People are Perfect, Judgement is Flawed

We met with Digital Divide Data, a social entrepreneurship in Cambodia. They were very generous with their time to meet with us for a good long time, tell us all about themselves and hear what we are all about, then they showed us their operations. They recruit the top high school students from rural areas who already have English competency and as well as economic need, teaching them IT skills through a four-year program. The students are put to work while with DDD doing data entry and document discovery. They earn a good salary and the organization uses its profits to build and recruit. They find it difficult to find funding because they are so similar in their financial functioning to a traditional business.

DDD was founded by a guy visiting Cambodia as a tourist who fell in love with the country. He somehow managed to get a meeting with the King and told him that he wanted to do something but wasn’t sure what yet. The king replied that he should come back in one year and he will support him in whatever he chooses to do. That was five years ago. To me this is the typical Cambodian story. You come for a visit, get caught in its magic and want to stay, not to fix it but to help in some way. It’s the only place that I have ever seen that you can make things truly happen in just a few years. I look forward to meeting the founder back in California to hear his story first hand.

There is a lot of potential for future partnerships between DDD and SEALNet. They expressed interest in having their students get training from us and maybe have their managers go through our leadership training. They would also be an ideal partner for our future mentees to work with as the service portion of our program. They could learn a lot about how a successful social enterprise functions and be an inspiration of how quickly things can be moved. There are a lot of possibilities there and I look forward to seeing where it leads. For me this would be great practice in the softer skills of business relationship building.

I have to work on letting people be who they are. Arthur sometimes takes the blame for things that are not his fault. I then get frustrated and try to jump in. I recognize that the taking the blame thing is something I’ve inherited from my parents and I’m worried that if I see it around me I will do it myself. I’ve also inherited the arrogance that I can fix people. What I need to work on is accepting people do things differently than I would and that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing them correctly it’s the way they do things. It will be hard for me, but essential, to learn to stop seeing things in terms of flaws and correctness and accept people as inherently perfect.