Successful leaders are those who think about tomorrow and envision new kinds of investment opportunities while doing good for those around them. Visionary founder and chief executive of the Global Institute For Tomorrow (Gift), Chandran Nair, is offering a Global Young Leaders Programme (YLP) to produce leaders who can face a business environment 'characterised by mounting complexities, growing interconnectedness, an increasing need for cultural sensitivity and a demand for sharp political and ethnic understanding'.
'The aim of the programme is to fill a gap in executive education that is not being filled,' Mr Nair said. The programme hones leadership and business skills that enable social entrepreneurship. Students are taught to find commercial and viable solutions for community projects through experiential programmes.
'There is a recognition that conventional leadership education programmes tend to focus too much on functional learning - strategy, marketing, execution, and all of that. While that is important, in the corporate business landscape of the future, you will need a lot more than that to be successful. So we are trying to fill that gap.'
Mr Nair said the programme was not about raising awareness of corporate social responsibility, but stimulating and inspiring new ways of looking at contemporary problems and coming up with investment opportunities for the future.
'Traditional approaches to investments and rate of returns have reached a ceiling and some of that will persist,' he said. 'But there is a recognition that we can't keep externalising cost to maximise profits, and that new ways and new models need to be created and a new community of enlightened investors brought into the framework.'
Participants in the two-week programme spend a week developing a business plan and listening to guest speakers to absorb the idea that leadership exists everywhere. In the second week they implement their business plans in a developing country in the region.