Academy Meeting @Garanti Bank Education Directorate

Academy Meeting @Garanti Bank Education Directorate

After the busy final period with stress, we finished a semester again. Despite all the tiredness, waking up early in the morning and meeting my CampusWINner sisters who are the most inspiring women was a perfect motivation to start summer for all of us at the last academy meeting. We got together with the theme of ‘‘Service Orientation’’ with an exciting program and successful speakers.  

The first part of the program was ‘’Service Orientation Panel’’ with Merve Altundağ who is a former campus leader and work in Channel Marketing Lead in Google and Melek Pulatkonak who is the founder of TurkishWIN and BinYaprak.

They talked about the importance of the asking questions in our lives. They shared a memory with us that Merve studied at Boğaziçi University which is the first class education and while in a TurkishWIN event, she asked a question that ‘’what are we doing for the women who do not have good chance and opportunity?’’ After this question, Merve became the campus leader and also this question was the key to the formation of the BinYaprak.

In addition to this, Merve talked about her professional life in Unilever and Google. She said that Unilever is the great company to experience the different categories at the beginning of your career. She experienced both home care and ice cream categories as an assistant brand manager in Unilever. After 1.5 years in Unilever, she decided that want to work in a technology company and applied to Google via a job advert she saw.  At Google, she said everything is done very programmatically. Because of this, all the projects you want to do in Google have to base on strong bases, if not, the project probably will fail at some point.

She also recommended us, if someone want to work in the marketing field should have good observation ability. İf you choose a department that you have necessary skills; it will help you to do this work lovingly and effortlessly.

The second part of program was ‘’Service Orientation Workshop’’ with Gamze Gürbüzatik who is the group director in Fjord. She described us the Service Orientation that is the ability and desire to anticipate, recognize and meet others’ needs, sometimes even before those needs are articulated. Service oriented people focus on providing satisfaction and making themselves available to others.

If you asked what humans do best, the answers are lead, improvise, create, judge and empathize. On the other hand, if you asked what machines do best, the answers are transact, iterate, predict and evolve. On this point, there is The Missing Middle that describe the collaboration of people and machines and include the terms of train, explain, sustain, amplify, interact and embody.

She recommended us Human+Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI book written by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson with a quoting that ‘’Businesses that understand and act on AI can surge ahead. Those that neglect will fall behind.’’

She also quotes her favorite phrase from Avedis Donabedian that ‘’Ultimately, the secret to quality is love. If you have love, you can then work backward to monitoring and improve the system.’’

She showed us that another subject is the Moral Machine. It is a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. They show you moral dilemmas, where a driverless car must choose the lesser of two evils, such as killing two passengers or five pedestrians. As an outside observer, you judge which outcome you think is more acceptable. There is an idea, in the future this type of driverless means can take these decisions.

The first time I heard this information and it was so inspirational. After this inspiring information, we made two exercises. Firstly, we grouped as two people and one of group member closed the eyes with an eyepatch and discover the area and the other group member was guided her. On this exercise, my eyes closed with the eyepatch.

Recently, I participated ‘’Dialogue in the Dark’’ and it was the unique experience for me, I advise everybody. I started to perceive by touching and hearing and also the most important point is that learn to trust your guide. It was very scary at the beginning, but then I really got used to it For this reason, on this time, I was not too scared, I was relaxed and I discover the area with all detail. And also I listened to my guide and I trust. After finishing the exercise everyone shared their own experiences. Most people said that they did not trust their guide and were very frightened. Actually, the main purpose of this exercise is this. Everybody have to learn to listen and trust their co-worker.

On the second exercise, again we grouped as two people, then everyone told some memories about they could solved a solution for a problem by human interaction instead of the technology. We live in a world that technologies improve every second and lots of devices have the artificial intelligence but still the human interaction is really important and we should not lose this interaction.

It was the last academy meeting for this semester and I was really happy to listen all speakers and got together with my CampusWINner sisters. We talked and shared our experience between us. We laughed a lot, we had fun a lot. Somebody graduated; somebody will go to the foreign country for Erasmus or internship. All of us will have more inspirational experience on summer. I missed my sisters already and I'm excited to meet on the next academy meeting on the next semester.