What kind of business talent is needed?
How can we college students make efforts to develop ourselves?
What is the true meaning of advanced education?

I have so many questions and I got the answers from the session called “Building the Next Generation of Business Leadership, The Challenge of Developing Talent” this morning. As a future candidate for business jobs, it is really nice for me to know how the Boards and CEOs of a company think of their prospective leaders and how they intend to cultivate talents.

As Jing Ulrich, the managing director of JP Morgan pointed out, the future business leadership should question authority, know how to innovate, have multicultural skills, think creatively, and have very good interpersonal skills. In fact, I wanted to have some further discussion with her not only because she is the chairman of China Equities, a big investment bank, which I am always interested in, but also because she speaks coherently, clearly and raises good ideas. However, she had a meeting and had to leave the room in a hurry.

Later, I had a short conversation with Wing-Dar Ker, who is the general manager of Microsoft in the Asia-Pacific and Greater China Region. He is a friendly and talkative man who gave me some inspiration. Our conversation started with education, which was an issue raised by him during the meeting. He said that college education should not be job training, but it should give students a solid foundation and system of knowledge that they can continue to build on after graduation. It should also teach students to learn to take advantage of their strengths, because every successful person knows what they are really good at. Nowadays, what some people see and their definition of success may be a little too narrow because of the market-driven world. Different people have different characteristics. Different leaders can also have different styles of leadership. Most importantly, he also told us to do what we love.

Whenever I talked with some of these leaders, they all give me an impression of knowledge. They can keep talking for quite a long time and make their points easy to understand.

Some of the points about how to become a leader are valuable, but also modest and simple, such as, “do what you say, say what you believe”, “forgive”, “have a sense of pride”, and “listen to others”. When a lady said wittily that when companies show the number of top women leaders not to just fill the numbers, but because they are really capable, we’ll know we’ve arrived, everyone burst out laughing.

I am Inspired!