Background

Just under 2 years ago, participation in Accenture Development Partnerships (ADP) was first made available to employees in the Malaysian consulting office. I was one of the initial batch of 3 staff who did the ADP assessment and qualified to participate in an ADP project.

Not long after that, I had the opportunity to join an ADP task-force to assess the post-tsunami recovery efforts in Tamil Nadu, India and Sri Lanka. The task force consisted of a group of "young" managers (some of us were over 40 years young!) from various multinationals and we toured the tsunami impacted areas, talking to the local fishermen and traders, government officials as well as representatives from NGOs, charities and local companies who had contributed resources and money to the initial relief and subsequent recovery and livelihood building efforts.

That was a great experience and all members of the task force learnt a great deal and we all were fired up to do more in the area of voluntary work and helping those who are incapacitated by disaster, illness or dire economic circumstances.

As mentioned in the beginning, that was almost 2 years ago - in the meantime, I got caught back up in the normal consulting environment, that is, helping successful businesses become even more successful by applying my knowledge of best practices, process improvements etc. At the same time, I became a father 7 months ago, and that meant less business travel and also more expenses - not exactly conducive to doing an ADP project which has as one of the conditions that I take a 50% pay cut for the duration of the project (this is so that consulting expertise is affordable to organisations that would normally not be able to engage consulting resources).

However, in the back of my head, there was always this niggling feeling that I should contribute my time and knowledge more to those who really could use it, rather than to companies that are already successful in their own right. One could of course argue that this is the way the world works and that trying to change the system is not going to make a difference (I am sure this will be the subject of some of my subsequent blogs). In any case, my perspective has changed as a new father, and I want to be able to at least say that I tried making the world a better place for the majority of the population who do not have access to all the things we take for granted like clean water, electricity, a decent education, a long enough life expectancy to pursue happiness.

So when the opportunity came up to do a project with World Vision, I jumped on it. Luckily my wife was supportive, as well as my client, my team members on my current project, and of course my boss. I think my son is supportive too, as he gets to come along for the ride!