Experiential Learning in Hong Kong

While I was still in Thailand for the Global Social Venture Symposium, I told Mai Siriphongpanh, our COO in DDD, about my experience as a guest speaker at the Symposium. She congratulated me on my achievement, as she knew that I was really not comfortable with public speaking. Then she told me that she had a new challenge for me: To represent Laos and DDD at the GIFT Institute’s Young Leadership Program in Hong Kong.

While I was still in Thailand for the Global Social Venture Symposium, I told Mai Siriphongpanh, our COO in DDD, about my experience as a guest speaker at the Symposium. She congratulated me on my achievement, as she knew that I was really not comfortable with public speaking. Then she told me that she had a new challenge for me: To represent Laos and DDD at the GIFT Institute’s Young Leadership Program in Hong Kong.

The Young Leadership Program addresses a critical gap in today’s training for future leaders: The purpose of the program is to provide an experiential course which ultimately uses the inputs of relevant business practices to make a positive impact on society. The program provides experiential leadership development by combining a week of classroom-based learning (Module 1) — comprised of intense debate and discussions with well-known leaders from HSBC, Siemens, Sonepar etc — followed by a week of on-site work on a real-world project (Module 2). The goal is for your team to identify a business idea and capitalize on it to create either an investment opportunity or a business plan. We put in an average of 14-16 hours per day to complete the program objectives.

I was lucky to have a lot of opportunity to give my input from the perspective of a social enterprise. Particularly, I emphasized a major lesson my job has taught me: how critical our everyday decision making is, and how deeply it can affect the people and society around us. Since most of my teammates in the program came from a corporate background, my presence in the team did bring about a different perspective. Of course, I took this opportunity to share our experiences from DDD with everyone. Many of the participants had never heard of social enterprise before, but became interested in making our model part of the business plan we were developing.

During Module 2, we met up with many local government officials in China. We found that there were too many policies and regulations working against establishing a non-profit organization due to the Chinese economic system. Therefore, our initial business model changed from a social business model into two models: The first model is a commercial model that will use its profit to pay annual royalty fees to our second (social) business model in order to achieve the program objectives.

At end of the program, we completed the business plan on time and presented it at the investor conference. We were congratulated by our Chinese partner for our ability to come up with new ideas in such a short time, and they promised to look into adopting our ideas in order to achieve sustainability in their current business expansion.
During the reflection at the end of the program, I concluded my participation with appreciation of the GIFT Institute team, and I of course thanked my sponsor,Ms Annie Chen, who funded my trip and program cost in Hong Kong. I also requested that the GIFT Institute look into giving more opportunities to our local managers in DDD Laos and Cambodia to attend this program in the near future. I am thankful for the opportunity to participate in this program, and I appreciate that DDD encouraged me to learn more about leadership and to share our DDD stories during this two week program.

Lessons learned:
Diversity – I was assigned to a diverse team that consisted of people of more than 10 different nationalities, industries and backgrounds who were to accomplish the tasks set. Our openness to the views of others was tested. Diversity of the team was crucial for the team’s growth and development.

No passivity — Stepping up to be a leader is the key to success and self-realization; failure to do so, on the other hand, will not help me or my organization. An open mind and a high level of intellectual curiosity were essential to get the most out of this program. I learned to be more engaged and to always find a way to be effective.

Ability to communicate – Understanding the participants’ individual ability to communicate was really important in order to ensure that we were not weakened by language barriers during the program. It was clear that when the session was conducted in English, the native English speakers tended to be very dominant on the floor and most Chinese speakers remained quiet. This situation changed as we went to into Module 2, where most of the sessions involved Chinese speakers from the government and local companies. Suddenly the quiet Chinese participants became lively and participated in every debate and took the lead in all of Module 2. Some native English speakers suddenly became less dominant, although there was a translator who worked with us in every session. During the reflection, some of the English native speakers admitted they had felt insecure in most sessions and apologized to the Chinese participants for being ignorant during Module 1. It was interesting for me to observe these things, and the team was really great in acknowledging this lesson.