How to transform & enable your future leaders

Many of you know that Momentum Works is a venture outfit with the majority of our time and energy spent on building startups. With real insights, an experienced team of practitioners, and a community of innovators, we are also engaged in other activities around the ecosystem. 

Over the years, we have been asked by academia and corporates to share our experience and insights – through talks, business cases, and simulations, to name a few. 

We recently helped a regional bank run a programme for their high potential employees. 

The problem statement: “ Design and run a programme for our brightest young minds. Immerse them in the world outside of banking; Show them how the real world works. Oh, and it will be over 4 countries, more than 100 people, 100% virtual…. Make sure it’s stimulating, engaging and fun!”

After a few brainstorming sessions, we successfully crafted and delivered a bespoke programme. Some highlights below:

1. We created an alternate universe of venture capitalists and startups

We wanted to give the bankers a taste of the real investment ecosystem, but there is always this hindsight bias. So we took real life scenarios and came up with an alternate universe.

2. We used new tools to make the programme online as exciting and engaging as possible. 

In this instance, we worked with Lark, who not only gave us 100% support and training on using the tool, but also got one of their young leaders, Zac to also share more about the Lark culture.

3. We created a number of activities for the young bankers to experiment with.

We created real scenarios based on what we had seen and one in the startup and investment universe based on our fictional VCs and startups. And we sprinkled a generous amount of creativity to make the activities touch on immersion, experience and insights.

4. We bought in real entrepreneurs and CXO from our Momentum Works startup and investment community who made the whole experience magical. 

In total, 17 friends (a diverse group, with 12 nationalities) joined us to share real world insights and provided a real simulation experience to the young bankers. 

It was interesting to see the interactions between young bankers and experienced, smart, cunning entrepreneurs, played out through the activities – without the barrier of formality, company or age. 

A big shout out to Joon Chan, Chiong Siong, Sean Liao, Yolanda Yu, Sik Hoe Yong, Smriti, Kevin Waller, Rajan Devnath, Yuhong Mu, Monica, Miriam, Alfonso, Sonat, Jing Ting, Kirby, and Yorshee

Big thanks to Patrick, Winston and Yolanda for sharing their valuable experience and insights from Huawei and Shopee on company culture, staying agile and how to navigate in the ever-changing scene of tech. 

5. And last, but most importantly, we had a kick-ass team that brought everything together and implemented the whole programme 

Implementation of a 100% online programme was not easy, especially for more than 100 pax across 4 countries! We had sleepless nights trying to get the ducks in a row… so much so we created a duck and a cat to help ra-ra the bankers.

And the team stepped up to the challenge – pulling sleepless nights, 15 mins lunches, chats whilst walking the dogs/petting the cats – all the get it in order. A big shout out to my fellow sisters – Nanette, Nurina, and Clarissa – super ladies who did all the heavy lifting. I just did the talking.

Thanks to Jianggan, Yorlin and Alex (who took time out from running Entrepreneurs of Asia) for going out of the way to entertain the team and keeping our motivation up. 

Their Rocket Internet experience of all nighters, achieving impossible feats and just running on adrenaline kept us going!

We and our MW community learnt a lot from the young bankers as they did with us. 

Our take away was that corporates are curious about how startups and investment work; but it also needs to be relevant and relatable to their daily work after the exercise.

I guess that’s why Momentum Works works. We don’t come up with training – we just share our experiences, our community and our insights – and we get so much more in return. 

As we said at the beginning of the programme “This is a time of a great crisis. But also a time of great opportunity if you can identify and grasp the opportunities ahead. What we need to do, instead, is to prepare ourselves in situations, and make the best out of them. Just like in playing poker. Remembering history, and knowing things could happen, help too.”

Thank you to everyone who was part of this programme, and thanks Clare for the support and trust! Will be one to remember! 

If this is interesting to you, you can reach me at [email protected] to find out more about what we do at Momentum Academy.