LettersSuccess of the Northern Metropolis will come down to leadership culture

Yet, as someone who has spent over three decades in senior executive roles and leadership training, I believe the success of the Northern Metropolis ultimately hinges as much on people and culture as on institutional design.

First, Hong Kong’s higher education system has long excelled at producing highly competent technocrats, but not so much big-picture thinkers with a historical perspective and a strategic mindset. This cultural bias towards narrow efficiency over long-term vision makes genuine cross-institutional collaboration difficult, even with top-down encouragement.

Unlike mainland China, where large-scale projects benefit from a unified administrative tradition, Hong Kong must develop its own model – one that respects institutional autonomy while incentivising cooperation.

Second, the soft skills of university leaders deserve far greater attention. In a project of this magnitude, vice-chancellors and senior managers must do more than oversee research; they must communicate persuasively, mediate competing interests and articulate Hong Kong’s role in global innovation. Our education system has historically underemphasised these capabilities. In an era when artificial intelligence (AI) outperforms humans in technical domains, it is precisely these human-centred competencies – judgment, empathy, persuasion – that determine whether complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives succeed.

Leadership development programmes tailored for senior academics and focusing on negotiation, strategic communication and systems thinking should be part of the Northern Metropolis’s foundational investments. Structures matter, but they are inert without the right leadership culture. If the Northern Metropolis is to become Hong Kong’s “third curve”, we need not only a well-designed consortium, but also a conscious effort to cultivate strategic vision and collaborative leadership among those entrusted with its execution. The question is not whether Hong Kong can copy someone else’s playbook, but whether it can write its own – one that would turn its academic strengths into sustained innovative capacity.