Dear Editor,
Admittedly the experience of my own development biases me towards the ‘old- fashioned’ model wherein managers sought to support the growth of potentials ‒ not by ‘molly-coddling,’ but by challenging and testing them ‒ in those very ‘halcyon days,’ the recollecting of which still serves to rejuvenate both Nowrang Persaud and myself.
The prism through which I observe the extant organisational environment reveals a reality, of which too many components display insufficient integrity to function outside the strictures of compliance, within a skewed governance structure.
It is therefore a profound misapprehension to expect outstanding displays of self-reliance from the products of a chronically debilitated education system. In any case logic suggests that there is no substantive exclusivity between human resources planning, as a component of more comprehensive corporate planning, and self- development. Indeed the success of an organisation and its sustainability, could only be attributable to it having the right human resources.
In the milieu how is it possible to overlook the plight of UG students, amongst others, who in their struggle towards self-development are, for example, forced to resort to a virtual laboratory, in the absence of such actual resources on site.
In a societal framework which actively seeks to enervate, rather than energise the populace as a whole, the worthy resort to self-development (except in cases of the privileged) too often results more in disillusionment than in realization ‒ particularly of the numerous educationally, economically and socially-disadvantaged ‒ a situation hardly remediable by (limited) access to IT, if any.
One suspects that even current HR practitioners may, from time to time, have to grapple with the volatile currency of self-reliance and self-respect within the undulating playing fields of their respective organisations.
Once the towers of corporate social responsibility, the subscriptions from most of these institutions are more for the specious development of sports (and sale of consumables), than for the substantive educational development, even of participating sportsmen and sportswomen.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
