A duty to expand our leadership potential

Welcome back if you have had the comfort of summer vacation! In the meantime, the world has certainly not become less hazardous. We’ve seen the rise of geopolitical tensions in Asia and the Pacific, a burst of new terrorist acts across the world, new manifestations of the effects of climate change, and mounting tensions in the Middle East. 

The world is in need of urgent cooperative solutions to address those developments. Such solutions are often complex and potentially disruptive for the established order (or disorder) and therefore not the most popular with domestic political constituencies. In this context, we each have a duty to expand our leadership potential and contribute to the design of actionable solutions at every level. At Executive Education, we aim to help you in this endeavour with a new emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Our series of action days exemplify best this entrepreneurial, solution-oriented, approach providing participants with new competencies and answers to a variety of individual and societal challenges. With these very concrete days of action, we also wish to exert our thought leadership and societal responsibility in raising issues that are controversial in nature. A foremost example is our action day on the universal income. The insertion of design thinking and foresight analysis in our portfolio of programmes is a second manifestation of this approach. These tools are well suited to systematically explore the unknown and elaborate policy developments that can either succeed or fail fast.

This Autumn also marks the launch of the tenth edition of our Executive Master in International Negotiation and Policy-Making with an impressive cohort of talented professionals coming from the private, public and non-profit sectors. A key innovation in that programme is a brand new online module on the fundamentals of global governance.

We are confident that our emphasis on leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship will serve your professional needs and contribute positively to the reinforcement of cooperative solutions to address the world’s current challenges. In the weeks, months and years to come, we will expand our efforts to raise awareness about ongoing transformations and their implications for the workplace and societies more generally. We count on you to join us on this journey!

This is the first edition of my new series "The Director's words" which features in our Executive Education newsletters. Sign up here>