- First Future Ready Forum held on 17 to 19 March 2015 at SMU
- Thirty faculty and speakers featured in themed tracks on Digitalisation, Human Capital and Innovation
- ‘Mini university’ for executives to customise learning
SMU hosted the first-ever Future Ready Forum, themed “Delivering the Latest in Management Thinking and Business Trends”, for business executives from 17 to 19 March. Organised by SMU Executive Development, the Forum showcased a record 30 faculty and speakers who were experts in a wide range of disciplines.
In the opening address, Mr Ho Kwon Ping, Chairman of SMU’s Board of Trustees, described the forum aptly as ‘around the world of SMU in three days’ and organised like a ‘mini university’. Participants personalised their learning curriculum from a choice of over 30 sessions on trending topics clustered around three themed tracks – Digitalisation, Innovation, and Human Capital.
[Photo: Mr Steve Wyatt, Director of SMU Executive Development that organised the first Future Ready Forum, welcoming delegates at the opening session.]
Attended by more than 100 delegates from over 30 industries, each day of the Forum began with a plenary session, followed by three parallel sessions on management insights, diverged into concurrent tracks for the three themed focus areas, and concluded with a thought leadership session.
- Mornings: Plenary Session and Management Insights. SMU faculty and partners inquired about the future of finance, whether Asians could be creative, how best to equip people for innovation, leading in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world, and what was wrong with the current state of employee engagement, to name just a few topics.
- Afternoons: Focal Areas of Digitalisation, Innovation, and Human Capital. Some of SMU’s most senior faculty such as Provost Rajendra Srivastava, Dean Gerard George, Associate Professor Tan Hwee Hoon, Professor Srinivas Reddy and Associate Professor Chris Boesch shared their latest research.
- Conclusion: Thought Leadership. A key expert concluded each day’s proceedings, inviting participants to think about larger questions. How can you, for example, become future ready when we do not know yet what the future is? How do we best deal with adversity? How do we create unrelenting cultures of innovation?
[Photo: Professor Rajendra Srivastava, SMU Provost and Deputy President (Academic Affairs), was among the senior SMU faculty who shared insights with executive participants.]
The Forum aimed to equip executives with management insights that sharpened their business acumen, increased their agility to seize new opportunities, and helped them better navigate around the increasingly complex business environment. Senior executives who attended with their team members benefited greatly from the customised interactive learning experience that helped them review their goals, priorities and action plans.
With the current digital age often referred to as the third industrial revolution, post mechanisation and mass production eras, the timing was apt to discuss what might be the disruptive trends that would bring tremendous advances and challenges to the world.
As Singapore marks 50 years of progress, and the world’s economic centre of gravity rapidly shifts towards the East, perhaps also towards the ASEAN countries, the Forum appropriately invited participants to consider how they could be ‘future-ready’ – what it means, what is coming next, and how both executives and educators should prepare for that future.
[Photo: Over 30 SMU faculty and speakers, who were experts in a wide range of disciplines, presented at the three-day forum.]
[Photo: Each day of the Forum concluded with a thought leadership session, such as this one on “Managing Adversity” by Raphael le Masne de Chermont, Executive Chairman of Shanghai Tang.]
[Featured Photo: Mr Ho Kwon Ping, Chairman of SMU’s Board of Trustees, delivered the opening address of the first Future Ready Forum that was held at SMU.]