KidLead Insights

At the moment, i'm enjoying Norah Jones singing at my fav Starbucks on Cannery Row in Monterey, CA.  I just turned in my free birthday card drink, so i'm enjoying a venti mocha (skim) and doing some writing on a new book called LeadYoung.  I've come to the realization that the best parts of life are those snapshots where you say, "This is as good as it gets."  It might be hanging with a group of friends, Starbucks moments like now, having the kids home from college, or a walk along the beach with my best-friend-wife.  Push "pause" and sigh a sigh of enjoyment; yeah, this is nice . I'm getting more and more of these blessed snapshots these days, especially as we the increasing results of our work with young leaders and those who're catching the vision of this movement.  As we ponder the past year and anticipate the next, 2011 looks like it will be truly exciting.  We're tooling on some new resources that will expand our work from ages 2-25 a

I recently made a quick trip to Bangkok, Thailand, where we're interacting with a leadership training company about bringing young leader training to southeast Asia.  What a wonderful group of people I met.  They have found what I discovered that adults don't change very much or very easily.  I was delighted to see how Thai preteens and teens responded to the interactive learning events and how well they accomplished the tasks and lead each other.  As in the other cultures I've observed, certainly some students quickly display their leadership aptitudes, others hesitate a bit, and some just don't grasp the matter.  Young leaders have much in common globally.  I'm excited to work further with this company, in hopes of bringing KidLead's expertise and passion to Asian countries.  We have a certified trainer in Korea and are negotiating with an entity in Singapore and Malasia.  One thing this culture values is investing in the new generation and giving them a leg u

Right now, I'm in Bangkok, Thailand, a bustling city of 66 million people in southeast Asia.  I'm working with the APMGroup, the leading organizational development firm in this region.  What excites me are the executives' realization that for them to bring about cultural change here, they need to be about developing new generation leaders.  Their longterm goal is to raise new Asian leaders.  The movement to include children and youth is quite revolutionary, as it is in the United States.  The sense of my hosts is that parents in this culture will do whatever they can to provide their children with a leg up on the competition, to help them realize their potential.  I look forward to KidLead partnering with many others with the audacious vision that when you focus on leaders, you change history, and when you focus on them when they're young, you change them.  We need more visionaries like Arinya, Pui, and Dane at the APMGroup ( www.apm.co.th ).