Youth power to drive sustainable growth

Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan (left) and former Irish president Mary Robinson (right) at this year's One Young World summit in Dublin, Ireland. [Photo / Provided to China Daily]

Companies count on budding leaders to make the difference

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 in Shanghai Botanical Garden and Tongxiang Botanical Garden, in Tongxiang, Zhejiang province, to raise money for the World Food Program and help pay for 500 meals for poor children in less developed areas in China.

"We sent out e-mails to encourage our colleagues to take part in the program," Ren says. "And we also went to the parks and spoke to people to let them know about the event."

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

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

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

This year's five-day conference was held in Dublin starting Oct 15 and was attended by 1,300 young leaders from 190 countries. Issues explored at the event 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 the event. Xu is now in the Siemens graduate program in China.

Speaking before the conference, Xu said: "I am looking forward to being motivated by those well-known speakers. I am also eager to share my perspectives on many social topics with other young people.

"I hope I can find feasible ideas that would help China in some ways and put them into practice later after the conference."

Passionate to help bring about changes in society, Xu served as a volunteer 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."

During the Games, Xu was responsible for making a contact list of all staff at a football venue.

Two years later at the expo Xu was a team leader of a group of volunteers responsible for one pavilion.

"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 cosmetics giant L'Oreal. She is particularly interested in sustainability, which was a hot topic at the summit.

"We discussed how the current business model works in our economy, which is about 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 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 ideas with each other. They either organize a group activity or invite a guest speaker from another company to deliver a lecture.

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

When her team launched a new product line in July, she came up with the idea 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 eager to express their opinions and bring about 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 to the team with energy and creativity.

What particularly impressed her is the recent decision by the management trainees to handle their own graduation ceremony. They managed to organize the program in just three weeks.

"The graduation ceremony used to be organized by the human resources department. But this time the young trainees organized their own ceremony, taking care of all the details. 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. members."

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 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 the Beijing-based Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.

Xiang says the conference is important because it allows young people to gain a global 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 his school tries to champion.

It brought in the subject of humanities into the curriculum in 2004, the first business school in China to do so.