In May 2018, Bruce Simpson, a senior partner of McKinsey & Company and Alumnus of Churchill College worked with the Møller Institute team to design and deliver a unique and high impact experiential, immersive leadership development programme for the emerging leadership team at Chinese logistics giant Deppon. Here, he tells us the benefits of the Cambridge immersion.
Continuing my Cambridge journey
Bruce Simpson, senior partner, McKinsey & Company
“I recently returned to my university stomping ground, Churchill College in the University of Cambridge to discover a hidden gem – the Møller Institute – a leadership development centre, bringing together business and academia, and with whom my team and I worked to design and deliver a unique and high impact experiential, immersive leadership development programme for the emerging leadership team at Chinese logistics giant Deppon.
The entire Cambridge experience was both magical and memorable, the flexible model the Møller Institute adopts allowed them to seamlessly blend Cambridge academics, global industry practitioners and leadership development experts into an entirely bespoke programme for us. I wanted to share some highlights of the programme and also the capabilities of the experienced Møller Institute team who I can highly recommend.”
Agile Leadership Programme
The programme built on our multi-year Deppon Leadership Programme that takes a pioneering approach, designed to enhance Deppon executives’ skills in problem solving, collaboration and overall leadership extremely rapidly, to face today’s increasing volatile challenges.
The Cambridge module focused on building the highly agile leadership behaviours and traits fit for the 4th Industrial Revolution digital age – including resilience, positive approach orientation to opportunities as well as challenges, attitude to risks, tolerance of ambiguity, leading by purpose, and cultivating innovative culture.
I wanted to ensure that the Deppon team was immersed in the inspirational University of Cambridge environment renowned for discovery, breakthrough, academic excellence and highly personalised learning and teaching.
The five-day customised programme, we developed, was anchored around ‘agile leadership’, it will help Deppon’s future senior management team/leaders to build their leadership skills at individual, team and organisation levels and achieve their ambition of continuous high growth.
Deppon’s emerging leaders heard from and interacted with a group of distinguished Cambridge scholars as well as practitioners on the development of technology enabled innovation and how they transformed the industry sectors and our lives.
Deppon leaders also explored the historical context of leadership including studying the characteristics of inspirational figures like Churchill and Shackleton, who demonstrated great passion, vision, courage and resilience through challenging times.
We learned about high performance team-building and innovation through experiential activities like “competitive” rowing, punting and river activities at the College Boathouse on the River Cam.