Center for Asia Leadership

Our work focuses on capacity-building, content-development, coaching, and events related to addressing social challenges in Asia. If chosen for The Grant, we would add a “Women’s Leadership Program,” an area that requires great attention in Asia. We aim to operate with a seed fund that will finance this new initiative, with the goal of becoming fully sustainable within two years. Our program would include:

• A 3-Volume Publication offering stories, insights, and leadership lessons from inspirational women leaders, from 48 countries. The Center, to date, has produced 13 books and 30 case studies and has a tested capacity to write, print, and distribute books.
• A Women’s Leadership Program consisting of six in-person and virtual sessions over one year. Currently there are very few English- and local-language programs in Asia focusing on such topics as scaling businesses, adaptive leadership, futures thinking, cross-boundary negotiations, ethics, and organizing for change. Our program would gear these topics specifically toward women. To create it we would engage our 26 Country Heads as organizers and enroll 30-40 emerging women leaders per year.
• A YouTube Channel to disseminate the content developed and taught by Center affiliates regarding women’s leadership, which will include some content from the above publication. 

I grew up in the Philippines as a child of humanitarian workers. In the ten years I spent living there, I witnessed the dire plight of the locals under an ineffective regime. A strong conviction grew in me that the world needs highly qualified and morally upstanding leadership at all levels. Thus began my journey toward a career in social responsibility. On this road I have pursued a diverse array of professions, as a lawyer, a South Korean diplomat at the United Nations, a policy-aide at the Korean Congress, a social entrepreneur (leading Korea’s one of the first social enterprises providing economic opportunities to 400 low-income families), an army officer, a community builder, and finally a consultant on Wall Street, where I witnessed firsthand the demise of a financial giant during the 2008 crisis, thanks to bad leadership stemming from arrogance and ignorance. Finally, I set up the Center for Asia Leadership Initiatives in Boston during my graduate studies at Harvard. My vision for the Center is to help organizations and individuals in Asia respond more effectively to social challenges and setbacks, to orchestrate meaningful progress, and to help invent a future that is purposeful and beneficial for all.

The Center was established in Boston in 2014 as a study-tour and community-service program in Asia for Harvard scholars. To date, some 500 scholars from 67 countries have participated. By 2015, it housed three initiatives—Asia Leadership Trek, Asia Leadership Institute, and Acumen Publishing—which together aimed to address six key social challenges in Asia: (1) good-governance, (2) ethics in public life, (3) social inclusion for refugees and minorities, (4) sustainable business practices, (5) cross-cultural trust-building, and (6) pan-Asian youth leadership. I came to recognize these as key areas needing change after engaging with hundreds of Asian leaders in over 3 million miles of travel to 42 Asian nations. To date, we have offered programs and services to 50,000 individuals and worked with 500 organizations spanning 83 cities, 31 countries. We are headquartered in Boston, and 4 cities in Asia.

All our engagements demand a minimum of one year’s commitment, and we carry out no more than 18 projects annually.

We are a robust content-builder, presenting our own carefully designed frameworks, case studies, pedagogies, events, and materials, all specifically tailored to the Asian context—a specificity critical to our success.

We have fully embraced technology-driven progress-tracking and impact-measurement mechanisms as we pursue our objectives.

Paying close attention to Asian people’s challenges and needs is critical to our success. I have long been an avid network-builder. Today the Center has over 80,000 contacts in over 140 countries, including an array of decision-makers, thought-leaders, and impact-creators. My staff and I engage personally and regularly with as many of these contacts as we can, via emails and social media, to learn how our undertakings can better serve Asia’s needs.

About 150 individuals work closely with us as staff-members, advisors, faculty-members, coaches, consultants, and country heads. These people have been chosen for their talent, drive, and competence, as well as their ideas and insights. Periodic meetings and a transparent, collective, compensation-sharing model have enabled us all to stay fully committed to our cause, and we have formed valuable partnerships with some of the world’s most esteemed public personages, including Modi, Jokowi, Obama, Bush, Cameron, and Jack Ma. 

 Developing effective pedagogies is critical to our work. We use a variety of approaches that are quite new to many Asian contexts, including the case method, the inquiry-driven method, and other active models of learning. These methods have challenged many status-quos, introduced our participants to new concepts, and amplified our interventions.

We take seven carefully designed steps in each of our projects: (1) identifying our target audience, (2) outlining our scope of impact, (3) formulating a theory of change based on our information and resources, designing interventions, and projecting outcomes, (4) testing our hypotheses through such methods as customer journey mapping, surveys, interviews, and research on key enablers and constraints, (5) executing our interventions, (6) refining Steps 1-5, and (7) evaluating our impact. We consider the diagnostic work (steps 1-4) crucial to understanding what actions on our part would be most effective. The process is repeated in multiple rounds throughout our engagement period.

In each project, we use a dual approach that addresses both systemic and self-made challenges, analyzing how each is influencing the other. Usually we focus on the outside-in perspective first, followed by the inside-out perspective. Having a bird’s-eye view of the overall context helps us to understand what individual stakeholders can do to address the challenge. Over the course of the year, we bring relevant content and share best practices in six sessions. In between these touchpoints, we provide individual and group coaching to ensure that the target audience has both grasped and implemented the measures we’ve introduced.