Leapfrogging With Humility

If you want to see how intent the Chinese are to be a major player on the world stage look no further than CELAP, the Chinese Executive Leadership Academy Pudong. Located just outside of Shanghai, CELAP was opened in early 2005 to provide training to senior government officials, executives of state-owned businesses, and military officers, and has already seen over 11,000 current and future leaders from across China pass through its doors.

The official theme for a conference that I recently attended there was Innovation, Transition, and Leadership. I think a more accurate title would have been Leapfrogging With Humility.

It seems like everyone in China is studying what really works in business and government, why it works, and how to put a uniquely Chinese spin on it. Their search starts in the developed countries of the West but, in reality, they don’t care where the ideas come from as long as they work. While the rest of the world is innovating around the edges to refine what’s already been proven, the Chinese are trying to create whole new models.

For example, what is leadership in a world where your primary interaction with employees is through e-mail, Skype, and a company wiki? When the number of nationalities, religions, and languages in your company rivals a United Nations summit? And where do you start when there is not a single book on leadership, among the thousands listed on Amazon.com, that is integrates the distinctly different leadership philosophies of East and West?

One of the most interesting presentations of the conference, by Dr. Xuezhu Bai, CELAP’s Chief Coordinator of International Courses, focused on just that question. The Australian-educated Bai attempted to create a “unified theory” of leadership, taking the teachings of eastern philosophy, represented by ancient texts such as the I-Ching, and relating them to the more scientific and mechanistic definitions of leadership derived primarily in the United States. Given the even mix of Chinese and English speakers in the room and the gulf separating our two cultures, we all probably understood about half of the material about half of the time. But one thing is for sure…globalization “on the ground” will be one of the great management challenges of our time.

And I wish I had a dollar for every time Dr. Bai and many of his Chinese colleagues during the conference declared how far behind they are compared to Western economies, technologies, and management development. They may be behind now but the gap is narrowing and I’m pretty sure they won’t slow down if it looks like the pace of progress in the West can’t keep up.

Competition is good. It forces the world’s current and future leaders to keep raising their game. This conference has convinced me that if there’s one characteristic that all future leaders will need to have, it’s the ability to think big and act small.