A World in Need of Globally Responsible Leadership - Call for Action
A pioneering group of 60 business schools/learning institutions and companies representing five continents, over 300,000 students & 1,000,000 employees are engaged in developing a next generation of globally responsible leaders.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, December 10, 2008 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The Globally Responsible Leaders Initiative (GRLI) was co-founded and is supported by the United Nations Global Compact and the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD). The GRLI's mission is to act as a catalyst to develop a next generation of globally responsible leaders. In doing so it challenges the issues of the company for the 21st Century, the mission of business schools/learning institutions and the process for cultural change in organisations.

Bill Gates in Time magazine in August this year said:

"Capitalism has improved the lives of billions of people ... But it has left out billions more..." "... we need a more creative capitalism: an attempt to stretch the market forces so that more companies can benefit from doing work that makes more people better off."

There is a need for this creative capitalism, but also a need for a more responsible capitalism and a leadership able to make that responsibility happen. A Call for Action is made to business leaders & academics by the GRLI with three main areas of focus:

Re-visiting the raison d'etre of the firm
Integrating leadership and ethics
Making corporate statesmanship a reality

"The (... current free market ...) model becomes increasingly ambiguous and paradoxical. At the same time as producing more wealth than ever and ensuring unprecedented growth, it pollutes, excludes, and often encourages domination and social injustice. It promotes a desperate race that no longer has any visible purpose, or raison d'etre beyond the race itself."

Concretely, GRLI believes that business schools should focus on educating the whole person as entrepreneurs, leaders, and corporate statesmen. Leadership is the art of motivating, communicating, empowering and convincing people to accept a new vision of sustainable development and the necessary change that this implies.

Realising the urgency with which a failing system needs to be adapted to human needs in a globalized economy, we will:

(1) enhance the change factors that will help us to implement a more sustainable development model.

(2) embed the appropriate values and behaviours in our strategies and management practices.

(3) aim to develop pedagogies and curricula which enable the development of a globally responsible leadership.

(4) exchange innovations, good practices and cases in business and education, and share them with our partners and the wider public through the development of learning platforms for critical and constructive dialogue.

The GRLI call for action aims at re-enforcing the strengths of our entrepreneurial system while correcting its defects and the financial excesses of the system. We strive to achieve this through enhancing responsibility at all levels.

A new way of educating managers and a next generation of globally responsible leaders will play a major role in making this come true.

Anyone wishing to express their support for the GRLI manifesto can do so on line at www.grli.org.

Press Release Contact Information:

Matthew Wood
EFMD
Communications Director
88 Rue Gachard - box 3
Brussels, Brussels
Belgium 1050
Voice: 0032 2 6269542
Fax: 0032 2 6290810
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