Doing good through networks

    It is a great honour to be nominated to join the Young Global Leaders community. Having worked the last few years in the House of Lords, I know a little more than I did about the power of a network to effect change and combine wisdom and insights from many backgrounds and experiences. It is also clear to me that many of the challenges and opportunities we face in Parliament, and as citizens, are increasingly either highly local in nature, or require global resources and networks to address. I’m looking forward to joining the Young Global Leaders because I think it has very much that local and global capacity and can, and already has from what I have learned, the ability to make a huge difference. My passions encompass social reform, East Asia, and the future of cities  – details of which are on this website. How do we train and connect people, particularly from business backgrounds, to support the social entrepreneurs of the future and help scale their solutions to the big environmental, educational, and employment challenges we face? How do we bring East and West together to build a sustainable Chinese Dream that helps us all to access prosperity? And above all, how do we connect cities together to drive economic development using technology, broader owernship of assets, and the power of relationship and serendipity? These passions all have, I believe, the potential, with the Young Global Leaders network’s support, to take flight, to replicate, and to make far more impact than I could ever make myself alone. I’m looking forward to engaging, sharing, and learning. Indeed at one point in my career I was due to enter a business school in the US, but the call of being a serial social entrepreneur got to me first. In many ways for me, the YGL programme will be the MBA I never had, and at the same time a chance to find like minded peers who care as I do about the dangers we face in our societies, and want to take action to address and avert them. As a person of Chinese descent living in Europe, I’m excited about how the YGL programme spans the world with different gatherings in different continents, including in East Asia where I feel some of the most interesting challenges and insights may come in future. It was Sun Yat Sen, a reformer and a hero of mine who founded modern China, who said coined the phrase “One World, One Family.” I’m looking forward to joining that global family that I am told Young Global Leaders represents, and working with that family to make the world a better, more prosperous, and more peaceful place.  ]]>