Expanding the mission
Since 1991, the LEADER Project, a student-driven overseas economic development program, has been making an impact. Both for the Ivey volunteers and those in the communities it touches. More than 800 instructors and 8,000 participants have been involved in LEADER in the past 25 years. On March 4, a special event at Steam Whistle Brewing celebrated LEADER’s rich past and exciting initiatives to come. In our series, we’ll look at how LEADER has evolved over the years. In part two of the series, we speak with Tineke Keesmaat, MBA ’05, CEO and Founder of TILTCO; and Lisa Dymond, MBA ’06, Head of Talent Strategy and Operations for Canada at The Boston Consulting Group; about the 2004-06 period when LEADER was transitioning to a different focus and student composition.
The LEADER Project started by bringing business education to people in the former Soviet Union to help with their post-communist transition, but the need for business knowledge extended beyond those borders. Aiming for long-term success and global impact, LEADER eventually broadened its scope to new sites in emerging economies and an increased focus on entrepreneurship.
A new mission in 2003 – to give students, entrepreneurs, and managers in emerging regions practical decision-making skills and offer cross-cultural understanding and learning opportunities – attracted recipients and volunteer instructors alike.
In fact, LEADER was a selling point for Tineke Keesmaat to choose Ivey when she decided to get an MBA.
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Keesmaat had started small businesses to help pay for university. She had also taken time off from her role at Accenture to work for a volunteer organization in Guyana. So LEADER’s entrepreneurial focus and the opportunity to travel and do good was a calling card to Ivey.
“It was a deciding factor in where I wanted to apply. I thought it was really cool that a school would invest this much time in sharing knowledge and that students would be so invested in this program. There was a real connection when I saw that I could get that kind of experiential learning in the Ivey program,” she said. “I liked the idea of working with other students in different environments to share education. I also saw it as an opportunity to get to know colleagues in my class at a different level than just being in the classroom.”
Seeing the world through a new lens
For Lisa Dymond (then Wiens), LEADER offered an altruistic reprieve from the all-consuming course work and job hunt and an opportunity to be with like-minded students who want to make a difference.
“LEADER allows you to contribute beyond Ivey. It forces you to set your eyes beyond the horizon of London, Ont. or Bay Street and to think about what is going on in the world and how you can help,” she said. “I also gravitated toward LEADER because of the people who were involved. The program attracts students who have a very well-rounded profile: strong academic performance, clear propensity for leadership, commitment to the tenet of volunteerism, and a bias for fun.”
Both Keesmaat and Dymond said the experience delivered even more than expected.
Keesmaat learned about the power of resilience and kindness.
“You are a guest in a foreign country and things aren’t going the way you want them to go, but that’s part of the learning. You learn resiliency – to be flexible and to adapt,” she said. “You also learn how kind people around the world are. We had people go far and beyond to make sure we had positive experiences.””
She also enjoyed helping entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground. She has since founded a company that helps executives to make their ideas happen.
“You saw these young people with these amazing ideas and, with their Ivey classmates, they were able to put some shape around them and to see what it takes to turn an idea into a business,” she said. “Some people kept in touch with me later on so I learned how they were building their businesses.
The power of human ambition
Dymond learned that human ambition is innate.
“It was very inspiring to see people who came from such humble beginnings and with so many barriers overcome their circumstances and get their ideas off the ground,” she said. “They had unrelenting energy and drive to improve things for themselves and others.”
She was also reminded how fortunate her own situation is in comparison to those living in regions where employment conditions are challenging, health-care resources are underdeveloped, and the future is so precarious. During her second year with LEADER, she arrived in Nizhny Tagil, Russia to find a Russian student who had committed suicide overnight.
“It showed me that whatever hardships I might be experiencing, they pale in comparison to the challenges faced by many others, particularly those in this region of the world,” she said. “The image of the student has stayed with me over the years and serves as a reminder to put myself in the shoes of others before casting judgement and to continue to find ways to support other regions of the world, despite how busy and complex my own life may feel.”
On the other hand, Dymond said she was proud to be able to give the students in such regions hope.
“There were clearly some commercial successes spurred by participants in the LEADER project, but the other element of success was just exposing these students to the possibility of doing something beyond their own small community,” she said. “You could tell they were hungry to hear about Canada – to hear about our experiences and what we were learning and what was going on in our culture. Having access to us inspired them in terms of what could be possible for them.”
A change in leadership for LEADER
During Dymond’s LEADER experience there was another important transition. With Ivey’s MBA moving to a one-year program in 2006, LEADER would lose second-year students who had participated in the project to help the incoming group. The decision was made to recruit more HBAs who could participate in LEADER for more than one year. Although LEADER had been open to all students, mostly MBAs and PhDs had been participating. By 2008, HBAs made up more than 50 per cent of LEADER’s participant base.
“We were going to lose this muscle memory that we normally had where the second-year students taught the first-year students the ropes, so we needed to source a new contingent of LEADERites who could contribute to the program over multiple years. It also really effectively connected the two programs and we learned from each other,” she said.
Dymond said she was so impressed with the program and its ability to adapt that she has continued to provide guidance as a member of its Advisory Board.
“LEADER’s 25th anniversary is an extremely exciting milestone. For me, the most important aspect of this anniversary is how the program has been able to flex, adapt, and stay relevant for a quarter-century,” she said. “The program’s shift in focus from students in Eastern Europe to budding entrepreneurs in emerging economies is an impressive evolution. It is also indicative of the quality of leadership among the Ivey students who have been at the helm of the program. Their ability to think strategically and operationalize such a massive transformation is incredibly impressive.”
Making an impact
Over 25 years, LEADERites have been making an impact in many areas of the world. Here are some of the sites they’ve visited:
- Accra, Ghana
- Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
- Almaty, Kazakhstan
- Bangalore, India
- Belgrade, Serbia
- Chisinau, Moldova
- Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine
- Eldoret, Kenya
- Georgetown, Guyana
- Havana, Cuba
- Irkutsk, Russia
- Kathmandu, Nepal
- Lviv, Ukraine
- Minsk, Belarus
- Moscow, Russia
- Nizhny Tagil, Russia
- Port-au-Prince, Haiti
- Riga, Latvia
- Skopje, Macedonia
- Tolyatti, Russia
- Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
- Vilnius, Lithuania
