1000 years back

I have just come back from a trip to Velikij Novgorod, which is the city on the north of Russia that has a history of more than 1000 years. We went there with Sveta, a friend of mine.

It’s even difficult to imagine – 1000 years! Yet, many historical monuments are still on this land, although were badly destroyed by wars.

You may read about the city in web: www.novgorod.ru/english while I will put some pictures that we did there and my personal impressions about the trip.

Impression 1 – Kremlin, cultural center of the city and a good place for rest in piece and silence.

Impression 2 – Cotton hare. Surprisingly, we came to Novgorod in its birthday, so took part in the celebration that impressed us a lot! The event was organized in such an interesting way that everybody could get involved in different activities: painting, weaving, sewing, dancing!

As for us, we learned to make cotton hares :-)

Impression 3 – Monastery life. There are a lot of churches and monasteries in Novgorod. Wherever you go, you will find them on your way. It’s strange and frustrating how some of them are surrounded by cafes, clubs, beaches etc. without any respect to monks. Yet these are just exceptions. And there is the one which impressed us the most, because of its blinding beauty and spiritual silence…

We heard the story about novices (“послушники”) who have to obey all requests of a parson (“батюшка”). No words back, no complaints, if you are told to do something you are to go it. Are we able to live this kind of life?

And this is an old church destroyed during Warld War II, now a home for some Novgorod citizens...

Impression 4 – House of Dostoevsky in Staraya Russa (town in Novgorod region). Fedor Dostoevsky is the famous Russian writer, we saw his small house where he lived with his family.

Impression 5 – Weird things. Some of them are funny, some are frustrating, the others are completely senseless. One of them is just STRANGE… like this drama theatre… :)

***

Thank you, my dear, for such a pleasant trip!

Corporate Responsibility

2 weeks ago I attended a round table devoted to Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR (organized by AIESEC in Moscow).

CSR is one the areas I am passionate about, so I was extremely glad to participate in the mentioned event.

In order to keep the key learning points that I go out of discussions, I am posting them to this blog.

Some of them might be seen as obvious; however, it was important for me to clearly understand basic things, although I read books about CSR before.

First presentation got us into the topic and underlined 3 main challenges of CSR in Russia:

* not developed reporting system for CSR activities
* CSR is not a part of the general strategy of the company
* CSR is still perceived as a charity activities, although it includes 2 additional aspects

Eugeny Tutkevich, top manager of MDM-bank, pointed out another interesting question, and instead of talking about importance of CSR for companies, gave 5 reasons why companies should not do CSR:

* CSR is not the first priority for the company as it aims on making profit
* Companies pay lots of taxes, so it’s the job of government to do social work
* Charity attracts attention of government
* The more you give, the more people will ask you for
* “If I am asked to sponsor road building, why should I give the money if a road will be built anyway?”

Conclusion: company that doesn’t do CSR activities has far more benefits than the one who does!

So WHY CSR in this case? Because of 2 main reasons:

* Sustainable development: operating at present times company creates sustainable future for itself
* Stakeholders

Then, there are 3 aspects/levels of CSR in a company:

I – stakeholders (company acts in sustainable manner with its stakeholders, e.g. ethic way of doing business)
II – personnel (programmes for employees: corporate culture, motivation, rewards & recognition, promotion within company)
III – regional community where company operates (e.g. environmental programmes)

Another interesting point that caught my attention is that company should have such CSR policy that reflects its core work.

After introduction several companies shared their examples of CSR policies:
- bank declines credit interest rate for some groups of people e.g. young married couple with children;
- educational projects about healthy food of food company
- building a computer club for school children (example of IT company) or scientific institute (FMCG company)
- “green products”: TV set that consumes less energy, much higher lifetime reliability etc.
- providing opportunity for disabled young people to do internship in a company
- free professional education for employees
- developing pension system for a city for free

The concept of sustainable development for a company is based on the idea that it helps society which will consume company’s products in the future. As in the example of education of healthy lifestyle: company increases amount of healthy people, thus ‘create’ healthy society. Many companies focus on a help for children, because this is children who are future society!

And, the last point that was mentioned: it is government that should show to business what areas to focus on.

***

I really feel like reading more and more about the topic, besides will be certainly looking for CSR internship at one point of time!

One

"Streets and highways connect every place with every other, but each driver chooses where he wants to go. He can drive to a beautiful countryside or to skid row, to a university or a bar, he can follow the road over the horizon or he can drive back and forth in a rut or he can park and not go anywhere.

He can choose his climate by where he drives, Fairbanks or Mexico City or Rio, he can drive a race car or a sedan or a track, he can keep it in perfect shape or let it go to pieces. He can drive without a map and make every turn a surprise or he can plan exactly where he's going to get there.

Every road he will take is already there, before he drives on it and after he's gone past. Every possible trip already exists, and the driver is one with them all. He just chooses, every morning, which trip he'll take that day"

This is an extract from the book I've read recently - "One" by Richard Bach. Interestingly, how it works with me & books.. when I have some problem, or a difficult question in mind, I usually find the book that gives me an idea on a possible answer.

It went just the same with this book. Sergey suggested me reading "The Bridge Across Forever" also by R.Bach, however when I went to the shop I found just a novel called "One", and, as I realized afterwards, that was exactly what I needed that time.

3 main ideas I got from the novel are:

1 - everything depends on our choices (perfect illustration of what it means is in the extract above)

For a long time I couldn't decide for myself what is my phylosophy about this topic: if the things are predetermined or not, if we really choose or just follow what is already planned.

It may seem difficult to live when you believe in idea of personal choice coz it's easy to hope for a planned-for-you-by-someone-else path. I decided to believe in choices.

Now, imagine any situation where you do not have influence. For example, your car gets brocken because some guy drove into it. Couldn't you choose? Almost no. Yet you have at least one thing you can choose, and this is your attitude to the problem.

2 - life is about learning (life is like a book, "when you turn to a page about nuclear war do you despair, or do you learn what it has to tell? Will you die reading the page, or will you move on to other pages, wiser for what you've read?")

3 - ideas are good only when are turned to work ("Ideas aren't thoughts, ther are engineered structure. Notice this and pay attention to the way your ideas are built and you will find dramatic increase in the quality of what you think")

And.. the most powerful message that I found for myself in one of the last chapters.

Main characters of the story (a couple: he and she) come to the place where they live and find themselves in the future.

An old guy reads a book by Richard Bach and then tells to his wife: "I could have done it! Could have done everything in this book! I tell you I damn well could have written that seagull thing he wrote! I used to go out on the jetty when I was a kid, watch the birds to fly. Wished it was me with wings..." His wife replies: "Maybe you could have, Dave".

This extract shocked me so much. After reading it I decided that I will always choose the path that - as I think - is for me, and believe in dreams. I would like to tell my grandchildren about what kind of person I have become and what impact I've made in the world, and what good things I have done for people, but not about the ones that I have dreamed about, yet didn't do.

"I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?"

True success

There was a competition announced by Procter & Gamble in December last year.
The task was to write a success story of yours.

Fortunately, I got selected to take part in the final event with the other 16 finalists.
This is the link where I read about the results:

http://www.procterandgamble.ru/news/simple_news/&id=119&s=0

Snowy Almaty

* on the way to free wi-fe cafe :)

* love name of streets in Almaty!

* happy me, skating :)

* hospitable people in LC Almaty

Servant of the Tsar

In the end of the busy day in Almaty Maya (LC president), Andrey (ex-president) and me decided to go to the cinema. Andrey guessed our desires and bought tickets for a marvelous movie “The servant of the Tsar” (“Слуга Государев”).

The story begins in Russian army when soldiers are discussing a recent issue, case with black horseman who already killed many people. It’s a time of way between Russia & Sweden, besides France pretends to play a supervisory role. In the beginning we get in France where young queen is unhappy in relationship with a king and finds a lover from the guests of king’s ball. Right after the occasion during cards game envious man challenges him to a duel. Then, a king finds out about the duel he writes letters to Swedish & French kings and sends 2 offenders in the epicenter of the battle…

3 moments that caught my attention:

*scene with burglary of Russian village, one of the saddest moments of the movie. Innocent village people were robbed by Polish partisans and Swedish army just because of the fact that some time ago a Polish village was destroyed by Russians. Revenge doesn’t know concrete people, and you become responsible for actions of your country’s citizens.

*speech of Peter the Great 1 min before the final battle with Swedish army started. He said: “I don’t care what will happen with my life, the only thing that matters is our country, Russia”. In contrast, operator shows us the king of Sweden, who lies on a sofa with broken leg and shouts on doctors: “Do you really want a king to be an invalid?” Then, again, in the culmination of the battle, it was Peter the Great who galloped in front of his army in the fire place and all soldiers went right behind screaming patriotically. And it was Swedish king who chose to escape from the battle being afraid to harm himself…

*French soldier and Grisha (Russian solgier from Peter’s amusing shelving) fight together against Swedish. They went through a hell, and suddenly Grisha notices that his friend fell on the ground. Grisha does his best to help him survive. They traveled to Russia many kilometers. They speak different languages and don’t understand each other. However, human values and feelings are common for every human being, no matter which nation you belong to.

This movie is about bravery, mutual trust and support, true values and true love to the people and the country. I’d definitely recommend you to watch it and discuss with your best friends.

***

Film finished after a midnight and we appeared in a wonderful snowy Almaty in night!
Thank you so much, Maya and Andrey, for a meaningful evening and exciting excursion around the city!

Training our intuition

Every week we get the economic magazine called 'Sekret firmy' in our MC-office.
Having took one of the issues with me, I found a very interesting article that catched my attention immediately.

I will use the space of this blog to outline the main ideas, as I really want this information to stay in my mind.

The article is about intuition.

First question is pretty clear: "While making business and personal decisions, should we rely on our intuition or our logic?" The answer is almost obvious, they say that intuition doesn't come from anywhere, however it is a result of our experience. Therefore, making a decision, even if we think like 'oh, it's a sign!' or 'I feel I need to do this, not that' we actually compare our past experiences and make connections.

Yet what I was really impressed by in that article is an advice on how to train your intuition.
The main idea is to learn how to connect your inner state with weak signals of external environment.

The author suggest following 3 steps:

1. Learn to describe your inner feelings. You may say: "I feel like a lion" or "I feel like a cat on a sofa". This method helps first to discover yourself and also to choose "whom to be" in a specific situation. For instance, when you are speaking on public informing about difficult situation, you would probably want to be a lion, not a cat on a sofa.

2. Learn to find positive signs of external environment (as you usually have just some parts of information available and known). To practise it you may put a minimum volume on your radio and guess what they say. Another one is to remember objects' bounds on a high speed. Or - to draw the clear some object's bounds when you can't see them correctly.

3. Learn to make a forecast. To do this you should connect your inner feelings to the weak signals - just what I have told about in points 1 and 2. To train this ability, you may guess the end of the story watching a movie or reading a book, finish a picture started by someone else or play improvisation.

It's amazing that we can really train such quality as intuition with these simple methods.

If you are interested, read the whole article (unfortunately, it's only in Russian).