Friday, November 09, 2007

Value in life

By working in Deloitte I got in contact with the “value creation” philosophy which I like and I decided to explore it further through my thesis called : “The role of management consulting in long term value creation for companies. Case study Deloitte”.
It is related with sustainability and meaning for companies’ stakeholders. A company that explores a temporary need in the market and makes good profits for 2 years is not considered valuable. A company is valuable if it’s core activities can bring profits for shareholders and value for the other stakeholders on the long run.

I read more and one thing came to my mind: the way companies make value is more and more documented while the way people create value in their lives is not, or at least I haven’t heard of such a science. And this is a topic I am really interested in: how people create value in their life, how do they create happiness for themselves. And I started developing my own perspective on the topic … I have identified 3 things which made me so far and I believe will make me happy in the future as well.

One of them is having tight relationships with people; though I enjoy meeting new people and creating bonds, the relationships that make me happy are the ones based on strong ties, respect, trust and complementarity. I realised that the past 16 months I have been unstable, moving from place to place, created bonds but now I am not in the situation to enjoy them.

The second one is to do things I am really passionate about on a daily basis and I realised AIESEC gave a lot of it, I was passionate about the things I was doing and I could chose what I did. Nowadays is different, with most things I do I am not connected through passion, and still searching for it.

The third category of things that make me happy is short experiences like going on a boattrip, skiing, admiring a landscape, seeing something beautiful, having a nice chat, eating something really good, hearing a good joke etc. In this sense this year has been so enriching: my systers wedding, travelling to Dublin, Paris, Munchen, St. Gallen, Gdansk, Bialystok, Gent, living in Rwanda for 18 days and so on.

I believe once people realise what makes them happy they’ll continously want those things in their life more and more and remove the non-value-adding aspects of their life. It’s a matter of realising and then of really wanting, taking decisions and standing up for them.

Nowadays I am again in the position to think of what I’ll do next after this intership, I see again the options and taking my time to take a decision.

Next time I will tell you more about Poland and its people, it’s a very interesting country, as a starting point just consider its history in the last 70 years …

For recent pictures, please check facebook http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=503656679

Do widzenia! :P