Sustainability, People and Heritage

 

When people talk of sustainability, the first thing that often comes to mind is the environment, followed swiftly by social aspects, then within a business perspective, the financial sustainability of an organisation. All are important, all are significant.

But what of people? My current assignment with Fujitsu is looking at promoting sustainability within our global businesses and global delivery centres. This is not just an altruistic and heady ambition underpinned by our noble goals to "Strive for Human Centric Innovation to Overcome Global Environmental Issues and Create a Sustainable Society."

It’s also about how we can achieve business success by being responsible, to the environment, to society and to each other. A trusted business builds long term relationships, with customers, stakeholders and employees.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting our business operations in Spain as part of this assignment, but also three of our Global Delivery Centres, in Portugal, Poland and Russia. Global Delivery Centres are in essence great examples of sustainability success, a centralised, lean organisation and team delivering remote global services. If we can avoid an engineering visit, that is a great success for customer satisfaction, because customers do not have to wait. But it’s also a success for the environment because we are exploiting ICT to remotely resolve key issues without generating even more carbon emissions through transport or disposed equipment.

As well as this, the Global Delivery Centres have a fantastic diversity story. They are multi-lingual, multi-national centres, employing young, ambitious people. I started my own ICT career working on a Service Desk, answering and resolving calls, it’s tough work, but there is a sense of pride and gratification in being able to achieve for a customer and when they thank you, that’s a great buzz. Women are also significantly represented, in management too. In Portugal for instance, the Global Delivery Centre management team has a majority representation of women.

So, and much as it is an obvious thing to say, people are fundamental to the success of any organisation, and the development and sustainability of people is key. An old adage states that employees do not leave companies, they leave managers, in some respects this is true, but organisations like Fujitsu have developed extensive guidelines and policies to develop the expected behaviours of all employees, such that we try to avoid this scenario.

So what else motivates people to stay with an organisation? Well, money of course, we can’t talk about motivation without mentioning that. As well as that, job satisfaction, development, being felt valued. All are significant and there are many success stories in many an organisation of how the sustainability of people, through development, is achieved to drive the long term success of the organisation.

But one thing I wanted to pick up on is the heritage of an organisation, is there a sense of pride with where you work based on what that organisation has achieved? Personally I’m fascinated by the pre-cursor of Fujitsu in the UK, ICL, which in itself was a consolidation/merger of a number of significant British ICT companies with an interesting and diverse heritage of their own, including making components for the code breaking machines at Bletchley Park. The National Museum of Computing there has a great selection of working (pre) ICL equipment and a timeline on history. You can also see reconstructions of Colossus and the Bombe machines in action of course.

But something that stood out for me on my travels is that in our Russian Global Delivery Centre, there is an onsite museum with a great selection of computing history, photography and curios.

For example, did you know Yuri Gagarin’s (you know, the first human in space, that dude) space flight was directed by the locally built M20 computer? Here is a little tribute to him, Lenin is keeping a watchful eye too.

The Soviet engineering seal of approval.

Here is the lovely Margarita, who is now the director of the museum but was one of a handful of employees who set up the factory in the 1950s, showing us the model of the M20 computer.

And finally, me and Margarita, I didn’t speak any Russian, she didn’t speak any English, but we got on fine! (our wonderful colleagues Alina and Gleb were very kind and helpful in translating for myself and my colleague Hiro)

In a broad sense, people make the difference. It is encouraging that sustainability is on the curriculum in many schools worldwide, here’s hoping the future is in safe hands.

Borneo wildlife

The nature in Borneo has not only been diverse, but also abundant. It's often cited that tropical rainforests, which are only located in south east Asia, the amazon and Central Africa, account for 6% of the total land mass (or 2% of the planet's surface) but sustain approximately 50% of the worlds plants and animals.

In addition to the beneficial carbon offsetting work they do of course.

In that regard I've been fortunate to see some amazing species. Especially when I caught the short flight to Mulu, the unesco world heritage sight.

Before I talk about Mulu, a quick word on orangutans. On our last day of the fujitsu tour we overnighted at the Shangri-la rasa ria which houses a sanctuary for orphaned orangutans. This is all part of a complex rehabilitation programme, after the rasa-ria they are moved to the east of Sabah where they are slowly weaned off their dependence on humans so they can then be released into the wild and hopefully continue to sustain the dwindling population.

Both the resort and seeing the orangutans was a great reward for us 60 volunteers!

I also saw this wide gaited geezer of a monitor lizard. He was strutting along without a care in the world.

And a cute snake outside my room (there were several members of staff keeping a safe distance)

Interestingly I also saw these amazing crab patterns on the beach, where they dig out sand from their burrows and deposit it in incredible patterns. It made me think of Alan Turings theory of morphogenesis. I'm no scientist but strictly this phenomenon probably doesn't sit under that theory as it's more to do with how animals adapt and evolve chemically, e.g. To get stripes or spots, but still, he did some fascinating work after the war before he cruelly died so young.

They are like little cities with carriageways and open spaces. Why does each crab choose a different design or approach?

As for Mulu, what an incredible place, a friend who had been there before told me to close my eyes and listen to the sounds of the jungle at night. However on the first night the restaurant just outside the national park's perimeter had karaoke on, so all I could hear was the horrible drunk wails of Homo Sapiens singing "I will always love you" - had to laugh!

Below -On the way to Mulu.

But when it only the jungle you could hear, there is an overwhelming variety of sounds. The yelps of geckos, cicadas chirruping, frogs, the weird leaf cricket who rubs its wings so it sounds like a six year old having their first violin lesson. And also disconcerting sounds I didn't get a chance to ask a guides advice on. An unearthly booming echoing call, like two huge pieces of bamboo being whacked together for instance.

I did a night walk,a canopy walk, and various cave walks. I asked our guide what the best way to get rid of leeches was. He said to use a credit card, I made a joke about leeches charging, but nobody laughed. Wasted wit :).

But...My best memory though has to be my last day.

I saw the famous bat exodus. It wasn't the millions promised but at dusk the caves belched big clouds and beautiful ribbons of bats into the fading light. Bat hawks circled and dived into the mass, snaring the tiny bats, truly a wonder. Here's a terrible photo of a "bat ribbon" - morphogenesis again? (Or not!)

Earlier in the day I went to racer cave, which isn't lit like the other tourist caves. So there's an eerie quality as you gingerly step through, shining your torch in the pitch black. The click click of swiftlets and the shrill calls of bats the first clue to the unique Eco system. We saw massive huntsman spiders which feed on bird eggs. Huge crickets with enormous antenna, compensating for their blindness and the racer snake, the alpha predator.