Youth power seen as key to future

Companies count on budding leaders to make their mark

A new wave of young talent is emerging in China's corporate world, leading the direction for the country's future growth.

These young leaders, in their 20s and 30s, are now reaching junior management levels in their companies, and are starting to have influence in their firms' decision-making. Their creativity and concern for sustainability are driving China's growth.

Cleo Ren, 31, a communications officer with the Dutch material science company DSM, is one such young leader with independent and creative ideas.

This year she helped her team organize five-kilometer charity walks taking in Shanghai Botanic Gardens and Tongxiang Botanical Garden, in Tongxiang, Zhejiang province. The walks were hosted to raise money for the World Food Programme and helped to pay for 500 meals for poor children in less developed areas in China.

"We sent out internal e-mails to encourage our colleagues to take part in the program," Ren says.

"But we also went to the park and spoke to people, and made them aware of the event and the cause we are fund raising for."

Leadership is about sharing one's thoughts with others and inspiring those around one, Ren says. In this respect, she feels her line manager is a role model for her.

"She is so passionate and gives us inspiration every day by giving us her thoughts not just on work but the way she views the world. She is a female executive in our company, and it is very rare for a Chinese woman to be in the executive team of an international company, so the story is inspiring."

Ren was one of four Chinese participants at this year's One Young World, a conference started in 2010 that allows young people to exchange views on important issues and interact directly with global leaders from business, politics, arts, science and sports.

This year's conference was held in Dublin over five days from Oct 15 and was attended by 1,300 young leaders from 190 countries. Issues explored at the conference included peace and conflict resolution, global business, human rights, sustainable development, education and leadership and government.

"One Young World is like the Olympics in the social field for youth," says Xu Zhenyin, another Chinese who attended, now in the Siemens graduate program in China.

Speaking before the conference Xu said: "I am looking forward to better understanding such a young party and being motivated by those well-known speakers and others who attended.

"I am also eager to communicate my perspective on many social topics with other young people as a Chinese.

The best I can expect is that I can find feasible ideas that would help China in some aspects and implement it later as a personal project after the conference."

Passionate to help bring about changes in society, Xu volunteered for the Beijing Olympics Games in 2008 and Shanghai Expo in 2010.

"It was my dream to be a volunteer for the Games. I felt passionate and committed during the entire month. That summer was like a dream to me."

At the Games Xu was responsible for collecting and making the contact list of all staff in Shanghai Stadium, a football venue. Two years later at the expo Xu was a team leader of a group of volunteers responsible for one pavilion.

"Every volunteer was so lovely that we couldn't hold back our tears when we sang songs to say goodbye to all the visitors on the last day of the six-month expo."

Another of those who attended was Aqua Huang, 29, a product manager with Lancome China Marketing Group, which is a part of L'Oreal. She is particularly interested in sustainability, which was greatly discussed at the summit.

"We discussed how the current business model in our economy is around making money by utilizing limited resources, but this may not be sustainable. I really hope to take some of the lessons we talked about back to my workplace and see how L'Oreal can do things better."

An interest in sustainability has already led Huang to organize initiatives in this direction. One initiative is Green Friday, in which Huang encouraged her team members to engage in non-work-related activities on Fridays and share their inspirations with the team. They could organize a group activity or hear a lecture delivered by a guest speaker from another company.

Huang's second initiative was a tree planting program in Inner Mongolia in partnership with the non-government organization NPO Greenlife.

When her team launched a new product line in July, she came up with an initiative for L'Oreal to sponsor the planting of a tree in Inner Mongolia for every three bottles of the new product sold in the name of a particular staff member and his or her family. Her team has sold enough products to plant 20,588 trees in Inner Mongolia.

Huang says she feels it is important for young people in China to display leadership, as society is changing rapidly and young people are the most connected with new phenomena.

"There are lots of Chinese young people happy to express their opinions and impact changes. There are lots of young entrepreneurs, and I think many cutting-edge products are developed by young people."

Huang herself is a testimony to this process of youth leadership development and engagement. Joining the L'Oreal team as a management trainee seven years ago, she has gradually learned key skills of leadership and now supervises a team of five.

She says she is excited to observe many new management trainees in their early 20s taking leadership roles and contributing great energy and creativity to the team today.

What particularly impressed her is a recent management trainee cohort's decision to handle their own graduation ceremony, which they managed to organize to a high standard in just three weeks.

"When we finished our trainee year we participated in the ceremony which is largely led by the human resources department. But the young trainees got into teams to organize the production, lighting, sound and other aspects of the whole ceremony, and it was amazing."

Huang says her leadership is about entrepreneurship, the combination of thinking and action, and love for one's work.

"Entrepreneurship allows one to regard company's work as one's own. Then we need to combine the creative thinking process with concrete action. Finally, you need to love your work, love your team and treat them like family."

Also attending the conference were counselors from different countries.

Luminaries for this year's summit included: the former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan; the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus; the CEO of Barclays Bank, Antony Jenkins; the founder and CEO of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales; the CEO of Unilever, Paul Polman; and the sports stars Boris Becker and Dame Ellen MacArthur.

One Chinese luminary was Xiang Bing, founding dean and a professor of China business and globalization at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.

Xiang says the conference is important because it allows young people to gain a global mindset and perspective. He says the focus on young talent is also significant, as such people are the leaders of the future.

Xiang has talked of businesses "having a global perspective and global view, but also competing globally with compassion".

Compassion means competing without creating so much social disruption, he says, and is a key concept CKGSB tries to champion as the school brought in the subject of humanities into the curriculum in 2004, becoming the oldest business school to do so.

cecily.liu@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 10/24/2014 page19)