Believing in your people to do the right thing
Guest: Klaus Kleinfeld (STEM industry executive)
Klaus Kleinfeld believes in people. To him, that is how businesses succeed or fail – knowing how to trust your people to do the right thing, even when circumstances change. And if you’re good at it and find it enjoyable, then you may have a chance to aim for a higher position, without it feeling “like a drag.”
“It’s all about people.” That is how Michele Matthews sees her job – managing people in order to move forward a vision. It all harkens back to her marketing days, which took her to all sorts of different roles in her small organization as time went along. After all, in small start-ups, sometimes you have to do a job that you weren’t hired for – this fed into her curiosity and led to her career taking off in the human resources sector, as COO of AG Care and a board member at the Chartered Professionals in Human Resources (CPHR) of British Columbia & Yukon.
Glyn Lewis never thought he would start a renewable development company. He thought he would be a teacher or chemist – but he found that the creative and analytical parts of him were more suited for something else. To him, working in construction but NOT coming from the construction industry helps feed into his passion for being innovative and coming up with disruptive ideas.
David Blackmon doesn’t see what he does as work; after all, he is doing what he loves, writing articles on energy and running a substack on the topic. It sounds like he knew what he wanted to do in life from the start – but based on what he was like as a youth, nothing could be farther from the truth.
What is going on in the Asia Pacific region? And how do we use that knowledge to do business and build relations? That is the mission for Vina Nadjibulla of the Asia Pacific Foundation. After all, understanding different places seems to be her calling, being born in the Soviet Union and growing up in multiple countries – and even working with the United Nations.