The importance of purpose

August 4, 2022

Charles Bodwell, ILO’s Enterprise Specialist for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific reflects upon his professional trajectory and the importance of high standards and continuous adaptation for professionals and organizations.

Charles Bodwell has understood the language of organizations, and particularly manufacturing firms, from a very young age. “I grew up in Detroit and my father was an ‘auto guy.’ I put myself through university working on the assembly line. I got to know companies, and production processes, and I am a relatively systems-oriented person,” he says.

Today, he represents the International Labor Organization (ILO) as its Enterprise Specialist for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. His role consists of advising and supporting ILO Country Offices and projects in more than 20 countries on business development and entrepreneurship. “We work with governments around the region bringing entrepreneurship into schools and marginalized communities, we work to upgrade global supply chains and corporate social responsibility, and we support women to enter and advance in business,” he says.

Bodwell’s career trajectory provides insightful lessons about the importance of making decisions at the crossroads, following a purpose, and putting workers’ well-being at the core of an organization’s mission.

“Life is about having a focus. Deciding what you are going to do, but also having other things decided for you and coming into your path,” says Bodwell, who worked as an engineer at Schulmberger, a technology and oil services company, after undergrad. “After some time, I quit and decided to go back to school, with the clear idea that school should be an opportunity to leverage and redirect one’s career, not just to get a degree. That is what I recommend to younger professionals.”

“School should be an opportunity to leverage and redirect one’s career, not just to get a degree.”

 Bodwell looked to a Masters’ degree to redirect his trajectory. Bodwell, a travel enthusiast who’d always wanted to work overseas, left Schlumberger to earn an MBA at McGill University and master’s in international management from ESADE in Barcelona, overlapping studies in the two programs. He joined the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), an opportunity he found “by serendipity,” and which would deeply influence his viewpoint about making an impact on the world.

At UNIDO, Bodwell started the TQM Awareness Programme, an approach that envisions factories working as “Swiss clocks,” with all of their components integrated and working in synergy.  His background in management led to his joining the Director-General’s office of the agency, where he worked on reform of HR and information systems.  .

However, after 7 years at UNIDO, he decided to go back to school again to begin a Ph.D. program at the University of Cambridge. “That is one of the nice things about school, it gives you time to think, which at work you don’t always have. I thought about the UN: its good and its bad. And I remembered the unparalleled opportunity and the freedom it provided me to design projects and see them impact lives,” he recalls.

Bodwell realized that completing a Ph.D. would not make him happier. So he went back to the UN, joining the International Labour Organization (ILO). “Continuing the Ph.D. would have taken me out of development work—what I really wanted to do—and put me in organizational optimization and more bureaucratic work, which I did not want,” he says, explaining that he decided to stay in the development branch of the UN to continue working on programs and projects—a decision that moves him to offer another lesson for young professionals: “Look for opportunities where you have freedom and which make you happy. Don’t look only for the money.”

“Look for opportunities where you have freedom and which make you happy. Don’t look only for the money.”

Every organization poses new and unique challenges. As international development provides the opportunity to meaningfully impact the lives of the most marginalized, its fast pace and its diverse stakeholders are some of its most pressing elements. “One of the greatest things of my job was getting thrown into different projects, where donors have their own priorities. It also was asking yourself ‘what tools do I have?’, ‘what problems are there in my area of work?’, ‘how do I address them?’, ‘what do we have on our shelf?’, ‘what else is needed?’. In this field, we continuously face challenges, that need solutions.” Bodwell says.

Al ILO, Bodwell and his team developed the Peer Learning Hub, a set of learning contents and resources, one of ILO’s approaches to building sustainable enterprises. Training materials found on the Hub are participant-driven, activity-based, and impact-oriented, with content that aims to support businesses of all sizes with tools that include soft skills training, tools for factory improvement, youth entrepreneurship, and cooperative development.  In 2021, Bodwell and his team faced a new challenge: adapting many of these peer-group learning tools to the new reality created by the COVID-19 pandemic

However, explained Bodwell, “as the Learning Hub is activity-based, we ran into a roadblock when COVID-19 hit. Those companies which were using our tools were suddenly not able to meet in person.” Events such as the Cambodia Entrepreneurship Day or the Guinness Record-Breaking Seminar C-BED (Community-Based Enterprise Development) had to be reconsidered due to social distancing policies. Some corporations also refused to do face-to-face training for safety reasons, and support for programs dried up.  “Later, in Cambodia, we realized that a great portion of youth had access to smartphones and bandwidth. So we pivoted to online rapidly and it worked. We tested a new approach in China and found that learning materials needed to be simpler, shorter, punchier, and more interactive.”

“The pandemic demanded learning materials be simpler, shorter, punchier, and more interactive.”

Training activities that were highly dependent on in-person interaction were severely affected by the pandemic, as were other industries that depended on increasingly-disrupted global supply chains, such as the garment sector. Globally, garment manufacturing employs millions of people. Factories kept producing but clients refused to pay, as malls remained closed around the world. Bodwell says, “All the risk stayed with the factories. Some buyer companies canceled their purchases explaining they did not need them anymore, for any reason. This moved ILO to support factory managers in finding new markets and training them in crucial areas to face this crisis. We included cash management because they had to keep operating, and they had to define what was crucial and what they could cut back on.”

The transformation that industries have faced around the world has been accompanied by technological advancements, that, in Bodwell’s view, have the potential to both create and destroy jobs: “We should continue to push for automation in certain key areas while boosting productivity in others and while keeping employment. What some may consider boring or repetitive jobs are real jobs, they are better vis-a-vis not having a job. But decent work is what supports us in making those jobs more productive and competitive.”

Bodwell advocates for organizations to focus on certain key elements: worker engagement, worker involvement, workers having a voice and representation, and workers being respected and involved in the workplace. “After 40 years of working in factories, I have never seen a great factory with crappy labor practices. If you want to be a top-notch factory you need to be committed to your employees and workers. Empowering workers and  treating them well is just good business. Good labor practices, health and safety, respect for rights, engagement and dialogue are basic good management,” he says.

“After 40 years of working in factories, I have never seen a great factory with crappy labor practices.”

Organizations around the world now face unique and similar challenges. Against this backdrop, Bodwell reflects upon the role the Global Opportunity Initiative (GOI) can play: “GOI has convening power and access to some of the greatest thinkers to study challenges such as skills development, human development in a work environment, enterprise development, and creation of opportunities. An initiative like this has access to leading academic institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It provides an opportunity to share and develop new ideas, bring people together, and raise awareness on topics through newsletters and meetings. We are in a time of much faster-shifting skills needs.”

And with the evolving nature of work, the importance of learning across the lifespan becomes a priority. Bodwell says, “I have four boys and I don’t know what to tell them they should be learning. The world is too dynamic. There is no choice but to be a lifelong learner.”

By: David Vasquez, Harvard University Research Assistant

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