PKU-Harvard Dialogue on Leadership
Jul 23-2020
On July 16th, BiMBA Business School and CITIC Press Group held an event on leadership in crisis times, featuring speeches and dialogues by prominent professors from PKU and Harvard University.
Prof. John Yang, special advisor to BiMBA, spoke on his theory of Tri-Meta Leadership under VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) context. Based on multiple years of research, the framework is useful for Chinese managers, including government officials and corporate executives, to understand their strengths and weaknesses in leadership style and behavioral mode. Thought leadership, professional leadership, and character leadership combine to make leaders powerful in normal and crisis times.
Prof. Leonard Marcus and Prof. Eric McNulty of Harvard University brought the Chinese version of their new book to share with the audience. The book, Crisis Management Course from Harvard University (literal translation from its Chinese title; the English title is You’re It), condenses their observations of the COVID-19 crisis and nearly two decades of prior research into what they term Meta-Leadership. It focuses on three dimensions: individuals, context, and connectivity. The two professors said that they set out with the goal of making the theoretical framework both practically robust and academically rigorous.
Prof. Yang thanked the two professors for their inspirations, and commented that among the three dimensions in the Meta-Leadership framework, connectivity – of people to people, people to leaders, and people to other stakeholders – enjoys the most attention from Chinese people. Moreover, many Chinese business leaders are starting to transcend individual limitations and learn to get leadership into full play to direct their companies out of crisis.
