Retired exec teaches others to succeed

As former vice president of Southeast Asia with PepsiCo and former vice president of International Restructuring Operations with Nike-Cole Haan, Lance Tanaka had been a successful business executive.

But what fascinates his audiences most is what he achieved in 2001, when he turned 45.

He retired.

Retirement for him was not an occasion to fish and play golf all day, but rather to do what he loved and was good at doing: motivating people. He set up a consulting firm called Asia Executive Resource, training executives from the top global companies in China.

And he established a non-profit education foundation called Excelerate in 2006, coaching university students about their professional lives for free.

"I've always had a passion for making a difference in the world, and where best to do it but in China," said Tanaka. "My vision was to leverage my strengths in developing people with my leadership experience to help China's future leaders in being effective in the global scene. I've always loved working with university students because they have a fresh view of the world and are so optimistic."

Subjects of his program cover self-discovery to identify a career path, interviewing, leadership skills in management and communication and company visits.

Over the past three years, the program has involved more than 1,400 students from Tsinghua, Fudan and Peking universities.

When it first started in 2006 in Tsinghua University, the program involved 80 students and eight coaches from international companies. It lasted one semester, with four to five coaching sessions. Each session lasted two hours, with one coach from an international company for each group of 10 students.

Now the program goes into "phase two", a deeper level, consisting of 50 students from each university for one year, eight to 10 sessions.

The coaches are executives who usually come from multinational companies, including McKinsey, Deloitte, Daimler, Coca-Cola, Intel, IBM and Microsoft.

Wang Mi, a fresh graduate from Tsinghua University, has been involved in the program for three years. "The most important thing I learned from the projects is self-discovery and to make the best use of my strengths to achieve my dream," she said.

"If you are good at doing something, you can make great achievement with efforts, but you may only reach a pass level with great efforts at areas where your weakness is."

That's exactly what Tanaka wants people to realize.

He realized before his retirement that it seemed critical to understand his gifts through a process of self-discovery.

"It inspired me to find out what was truly important in my life," he said. "What were my strengths and what were my passions? Once I understood more clearly those elements to my happiness, I put together a plan that allowed me to make better career decisions as well as go after the experiences and skills I needed to get closer to achieving the dream."

Tanaka wants to use the self-discovery method to influence and motivate people: He believes everyone has their strength and passion, and people should use their natural advantages to choose their life and career path.

"What sets this apart from other programs is that we learned to discover who we are, our strengths and passions and use them to not only find the right career but to live a happy and successful life," said Fu Jing, who attended the program at Fudan University.

Apart from the self-discovery session, every year the program has a "real world" project where students get to work on a project managed by professionals. One of the aims is to find out what executives from the top companies are looking for in hiring students.

Having coached over 950 executives from the top global companies operating in China, Tanaka knows what companies need from their new hires and managers and has a good understanding of multinational companies' cultures.

"We would like to become the 'go to' source for university students in preparing them for the future, and we also would like to become a trusted advisor to companies so that we can match the right students to the right jobs in the right companies," he said.

(China Daily 05/04/2009 page10)