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Observations on self-improvement
Forget the credit crunch - let's go to India and meditate. HSBC has seen billions of pounds wiped out due to the US sub-prime fiasco, and its chairman, Stephen Green, concedes the outlook for the rest of 2008 is uncertain. Lean times ahead, you would imagine.
Yet the bank recently stumped up £10,000 per person to send 80 employees from around the world on a week-long holistic training course in India.
Personal development seems to be one area of business unaffected by doom and gloom in the City. Leadership training, team bonding, diversity awareness, learning how to be an effective manager: multinationals are falling over each other to immerse their employees in mind maps and meditation.
Future Considerations is a London-based consultancy that designs and delivers these training programmes for HSBC. Business is booming; its client list also includes Tesco, Cadbury and KPMG. A well-rounded employee is apparently a more productive employee, so investment in the individual is deemed to be to the benefit of all.
Is this a genuine and productive attempt by multinational corporations to nurture souls as well as careers? Cari Caldwell, director of Future Considerations, is emphatic. "Rarely do business people get the chance to say what they care about, what really moves them, what they want their life to be about, and have their colleagues listen. We take our participants to this level of life reflection, working in a cross-cultural team, in a country they have never been to before, on a project focused on a technical area they know nothing about. This could be tuna processing in India or agroforestry in Brazil. They take turns leading the team and receiving direct feedback about their performance. That's what produces both personal and business results."
Self-improvement now plays an increasingly important role in career development in the corporate world. Is this a healthy duty of care or a cynical exploitation of aspirations? Multinational corporations are not renowned for being warm and fluffy. Workers today expose their personal weaknesses at their peril. Conform to perform.
Future Considerations undoubtedly delivers training that helps unleash untapped potential. But could it be that spoon-feeding an audience on the dos and don'ts of office life is yet another sign of our quick-fix consumerist society constantly seeking answers that may not exist?
That is the view of the New York sociologist and cultural critic Micki McGee, who seeks to establish a direct relationship between the rise and rise of self-development and the declining economic circumstances of the ordinary worker. According to McGee, what we are witnessing is a reaction to an increasingly volatile and competitive globalised work environment. A central consideration for employees trying to gain a foothold on the career ladder is the necessity of working on themselves. Be all one can be, they are told. Build your own personal brand. McGee's book, Self-Help, Inc, focuses on the US and argues that corporate workers are trained to regard themselves as human commodities. No longer simply an enterprising or entrepreneurial individual, the new worker is the artist and the artwork, the CEO of Me, Inc and the central product line. McGee explores how makeover culture entangles workers in endless cycles of self-invention as they struggle to remain employable.
It is when this approach fails, and we are unable to realise the mission statement we have created for our life, that we are left feeling we have nobody to blame but ourselves. That's when we reach for another self-development book, DVD or session to teach us how to break out of our new-found state of dissatisfaction.
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