Managing Diversity - What Companies Could Learn from Football

Hey everyone,

I just found this Youtube-Video which I really want to share with you. It is about managing diversity and in how far companies could learn something about diversity by having a look at football teams.

As they were saying that teamwork is easy within a team of 11 players, but could be quite complicated within a huge company. Do you also agree? Do you think working as a team is only possible in a limited group of people?

Furthermore they talk about the acceptance of people in a football team and that generally in football people from all over the world are more and more accepted than in companies. Do you think that is right? Do you think there is a difference between diversity in companies and diversity in football games?

I am really interested into your opinions so please feel free to share your thoughts.

Diversity

Hi everyone, 

I stumbled upon this video on Youtube. Now please don’t judge it, because it describes diversity in a very simple way. I believe that this is a great measure to explain the concept of diversity to people of every age, even children. For me, acceptance of uniqueness can never start too early, not even for kids.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNeR4bBUj68&feature=related

So what do you think??

Should diversity management only be a responsibility of companies or should our education system already pick up the topic? 

Because fact is, diversity issues do not only appear in companies, but also in our everyday live and people should be ready to embrace uniqueness and difference whenever they get an opportunity.

Is Intercultural Training necessary?

Hello everybody,

here you find an article from the New York times, talking about doing international business and the intercultural skills needed for that:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/business/global/22chinatrain.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1349807443-WWmX2LaZBm9jnFN7ZzMcVw

Have you experienced any intercultural problems before when cooperating with people from other countries? Do you think that intercultural training should be a "must" for every employee of international companies?

Please feel free to share your thoughts!

GSB Alumni Entrepreneur Bootcamp: Human Resources Issues

Something for today's evening couch session. Enjoy!

Enough people?? Wrong skills? Is the early education at fault?

Enough people?? Wrong skills? Is the early education at fault?

Melanie Holmes is the Vice President, World of Work Solutions, Manpower. She is talking about the changes taking place for workers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=AdNCfyysILU 

I would like to point out a specific matter she mentioned. Change in skills. She is talking about the problems companies have right now. There are people available but they don’t have the skills which are needed.

What do you think: Is the educational system in a country of fault? Do students get the wrong attitude presented? How should education change to enable a better, faster learning and more risk taking work force?

Let us know what you think!! :)

Is working in an international company an advantage??

When I was listening to Alexander Uelsberg, working for Microsoft Germany, I was impressed by the fact that they really try to treat every employee in the same way. No matter if they are from the US, Europe or Asia and they try to handle HR issues in the same way like in other subsidiaries.

Let's take for example the performance evaluation: If every employee at Microsoft does the performance evaluation in the same, efficient way, it could be easier to then evaluate employees from other subsidiaries. Moreover it could be quite useful to hire for example an HR manager of Germany in a subsidiary in the US because of an employee-shortage. Or if any employee at Microsoft in Asia decides one day to go to work in the UK, they just have to exchange the data of the HR department, and an employee could easily take the way to a new experience.

That leads me to the point: "Is working in an international company an advantage?" or could there be disadvantages as well? And what about working in a local SME? Is this automatically a disadvantage when someone wants to gain knowledge all over the world?