"It's Not All Jungles and Monkeys"
Teens Teach Execs About Emerging Markets

by Jake Breeden

“These kids are the powerhouse of the future,” explains the facilitator.  “It’s important that we engage with them now.”  She is about to surprise twenty-two senior executives from Royal Dutch Shell plc by introducing them, up close, to a group of young adults from Brazil, Russia, India, and China—commonly known as BRIC, a shorthand that implicitly recognizes the huge and growing importance of these emerging economies. 

These recent immigrants are not job-seekers; they’re good-natured kids who were chosen because they are smart and honest.  Of course Shell already knows a great deal about emerging markets; any global business depends on accurate forecasts, complex models, well-laid plans.  But under the auspices of a customized leadership development program, members of Shell’s top 200 suddenly find themselves doing the unexpected:  interviewing youngsters from these far-flung markets about their buying habits, brand awareness, and career preferences.  The session--part of a weeklong course in New York designed to highlight the most significant forces affecting the company’s future--underscores changes in consumer dynamics among the young, whose tastes and views reflect demographic trends with which every industry is grappling.

“These young people are future Shell customers and employees,” explains industrial psychologist Dennis Baltzley, who heads Shell’s Leadership Development.  “Downstream consumers can be important sources for new, diverse thinking, particularly in an industry whose future lies elsewhere than in today’s established markets.”

Dr. Baltzley identifies the ultimate goal of such conversations as embedding an even stronger learning culture among top executives and then creating a web of accountability around these executives that ensures they will change, adapt, and model this strong curiosity with the executives that report to them.

Shell looked at 10 potential partners for this effort and chose Duke Corporate Education to design and deliver the program, where nontraditional methods ensure executives learn.  They make executives think explicitly about the models they use for solving complex problems, and put them in situations that require a change.

Baltzley notes “At the senior executive level I always say, if you think you’ve ‘made it’ now that you are at the top, you are incorrect. Now is the time you must start learning, now is the time you must challenge all those mental models of success that got you here today.”

In this session, some of the BRIC kids start out feeling defensive before warming to the friendly atmosphere of the small-group conversations.  “It’s not all jungles and monkeys,” says a Brazilian woman; “It’s not all bears and vodka,” says the Russian lad.  But they quickly engage with the friendly execs, who have been warned by the facilitator, Duke CE’s Gil McWilliam, not to come across as “scary old people.”  Soon the groups are laughing together, making jokes about American baseball and talking about the environment, the youths’ career plans, politics back home. 

In a later debriefing, the executives make it clear that they were listening closely.  “You see their passion, their willingness to work, and you feel that the future is theirs,” says one observer.  “I have the privilege of going back to these kids,” says another working in Russia “or to others like them.  And I’m going to keep thinking about this.”

“Shell gets it,” says Duke CE’s CEO, Blair Sheppard, citing the firm’s attention to its leadership pipeline as keen as its attention to oil pipelines.  “Shell has refined its notion of leadership skills to include a high emphasis on collaboration even at the very top of the organization.  They’re looking at how today’s decisions may affect the market 12,000 miles or 20 years from now,” he notes.

During this highly interactive week, besides focusing on the BRIC markets, the executives also hear from American war-hawks and anti-corporate activists, and explore the increasingly global reach of litigation and global differences in governmental regulation.

“The most pertinent information is always at the edge of our vision, not where we are looking every day,” adds Gil McWilliam.  “This is an attempt to get to the edge.”