Wednesday 28 September 2011

Leadership strategies in Asia

 

DSCN3596   I’m back in South East Asia this week.  I’ve already delivered a workshop on HR and social media in Kuala Lumpur on Monday and Tuesday (see klhr20.blogspot.com).  And today and tomorrow I’m blogging from Singapore’s Human Capital Summit.

As you can see, it’s a big event (and very red!).

 

I missed the first couple of sessions, which was a shame, but I had a few other people to meet.  But I got here in time for ‘Research on Asia – The Shift’, with Lynda Gratton and some local business leaders as panellists.  I’d been looking forward to this, to better understand some of the key differences in HR in Asia, but the session focused largely on generic issues in the shift:

 

There was this though, showing some of the key differences:

 

In general though, most of what I’ve heard so far applies as much in the West as it does here.

For example, there’s the same misconceptions about Gen Y - that they have a sense of purpose, want flexibility and more life than work, that sort of thing (I know for a fact that most Western, and am fairly sure that many Asian, Gen Xers and Baby Boomers want these things too).

One speaker, for example, noted that Gen Y believe in more life and less work (so do I by the way).  However, one of the other speakers suggested that there was no longer any work-life balance as people spend so much time at work – so perhaps not everyone had quite got Linda’s message (actually this may be one of the few factors which really does apply more in the East).

 

And there’s the same move to a more collaborative, democratic way of working.  And I did think that this was a really interesting thing to see.  I’m going to post over at Social Advantage a bit later on.

 

Dare I say that there’s also, unfortunately, the same over-reliance on the use of panels during conferences. But in general, today’s looking like a really stimulating day.

Anyway, its wonderful to be back here again – I always find Singapore a very stimulating place (probably no coincidence I started my blog here all that time ago).

More from the summit later / tomorrow.

1 comment:

  1. Right on. The idea that generations are significantly different I do not find compelling. Some people care more about different traits. The over-generalizations made about generations I find fairly useless, and often counterproductive.

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