are going to exist in the marketplace. The idea of companies only paying for training that is related to people's current jobs is really a thing of the past. We spend about $600 million on all IBM work-related training, but Personal Learning Accounts are an opportunity to develop something very new. Some people referred to it as a “401L ’ for learning. This program really is a matching account that people can use for their personal learning and development. The program is now operational for IBM employees beginning in the US. If they've worked for the company for more than five years, they can contribute up to $1000. IBM will match that with a $500 contribution for these personal learning accounts.

The third new idea was what we call “Transitions to ”, which is built on a program that IBM launched a couple of years ago called Transition to Teaching. If people are looking for second career opportunities as they move from the corporate sector and they want to choose working in an education environment, IBM will pay for their course work, give them leaves of absence to practice teaching and move them into teaching opportunities as their second career. This has been fairly successful in the US; we've been working in partnership with a number of states and localities. There’s also been interest from other companies like Exxon-Mobile, Intel and others. Our idea is to expand Transition to Teaching to include transitions to public service and voluntary service. We’re going to create a menu of second career opportunities that will help facilitate people's transition from their corporate career into a second career in either public, voluntary, education or community service. Once again we can benefit the individual, benefit the community and also benefit IBM.

So that's the three different programs of the Global Citizens Portfolio. It's administered here at IBM through a range of individual organizations from HR to government programs to Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs with extensive involvement of country general managers and other business leaders. It originated, out of IBM's business strategy around the globally integrated enterprise, and we're very fortunate to have a lot of leadership coming from our CEO when he laid this idea out, and we're very hopeful about the results.

The reason IBM considers this initiative to be important is because corporate citizenship is so intertwined with the company's business strategy and globally integrated enterprise. We like to think that IBM has been a high-quality corporate citizen for a very, very long time, but changes in the global economy and the shift from multi-national to globally integrated enterprise requires a whole new set of thinking around corporate citizenship. This is really an opportunity to join together benefits to the employee, benefits to the community and benefits to the company. It’s going to help us to prepare our employees, relate to communities and create real, significant, expanded business values for the organization.

• The Portfolio also offers a great return on IBM’s investment. One of the distinguishers for a company like IBM is our ability to attract and retain talent. We know that there's a huge amount of interest in corporate social responsibility on university campuses and in graduate business schools. I'm on the Board of the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Institute, and at Harvard there are more students in the Social Enterprise Club than in all the other clubs on campus put together via our initiatives. We're telling people of talent, "If you come to work for IBM, you don't have to wait 20 years in your career to get an international assignment; you don't have to table your interests in community engagement.” This is something that at IBM is valued. It's part of how we prepare, support and develop our leaders.

We committed ourselves to moving expeditiously in getting these programs up and running and we’re pleased that all three of them were operational in less than a year. We've retained independent advisors to measure the success of these initiatives, so we're very confident that we'll be able to report on specific return on investment. We've also had a lot of interest from other companies looking at the innovations we are launching here, and so we expect to produce the evidence and get back to industry analysts, individual companies, business partners and others about what we’ve achieved and next steps.

Obviously, we're living in a time of great economic competitiveness, and I think the premium is being placed on adaptation and change, not just in terms of how you work with customers, but how you work more broadly within communities. The kind of initiatives that we're taking will be more and more prevalent, not just in companies like IBM but in partnerships with the public and the voluntary sector. I think that they talk to the needs of the individual, the needs of the company and the needs of the community. I definitely think programs like the Global Citizens Portfolio will help us to attract and retain the best people. There's an enormous amount of excitement in the company about the Corporate Service Corps and on university campuses around the world . There is great interest from government in fusing service and economic opportunity. I think we're going to see an enormous impact on the retention and attraction of talent, and I think that something like enhanced transition services helping employees broaden their opportunity if they move on to other careers, is going to create expanded business opportunity for the company as well. We know that when our people move from their IBM career to work for business partners or customers leveraging their skill and talent, it expands business opportunity for IBM. It also helps meet critical labor needs. I think the reality is that if you look at the demographics in places like the United States or Western Europe, the UK, Asia, Latin America, we have a large population of people who are not interested in traditional retirement. They want to contribute, but they want to do new, different things. They want to contribute in new and different ways, and just like companies have helped people plan for their next phase of life in terms of the economics of retirement, I think there's an obligation for companies to think about how people can not only retire but also contribute into their communities. That benefits the employees, it makes you a better employer, it benefits various sectors of the economy, and it provides an ancillary benefit back to the company in terms of business opportunity and expand ed community relationships. It really does enhance the company brand and the value that the company brings to its shareholders and its employees.

Spare change to real change

IBM invests in its people and communities

The spare change approach to corporate citizenship boils down to a company earning X amount of dollars and then contributing some relatively small percentage of that into communities. The goal of that is simple generosity . This is important but giving back or providing something into the community is only one thing that a company owes to countries. That's the old way of thinking. The “real change ” approach is that a company takes what is most valuable to it: its people, its talent, its expertise, its innovation, its creativity, and it brings that to customers in the marketplace. By taking that and contributing it into communities in unique and new ways and producing real change, you also produce significant value to the company. I think that’s what the Global Citizens Portfolio is. It’s about moving from spare change, to real change and real economic benefit.

Going global

IBM’s first three Corporate Service Corps (CSC) teams are now on their way to

Romania, Ghana and the Philippines, marking the official launch of the program.

Romania

The team is partnering with the Citizens Development Corps and the Center for Entrepreneurship & Executive Development.

Ghana

The team in will partner with the Citizens Development Corps and the Association of Ghanaian Industries.

Philippines

The team will partner with the Australian Business Volunteers, the Philippine Development Assistance Program and the Davao City Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

Stanley Litow is the President of the IBM International Foundation and IBM's VP for Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs. He heads global corporate citizenship efforts at IBM, which contributes nearly $ 65 million across 170 countries. Under his leadership, IBM has developed new innovative technologies to help non literate children and adults learn to read, helped people with disabilities access the internet, created a humanitarian grid to power research on cancer and AIDS and developed technology to increase economic growth and small business development.

He helped create and chairs the Global Leadership Network and serves on the board of Harvard Business School's Initiative on Social Enterprise, Independent Sector, Citizen's Budget Commission, and the After School Corporation.