Brooke, I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but let me explain how my overseas sales training activities started.
It was in my 2-3rd year in Isuzu Motors right after graduate school here in Tokyo. I was in the personnel department overseeing language training in the company. (Only Japanese is spoken in the company.) That was a position I was not happy with. Then, top management asked the dealership development training department to provide overseas dealers the same training offered to their domestic dealers in Japan. I was introduced to that dealership development training department head on a tennis court, and he asked me if I could help out at bit with translation (without my direct boss knowing). I said yes, and he put in an official request to have me go to his department once a week. In that dealership training department I learned that not only did they need translation, they needed trainers as well, as no one in the department spoke English (all Japanese). At that time, I had teaching experience, but no sales training experience. Therefore, I asked a consultant from General Motors (Chevrolet) to help me. GM owned 33% of Isuzu in those days. To make a long story short, we worked together, developed a sales seminar for Isuzu overseas vehicles together and gave a successful seminar in Singapore. That was in 1985. From there, the success of that seminar was heard throughout the other overseas sales divisions in Isuzu as well as many overseas dealers. That lead to me giving more seminars. The important point here is that I was officially in one department, but almost totally working in another department. That went on for two years, and the managers within those department were fighting for my time. Eventually, with the support of General Motors and Isuzu's top management, I was finally officially transferred to the overseas training department where I stayed for most of my career. I don't know if this is merit/meritocracy or just personal desire, but I was working well outside the organization chart for quite some time. When my direct boss asked me about spending more time in his department, I mentioned that really anyone could do that assignment. This overseas dealership training was very important and that he should talk to top management about it. Finally, they hired another person for my language training position, and I was officially transferred. Within non-profits, I would guess this desire to achieve something is equally strong, and that people are working on tasks that don't fit exactly within their job description or a given department. Hope this is helpful. Ron McFarland Tokyo, Japan On Sat, May 21, 2016 at 1:35 AM, Robin Muilwijk <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Brooke, > > During our first openorg call this week, you asked for some organizations > that might be applying/conceptualizing meritocracy. Do open source projects > / organizations count as example as well? > > I could give you some examples how I experienced this in two large > projects, but also the projects itself if you are interested. > > What always surprised me, is that nothing with regards to merit was witten > down, but people in those project did for example get leadership positions > through merit/meritocracy. > > Let me know if you are interested, always happy to share my own > experiences. > > -- > Robin Muilwijk > > Advisor Internet and e-Government > Community Ambassador Opensource.com > Community Manager eZ Systems > > Discover an open source world | http://opensource.com > > LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/robinmuilwijk/ > Twitter : @i_robin > > _______________________________________________ > Openorg-list mailing list > [email protected] > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/openorg-list > >
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