Something really brought home the magnitude of what we're doing. One of my teammates pointed out that if you treated corporations as companies, the GDP of IBM would still be $12B greater than the GDP of the Philippines. In IBM, we use that productivity to support our 300,000+ employees and our shareholders. The population of the Philippines is approaching 97 million people.
The big news that we got today was our project assignments. There's a good mixture of business and IT focus and clients across government organizations, universities, and local enterprise. I'm going to be focused on an initiative with BNeFIT - a public/private partnership focused on making Bacolod a global leader in contact center outsourcing. In the short time since inception, BNeFIT has already accomplished a great deal - bring thousands of jobs to the region. I will be working with them on a strategy to accelerate this growth even further.
Our team also had a good discussion on the role of international aid in developing countries. Personally, I'm not a big believer in the tops down "big push" approach advocated by Jeffrey Sachs and others. It hasn't proved to work at all and it has spent a lot of money. I do like the idea of linking those willing to help with those who need help more directly although this is obviously more complicated. One of my favorite "trendy" approaches is micro-lending. Organizations such as Kiva have been successful at getting money directly into the hands of the people who can do something with it with the different levels of bureaucracy and loss of funds along the way.
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