I had a deja vu experiance yesterday which I want to share with you. I was talking to a good friend of mine, she runs a big CSR project and asked her if she would buy our CSR software (www.csr-toolkit.com) for her project and her answer was that she is "shocked" because of my proposal, she expected me to give it to her for free. Of course I would give it to her for free, as she had also contributed with ideas etc. in the making of the software and I had sent her the link already several times. But what is the point I am aiming at? The point is, I gave her as a person the software for free, not to her project. But I had the distinct impression that person and project were the same thing in her mind. Does CSR make you go gaga or act like a drug addict, who only thinks about the drug? I my earlier life I had been working for the largest National Park in Europe, the National Park Hohe Tauern, which covers most of the Austrian Alps. That was a cool job, very rewarding and makes you feel good, as you are protecting nature, animals, plants from extinction and preserve it for the future. High identificaiton. I then went into politics and worked as the advisor to the head of a political party who aims and goals I shared, so high identification again, And I had a relativly powerful position, as I was whispering in the ear of the party head and so many of my thoughts were actually put into reality. I had contacts to all other political parties, the President of the Republik is a personal you friend, the head of the consititutional court and many others were close "friends". In 1999 we dropped out of Parliament (hopefully not because of my advices ;-) and I suddenly lost my job and was Martin Neureiter again, not the advisor to the party head anymore. And all the people, very influencial people, still knew me, but did not have time for a meeting, did not have the possibility to find a job for me, did not write recommendation letters etc. because I was not "important" anymore. The lesson I learned from this was, I only had power given to me by somebody, it was not based on my me as a person. This is a hard lesson to learn. Now what does that have to do with CSR and my good friend. Well, we tend to identify ourselves with our work in CSR in a very high degree, because we like what we do, it is doing good, it is cool, it is reckognized etc. But it is not us as a person, it is the project we are doing. Our partners accept and respect us because we give them money or we are in other ways important for them to make THEIR thing working, not ours. Once we do not work for this CSR project anymore, do not have the power anymore to give them money or other benefits, very fast we fall down on the ground and realize, it is not us, it is the project. It is power given to us and it is power taken from us.
That is why I chose to open my own company, to earn my own credits and be respected for what I am not for something somebody else gave me. I know so many examples were people hired somebody, because he was working for example for the chamber of commerce and they thought if he would work for them it would open them many doors to many companies and get them new contracts. Nothing of that happened, because as soon as the person left the Chamber of Commerce, the companies did not take him serious anymore, he was not important anymore, it was not him, it was the position he had that was interesting for them. Look at Tony Blair, he might earn loads of money for holding speaches - about the past, but nobody gave him a new job, never mind all his contacts etc. well, he is not Primeminster anymore. That is why I guess politicians try to hang on to power as long as they can, because afterwards the fall is deep and the landing very often very hard.
So, my conclusion from all of this is: keep yourself seperated from your CSR project, you are you and project is project. It will allow you to think in alternatives and to think further than just the next event within your project. And the disappointment after the project ends is much much smaller, especially in the people you have been working with.
