A DREAM FOR THE WORLD

Mankind does not dream. It thinks and feels negatively. There is not one single book or movie imagining a happy ending for the human venture. Famine, illiteracy, wars, conflicts, criminality, human rights abuses, and pollution are only the material projections of our negative imagination – of our dreaming upside down. It is time to dream a beautiful dream.This article is about a most ambitious philanthropic project for the future of the world: the creation of a planetary school for a new generation of leaders who are driven by ethics and integrity. They will chart a new course for humanity.

The Myth of Prometheus
If you happen to be in Philadelphia, do not miss the chance to visit the Museum of Art. There you can admire among other masterpieces the huge, magnificent painting by Peter Paul Rubens, ‘Prometheus Bound’, that the author himself described as one of his most important creations. It depicts with rare symbolic power the punishment of Prometheus, guilty of stealing fire – the divine spark – from Zeus to give it to Man. This Titan can well be considered the ancestral father of humanity and its benefactor.

He steals the fire for bringing life to Man, the creature that he, himself, had forged, thus giving Man the means to evolve. For this, he was condemned to be chained to a rock, to have his liver ripped out and eaten every day by an eagle, only to be regenerated by night in eternal punishment. In reality, according to legend, the punishment lasted “only” three thousand years, until Hercules slew the eagle and freed Prometheus from his chains.

A Mental Revolution
This ancient myth is a message from the future – a story of compassion and love for mankind. Prometheus is the symbol of a rebellion against an unjust and tyrannical condition, and the first dreamer of Man’s possible psychological evolution.
It is time to steal a new sparkle of intelligence from heaven to bring it to a decayed humanity to change its destiny. This sparkle is integrity, the central quality of the future leaders for the world.

We live in a conflicted society where the predominant motivating factor in Politics, as in Business, is Money and it is a world where leaders gain their power at the expense of humanity and where politicians and corporate gangsters with criminal minds are in the service of the economies of disaster: from arms manufacturing to environmental pollution, from pharmaceutical production to organized crime. These are economies where decisions are not made in the rut of a beautiful dream about the future of mankind, but where choices are biased by Fear. Consequently, we are delivering to our children a world in worse condition that the one we have inherited.

We need a new way of thinking – a mental revolution – which is the only possible solution to the millennia old evils of the planet. We need to change.

A Most Ancient Truth
Change never comes from a system of beliefs, a philosophy, a revolution, or a political party.  The myth of Prometheus, who can be seen as the archetype of the rebel, also reasserts this most ancient truth: change only comes through the personal efforts of a single, resolute individual, and from a luminous idea that starts as a tiny sparkle and then spreads like a wildfire capable of burning up the world.

Behind every human achievement, at the origin of every innovation, of every scientific or social conquest, behind the world’s greatest endeavours, business ventures, and all that is beautiful, useful, and wealthy, there is invariably one man – an individual and his dream. Throughout history, change has begun solely because of one committed individual who had the capacity to think outside the confines of time. Change comes from timeless leaders capable of thinking in terms of infinity, and not in days or in fiscal quarters. It comes from one who cannot be corrupted by short-term benefits, and who charts a new course for humanity.

The primary root of the millennia old problems afflicting our planet is the decay of moral values and the shortage of ethical, impeccable leaders capable of approaching business and politics as a sacred duty – as if they were serving a mission. A Dream for the World is a project designed to educate a new generation of leaders driven by ethics and integrity as the most strategic resource for all nations.

The DFW – Dream for the World Leadership Program
On the 2^nd of December 2010, I left my position as Rector, stepped down as Vice President of The ESE Foundation in New York, and reduced any other commitments in order to create an advanced research center offering a Program centered on Integrity as the most essential quality of leadership. Furthermore, its mission is to inspire specially talented students, selected worldwide, to believe in their dreams and to act with fearlessness in all that they do, and to teach what no school or university, no parent or mentor has ever conveyed: a sense of greatness, unlimited love for freedom, and incorruptible integrity, as the central quality of a leader and the most important achievement of Man’s life. From this group, we intend to develop leaders for the future, the most strategic resource for the economic growth and human development of all nations. Without them, no progress is possible. With my friend George Koukis, a world corporate leader and great philanthropist, we have set our hearts on creating a Program selecting and preparing the independent thinkers, the revolutionary minds, the luminous rebels that the world needs – men and women of integrity. Any other alternative, or a continuation of the current practices will yield disastrous results.

After Florence (2010) and Como (2011), the next edition of the Program is being organized in Istanbul, from August 27 through September 17^th, 2012. Participants will be carefully chosen and among all the applicants, only 30 candidates will attend the 21 day course. A pool of sponsors has instituted a scholarship program for the deserving students.

The FLW Program in Istanbul
A team of international teachers and the most prestigious key speakers will lead the Future Leaders to the discovery of their talents and what they really love. Art, Music, Drama, Philosophy, Psychology of Success, Creativity, Economics of Ideas, and Emotional Intelligence are some of the subjects of the Program, together with gym, wellness and team-building. Self-discovery, observing, studying and finally knowing oneself are integral parts of the FLW Program to restore Ethics and Integrity as the central qualities of an impeccable leader. FLW is a hands-on environment where, with the support of mentors (Corporate Leaders and Top Managers), each student will receive individual attention and directions for turning their aspirations into profession, and doing in life what they love – without any compromise. www.futureleadersfortheworld.com

Are You Ready to be a Future Leader for the World?

It does not matter from which of the five continents you come. Your nationality or upbringing, your background, previous studies, the social and family circumstances which bred you, your culture, religion, or tradition are not important. Just answer these questions:

One day mankind will be able to eradicate poverty, create jobs for everyone on the planet, make friends out of mortal enemies, and create a world with no pollution, and justice for everyone. It probably will not happen in my lifetime, and, possibly not within 100 years.  But would it not be a great aim to Dream of such a world 1000 years from now? Are you ready to commit yourself now toward such a distant future?

Then write to me, and apply to the FLW Program especially designed to develop your potential as a visionary leader, and to discover for what you were uniquely born. The main objective is to restore Ethics and Integrity as the central qualities of future leadership.

Not everybody can be a leader, and there is nothing wrong with that. Once you decide to be one, however, you must love your dream, and believe in it with your entire being. It will come true.

Are you ready to

Remember your Future ?

by Stefano D’Anna

In every epoch, remarkable men blessed with determination and unshakeable trust in themselves, endowed with a prodigious sense of intuition, have found capital to accomplish their impossible endeavours. Colombo believed that  going west was a short cut to east. President Juscelino Kubitschek ordered the transfer of the Federal Capital from Rio de Janeiro, and carved Brasilia out of the Amazon rain forest in 2.000 days. Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps dug out 100 miles of sandy desert to build the Suez Canal. Scipio rebuilt the Roman army and saved Rome when he was only ninteen years old, after the terrible defeat of Cannae, where the Romans lost 100.000 men in one battle.

The greatest social and scientific achievements, and anything beautiful, useful, and true are the splendid gift to humanity of one individual – never two or a legion; they are the present from one of these visionary men – divers into the invisible. To their glowing madness we  own all that we have and are. Studying their lives, words and deeds, I have asked myself where their sense of certainty, their unshakeable trust in themselves could possibly have come from. From where did they get the strength and self-confidence to conceive of and undertake their impossible missions? Did it come from culture, family, education, or from somewhere else?

Through observation of someone like my friend Alphan Manas, Founder of the Futuristic Association, the mastermind of ingenious and complex enterprises, and the great entrepreneur and philanthropist George Koukis, who bought a bankrupt company against all experts’ advice, and led it to worldwide dominance, and my encounters with other remarkable individuals of this kind, the impression was raised in me that, in some arcane way, they seem to know the happy ending of their ‘life-movie’. As impossible as it may appear, they seem endowed with the mysterious power to ‘remember the future’.

Believe in order to See.

Believing and seeing are one and the same thing, but divided by time – like dream and reality. In time, we will see all that in which we have believed, and realize all that we have strongly dreamed of and had faith in.

When the day came for the inauguration of the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, a project in which Walt had strongly believed and that was accomplished after his death, in response to the sad statement of a journalist: “ what a shame that your father is not here to see…”, Diane Disney answered: my father already saw, else all this would not be here.”

Time is a paint invented to make visible that which is invisible to ordinary people’s eyes.  Or better, it is a shock absorber which protects humanity from what they are not yet ready to see. Decades had to pass before the dream of freedom nurtured by Rosa Parks, M. Luther King, Jr. , Malcom X, and all of the black leaders who died young could pierce the smoke screen of centuries-old prejudices and become acceptable and then visible. As all true dreamers, they had the capacity to compress time and remember the future – seeing what all others would see and accept only many years later.

Believing before seeing is the mental watershed that is confronting mankind with a crossroad: on one side there is the large mass of those who need to see in order to believe; and on the other side, there is a handful of men of faith – who know that their belief shapes reality, and have to believe in order to see. These men sustain the world.

Ordinary men will still continue to call themselves humans for who knows how long, and continue to believe that they belong to one and the same breed without realizing that in reality there are two species – living side by side but marked by a different destiny.

“If a man who believes in himself takes a step into the unknown, unfailingly, he will see the ground appear beneath his feet, to prove that his shining madness is right… Believe in order to see, never vice versa!”

The Fear of the Unknown.

Humanity thinks and feels negatively. As a mass, it has neither dreams nor utopias – but only negative imagination and prophecies of misfortune. The crowd is a machine which is influenced by everything. I does not have a faith or a free will, and cannot create anything. Above all, it cannot imagine anything new, much less accept it. Masses are status quo worshippers, fearing the unknown and all that is unfamiliar. The fear of the new unsettles and blinds them. That is why they cannot dream and they are condemned to the hell of seeing in order to believe.

This explains why the leading spirits of humanity have always experienced a recurrently fierce, violent opposition from the masses. The world they envisage, is invisible to the masses, so eluding and scaring them. The vastness of their ideas, their unshakeable trust in themselves, the breadth of their vision, and their integrity, put us in front of ourselves and this comparison is so painful that instead of changing ourselves to be more and to become better, we prefer to eliminate the basis of comparison.

Future Leaders for the World.

Throughout history, change never comes from a system of beliefs, a philosophy, a revolution, or a political party.  Change only comes through the personal effort of a single, resolute individual.  For the future of the world, for its economic growth and human development , there is a need for a new breed of visionary leaders driven by ethics and integrity capable of dreaming the impossible, attracting great ideas, and having the responsibility for believing and committing their lives to them. There is no school – no mentor who has taught us the most important thing in life: the art of dreaming, the visionary power to believe before seeing.

The Myth, the Dream, the impulses of the heart and the capacity to believe before seeing have built our civilization, and in the construction of the future they will continue to preceed any evolution or progressive change. Icaro will forever come before the Mongolfier and the Wright brothers, and his wings, apparently so frail, have caused the air to shake millennia before the engines of modern Boeing and Jumbo jets.

First you have a dream
then you believe in it
Third you see it come true.

Stefano D’Anna 

There is a legend from the ancient times about two terrible giants, Scilla and Cariddi, guarding the strait of Messina, swallowing the water in the passage from Tyrrhenian to Ionian Sea, to explain the whirlpools and the rough sea causing innumerable shipwrecks and so many losses of unfortunate sailors. In the modern time there is another passage which gives the shivers to the over-sixty year old owners and founders still at the helm of their companies but thinking to pass the baton. It is the generation change, the passage from father to son of the responsibility of the family business.

In this passage over 70% of the companies owned by one family are wrecked, swallowed by the turbulent waters of the global business. Nearly 75% of the companies in the world is family-owned – more than 95 percent in the United States – and family business accounts for 90 percent of global gross national expenditure. So the deterioration of the activities, or running out of business of the companies controlled by a family is a planetary emergency, a phenomenon of such proportions to create serious damages to the wealth of the world when we consider what it means in terms of the immense loss of ideas, resources and skilled people, with huge social and human consequences.

We can say that family business is the most important and at the same time the most vulnerable sector of the national economies all over the world. In Italy over 20.000 family companies die each year. In Turkey the total number of small/medium family firms is in continuous growth but they have a very short life. 40 % of newly established companies stop their activities in the first five years, and 66 % of the companies which are more than five years change the ownership or postpone the generation change. Worldwide, the average live span is below 15 years and only giant corporations can reach the age of 40 or 50 years. Centenarian firms are a planetary rarity.

Families have an aspiration to longevity and to continue to own their companies for many generations to come, but in Turkey no more than 18 family-owned companies have blown out 100 candles for their birthday. And only one, Haci Bekir Turkish Delight, the oldest family firm, founded in 1777, is still hale and hearty.

The survival strategy for many has been to grow, believing that a larger turnover and an expansion of their operations would prolong their life. Others, while the global crisis still perdures and the awareness of globalization is raising, have thought of becoming more international and started looking abroad. This strategy is expected to be trending upward in the next years.

The Entrepreneurial Dream

Whatever is visible of a company is born from a dream: all that we see and touch of it is the materialization of the entrepreneurial dream of the founder. Beyond the most superficial and coarse vision of a company, beyond its factories and offices, sheds and machinery, beyond the army of employees, staff and managers and throughout the organs of that enterprise, you can still hear resonate the stroke of diapason that engendered them, a chord that still binds all its cells and makes them vibrate in unison.

Professors and scholars, business consultants and specialized research institutes, jurists and sociologists, professional accountants and psychologists, study since long the phenomenon of the generation change from any possible point of view, and still the invisible side, the raison d’etre of the enterprise, where the vital roots of its project lie, is beyond their reach.

Success is always a revolution

Therefore, for a successful generation change to transfer the material company with its buildings, people and machinery, is not enough. What has to be transferred to the next generation, above all, is the entrepreneurial dream that gave birth to it. The love for the enterprise, and unlimited commitment to all and each of the people that are part of it. The young people who have to take on their shoulders the burden of leading the family company have to be aware that one cannot just inherit the family business but has to reinvent it. The young corporate leader cannot just carry out the original project but has to enhance and enlarge the entrepreneurial dream of the founder. To do that he has to become himself a visionary, a pragmatic dreamer. He knows that success is always a revolution. For this he must be a rebel, have a subversive mind, be an independent thinker. It means to develop a sixth sense: intuition, and a seventh sense: dreaming. Early in his life he has to realize that organizations are living beings, that there is a lymph, a precious substance that runs in their veins and arteries. His real job is to nourish and enrich it. This will ensure prosperity to his organization and long life to his family fortune.

The King is the land and the Land is the King

An organizational pyramid is inextricably bound to its leader’s breath. A golden thread binds his image and personal destiny to that of his organization and his people, just as it did for the ancient sovereigns. The King is the land and the land is the King. There is a iron law which relentlessly applies throughout the centuries, from the ancient civilizations to the modern business empires. When the king is ill, the land is ill.

Hence, when we try to explain why so many enterprises die young, or disappear after successful years of activity, and especially at the time of a generation change, we have to remind that the destiny of a corporation, of a family fortune, all that an organization has conquered in years and years of efforts and intelligent management is linked to its leader’s breath. One man makes the difference.

Organization disappears when the dream dies up, when they become the projection of incomplete leaders. Even entire nations and civilizations live or die, get poor or prosper, expand or fall in slavery depending on the integrity of their leader, on flawlessness of their founder-creator.

The Great Divide
There is a barrier that divides two human species: the corporate leaders and entrepreneurs, on one side, and the clerical mass, the large sea of the employees, on the other. A great divide, a watershed. It is called Fear. An entrepreneur is an individual that somehow, somewhere in his life, has decided to face fear and get rid of it, as much as he could. Fear is a ghost. Almost the totality of our fears are imaginary. To have a healthy, real fear is almost impossible. When a man realizes that though imaginary, fear leads mankind’s life and he makes the decision to nevermore be lead by it, he is crossing the boundary between leadership and sheepship.

The Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is essentially a rebel capable to stake his resources and reputation to modify the status quo, to change the existing reality, to rock the boat breaking schemes and pre-existing balances to create new ones more profitable and advantageous to him. To put together other men, take responsibility for them, to infect them with his dream, could be called entrepreneurial characteristics, in reality they are quality of the Being, significant psychological features that allow a man to reach the highest stair-steps of the human responsibility and be a leader.

Behind the apparent search for a profit and the desire to make money out of it, more deeply than he himself can know, an entrepreneur is at the service of an evolutionary project. He knows that looking after his people, serving them and loving them is the task of a leader. Their improvement is his success. Each individual, at the end of a day work, must come out of the office or the factory improved, and even the most distant cell in his organisation has to be tended in order to evolve and progress more rapidly. His life is dedicated, his commitment is total. His human and financial destiny is bound to his organization and his people’s destiny. Like a captain of the ancient vessels he has to bring his ship back to the harbour or sink with it.

The escape from responsibility
“Daddy I would like to be a doctor…. A cello concert performer… to join a U.N. Development Program to Swaziland…” Here is the dilemma that many father-entrepreneurs are faced by, at a crucial age of their heir, when the designate future leader of the family business comes up with one of such requests. A father feels torn between the desire to let his child to follow his/her true aspiration, and the demand of his business urging a son or a daughter to be the continuator of the family activities, the fosterer of his entrepreneurial dream.

What should he do? Let him go or push him to stay? Is there a criterion to follow, a standard to adopt at this juncture? Yes there is a crucial question that the father-entrepreneur should pose to himself and be able to answer to: is it a real passion, a deep urge which draws him or her towards a profession, or music or a philanthropic cause? Is he or she uniquely born for it? In such a case, let the child follow his/her natural bent, what he or she really loves. But if it is a strategy to escape the weight of duties towards the family and the company, then the solution is to help to exercise the inner muscles of responsibility.

There is an illustrious family business, one thousand year old, which had to face this kind of problem a number of times in its history: The Windsor Family. It is very famous the story of Prince Edward who abdicated the throne of England to marry Ms Wallace Simpson. What has been defined the most romantic love-story of the last century is in reality a sad escape from responsibility. As future King of England, and therefore head of the Anglican Church, he not only chose a divorced lady, and an American citizen, but one of a Roman Catholic faith. No other woman on earth could have put him on a safer side from taking that responsibility of being a King of England.

The FIAT Case
Sometimes the escape from responsibility takes more dramatic expressions.
The generation change in FIAT, the Agnelli family industrial empire, in very recent years has shown with tragic evidence the effects of unreadiness of the heirs to bear the weight of such a patrimony of ideas, means and people.
Giovannino, the son of Umberto Agnelli and designate man to lead the Fiat in the new century, chose the way of the illness and was struck down at 33 year old from the rarest and most incurable form of cancer.
For Edoardo, an unhappy and frail being, the throne of the most powerful Italian dynasty was overwhelming and chose the way of the suicide at 46.
Lapo, easy rider, temporarily appointed as Fiat marketing manager, but in reality a spoiled scion of the family, chose the drogue and a dissipated life to make his succession impossible. Five years ago at 28 year old was brought to a hospital in Turin, between life and death, for overdose of cocaine ingested in excess during a party with viados and trans.

Be a King and the Kingdom will come
If you have built in you, through hard work on yourself and knowledge of thoughts and emotions, the qualities of generosity, vision and sense of greatness of a king, the kingdom will come. But nothing can be more disastrous than to receive a kingdom before you have achieved the capacity to bear it. Most likely nobody unveiled to this unfortunate youth the beauty of commitment, the other side of responsibility. Nobody ever told them that there is no happiness without a parallel growth in responsibility, and certainly no school, no mentor, has ever thaught them that Dream is the most real thing and that business is the ‘Art of Dreaming’.

“Man lives in his ordinary life as a disintegrated being but capable of
reaching a higher state. He can rediscover his integrity through a
special kind of education impossible to find in the ordinary paths of life.””

 What are the Universities for ?

By Stefano D’Anna

The universities of the future will do what today’s universities do not do: teach youth of self-discovery, self-knowledge, the Art of Dreaming, to aim higher, to elevate their being, and to become masters of their own lives.

There is nothingmore important.

I was in London at the Times-sponsored conference organized by Goodenough College and the Institute of Ideas, where the highest calibre of specialists from political, financial, and academic communities around the world, after three days of passionate debate, tried to give a response to one of the most crucial questions of our time: what are universities for?

We are so accustomed to talking about them – to sending our children there, to working, studying and teaching there, that we take for granted the answer to this thorny question which is at the core of the academic mission, and upon which perhaps hangs the future of our civilization. So far, writers, philosophers, educators, politicians and deans have not found clarity on this theme, but on one thing they can all agree: on the deplorable state to which the university education system and, in general, western higher-level education, has reduced itself. The charge is heavy:  schools are provincial and too theoretic, with campuses reduced to mental gyms, and too frequently, to nothing other than downright squalid exam houses.

According to the results of the Times conference, universities take the precious live potential of young minds and transform them, the students, into “job fillers”-  people who simply fill a role, and people with an employee-mentality, worried about nothing more than finding a job and surviving.

The accusation is not new.  Universities, born to be forgers of men with integrity and schools for individuals – on whom the survival of every civilization depends, are reduced to schools of dependence – factories that produce an employee species of frightened and unprepared men and women.  They are unprepared not only because they have no idea of what happens in the real world, but above all, because they do not know who they are.  Just a few years ago we heard from the other side of the Atlantic – in Boston – alarms being sounded after a government inquiry concerning the quality of instruction at Harvard University.  The summation is as heavy as lead: “We entrust our young people to Harvard and get back ‘men with hearts of stone’.” The bitter conclusion is that, despite scientific and material progress, millennia later, we are far behind with respect to Plato’s “dream” and his marvellous idea of the Academy.

University means “Towards One”.

That school model, those higher education institutes that much later in medieval times would be called universities, were schools of thought developed around a master, presuming a closeness with his disciples and taking place in enchanting locations chosen for the magic of their history, and positioned near water sources or rivers.

Not by chance, the Platonic Academies were located near the Cefiso. The High School, east of the campus, was nestled between the waters of the Eridano and the Cinosarge. To the south of the city, the place where the cynic Antistene taught, was near the Ilisso. Water, besides being a symbol of life and conscience, was used for ablution.  In these schools, the culture of the body and the spirit were two profiles of the same reality – indivisible.  Regrettably, not only Plato’s Dream was lost in the sands of time, but even its etymon – the meaning built into the very root of its name. University – uni-versus – means “towards one” – towards oneness. A university is to be a school of integrity.

First Education.

Once the roots were cut from the ideal Greek model, the values which inspired their birth also dried up, and the university, became its own opposite, without even changing its name.  Modern campuses, reduced to institutions without a soul, compare to real universities as does the Inquisition to primitive Christianity.  Students and families accept all of this with calm desperation.

How absurd to spend a quarter of our lives at school and university and let our entire time slip away without knowing anything about the ‘Being’ – not even suspecting the power that our states of mind and emotions have in determining the events and circumstances of our lives.

Schooling can be called  ‘first education’ – the one that we all receive, and it does not provide us with any sense of the distinction between what is external and what is internal, nor does it prepare us to manage our thoughts, or to be aware of our emotions. Our existence runs along two parallel tracks: ‘events’ which are the sequence of facts and circumstances that come towards us in time, and ‘states’ which are the impulses of our spirit, moods and emotions, and which are timeless – arising within us mostly unperceived and even unconscious.  A man’s personal history is therefore made up of outer events, but more so, of inner circumstances, emotions and thoughts. Without any deliberate intention, ordinary culture has relegated emotions, feelings and thoughts to the ephemeral and intangible sphere of myths, fables and dreams, considering them to be separate phenomena and extremely far from what is commonly called ‘reality’.

A University Program with a Soul.

The Conference conducted in London was valorous enough to declare “the art of self-discovery” as the central element in the education of the future, but it was useless to look through its conclusions for an answer to the question, “How?”  Exactly how could actual universities ever transform themselves into Socratic schools?  Which divine finger will inscribe on the eardrums of modern campuses the eternal Delphic motto: Know Thyself?  With which programs, methods and docents will this take place?

In the twilight of the western academic panorama, there is only one light that can orient the lone wayfarer.  A student who searches, like Diogene searched for the individual, would quest after a University Program with a soul – where the formation of the person is at the centre of every activity, and where self-knowledge is the top priority.  In such a program, the main subject is the “Art of Dreaming” – the capacity to develop a sense of greatness, to nurture and bear the responsibility of impossible dreams, to transform them into the possible, and then, at last, into something inevitable.

Ex-duco.

There is a program, FLW-Future Leaders for the World, exclusively designed for preparing a new generation of visionary leaders, which started in Turkey and then rapidly spread to other countries, from Italy to Brazil. Its founding principle begins with remembering the forgotten meaning of the word “education”, whose Latin root “ex-duco” literally means ‘lead out’.

The pedagogy of the program is not geared to transfer a ready-made set of convictions and beliefs, nor to give the students any bookish knowledge, imposed from the outside and equal for all. It takes place in Florence, where genius and excellence created the Italian Renaissance.

In this spirit, the FLW Leadership Program has the mission to foster higher ideas and to teach its students how to overcome inner limits, and to cultivate independent thinking and a true passion for freedom and greatness. Art, music, theatre, economics of ideas, philosophy and the search for truth will be the subjects of this program to amplify the vision, and to bring to light the inner qualities, the ideas and the values of a visionary Leader.

The University has to propose a system of essential ideas

capable of interpreting the world,

revealing man’s true condition

and pointing the way to his possible evolution.

The individual revolution, announced in my latest book “A Dream for the World” has started, and I am confident that from a spark it will become a flame capable of setting the planet on fire and spreading to all schools and universities as the pedagogy for the education of the leaders of the future who the world desperately need.

I’ve dreamed of a revolution.

I’ve dreamed of a School which ‘remembers’

that the ‘dream’ is the most concrete thing there is.

I’ve dreamed of a new generation of leaders,

driven by Ethics and Integrity, capable of approaching their role

as a mission, as a sacred duty.

They will fix the world.

Stefano D’Anna

]]> https://www.futureleadersfortheworld.com/2010/what-are-universities-for/feed/ 2 https://www.futureleadersfortheworld.com/2010/the-leaders-of-the-future/ https://www.futureleadersfortheworld.com/2010/the-leaders-of-the-future/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:19 +0000 http://testsurusu.wordpress.com/?p=48 read the rest...]]>  

I’ve dreamed of a revolution.

I’ve dreamed of a School which ‘remembers’

that the ‘dream’ is the most real thing that there is.

I’ve dreamed of a new generation of leaders,

driven by Ethics and Integrity,

capable to approach their role as a mission,

a sacred duty. They will fix the world.

The Leadership of the Future

For a corporation, as for a country, the decisive difference between

winning and losing, between progressing and decaying,

between being free and being enslaved,

between staying alive and disappearing, is always made by one man

with a dream and a sense of greatness – a true Leader.

The global economy stands out against the backdrop of an immense battlefield where every day, entire nations, and companies as large as huge regiments, confront each other in order to establish new economic frontiers, while modifying existing ones to their advantage. Only one victor emerges from these conflicts in the world business arena. The others, all the defeated, are chained to their war chariots and condemned to slavery. To survive, they have to adopt the habits of their new owner and learn his language. They have to serve him.

For a corporation, as for a country, in moments of great difficulties, the decisive difference between winning and losing, between progressing and decaying, between being free and being enslaved, between staying alive and disappearing, is made by one man. The difference is never made by two, one hundred or one hundred thousand. The difference is made by just one – a special man – an individual with a dream and a sense of greatness.

The crisis that the world is facing has little to do with economy and finance. The economical and financial problems are not the cause.  They could just be considered effects.  What we are really facing is a crisis of values, and a scarcity of healthy individuals, and ethical, impeccable leaders.

One Man Makes the Difference.

Rivers of ink have flown and thousands of books, articles and essays have been written on leadership. We could think that there is not much new or original to say about this subject. Its crucial issues, like motivation, decision-making, and communication, have been the same from the time of the construction of the pyramids, or of the creation of, and government of the great empires of the ancient times. In reality the very essence of leadership still represents an enigma for modern scholars and social scientists, as it was for the ancient thinkers and philosophers. It is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. So, when I set out to write this article, I felt like a tightrope walker suspended between the nothingness of banality and the immensity of this mystery.To have an idea of the magnitude of this issue, it is enough to think that throughout the millennia of history, in the most crucial moments, in life-and-death situations, one man has always made the difference. The life of a corporation, the progress of a nation, the survival of an entire civilization depends on the existence of a true leader – a visionary man or woman, a pragmatic dreamer. Without these individuals, not only is the progress of any organization impossible, but so is their very existence.

How would the world be without George Washington’s desperate courage to march on Trenton, or without the luminous madness of Colombo who believed in a way to reach east by going west? Where would the world be without Steven Jobs, whose Apple Computer, Inc. this year is ranked as the number one corporation in the world – beating out Microsoft – even though a few years ago without its founder and leader, it was ready to file for bankruptcy? I wonder where Rome would have been without Scipio, and later, without Caesar. What would have become of the Catholic Church, the largest multinational in the world, without managers of the calibre of Agostino, Domenico or Francesco d’Assisi? And what would Turkey have become without Mustafa Kemal Ataturk? These sane, integral men, these visionary leaders – where do they come from?  How do they feel and think? Who is preparing them?

If we could find the way to “produce” these special individuals, to forge them at will in schools and universities, we could solve all the problems of our planet, from endemic poverty, to pollution, conflicts and crime. The capacity to intentionally create impeccable leaders, and pragmatic dreamers, would be the greatest scientific discovery of all time.

Regretably, thousands of books written on leadership and the research and studies carried out by the best universities of the world have not brought one single  atom of understanding on how to create the visionary leaders that our civilization desperately needs. Their obsolete recipes could not be trusted any more than the remedies to make hair grow – sold by bald quacks.

Apparently, the immense patrimony of educational methods, value systems, and philosophical principles of the ancient Schools of Being is lost forever. Their teachings and research into invulnerability and invincibility, would still be of paramount relevance to prepare leaders capable to face and win the challenges of the modern economies. There was a need to create a solar laboratory, a forge, a universal hotbed where Dreamers can be formed one-by-one, and where visionaries and luminous utopians can prepare themselves to be the leaders of the Future.

With this mission in mind, I founded the FLW Program which immediately attracted hundreds of applications. The selection of the most suitable candidates took the entire summer. On October 4^th, 2010 the first edition of this course on “visionary leadership” had its official start with the chosen 40 students. It was organized in Florence, in the footsteps of Leonardo and the other giants of the Italian Renaissance. True education is ‘remembering one’s own uniqueness – one’s ‘dream’, more than it is adding further notions and contents; for us, the idea is encoded in the Latin root word of education, ex duco, which means to lead out. At FLW, the students will learn many things, but many others they will have to unlearn. The leaders of the future must unlearn fear and doubts, which are the foes of dreaming, and learn that changing the world can happen only if we know who we are and how to elevate our vision through a new way of thinking.
Self-observation.

An ordinary man thinks and feels negatively, pays no attention to himself and lets unpleasant emotions seep in and pollute his being. The selected students of this course will learn the great value of self-observation, and to be aware of one’s emotions. A leader observes his reactions and knows where they come from and why he reacts as he does. He has stopped any inner conflicts. His emotions are not his enemies; he is not governed by them.

Responsibility.

In this course, future leaders will learn that personal responsibility cannot drop – even for one instant. He cannot let one atom of fear steal into his being. A leader, a man of integrity knows that one instant of dejection, the slightest uncertainty, hesitation or fear will create years of misfortune in his life, in his organization, and in all that depends on him.

Inner victory.

Victory and a sense of safety must be a permanent state of the leader. In the classical Chinese traditions, in moments of great difficulty, when faced with a famine or an enemy invasion, the Chinese emperor, the son of heaven, would retreat to the Palace’s inner rooms to meet the doors of all things.

Motionless, facing south, with his superhuman virtues, he ensured that the whole empire remained in accordance with the Decree of Heaven. He knew that the difficulties he himself faced revealed a decline in his integrity and that the battle would first be won inside.

When the dikes give way and the floods come, and the barbarian hordes and attacks rain down from every corner of the world, it means that the ‘portable paradise’ given to the leader has been lost, and only the regaining of his own integrity can reverse that catastrophe.

(from The school for Gods – Sinedie Publishing & University of Buckingham Press – 2009)

I wish to all the readers of this article to meet the Dreamer. For me it happened in the most difficult time of my existence, when I couldn’t see a way out. He turned my life upside down. He inspired me to write a Book based on my apprenticeship with Him: The School for Gods, which has been translated in many languages and is a long-time best seller in Turkey. Real dreams are contagious and from Him I caught the Dream of a school for pragmatic dreamers, where one is told that happiness is economy, a Schools of Being to forge a new generation of visionary leaders with a sixth sense: intuition, and a seventh one: dreaming. Mass education cannot produce them. If the schools and the universities we know are for men, we need Schools for Gods.

The wealth of a nation doesn’t consist of its exports, industrial production capacity, plenty of natural resources, the discovery of oil fields or gold mines and diamond deposits. The real wealth of a nation is the quality of its system of values and above all its capacity to produce emotionally healthy individuals, who have eliminated from themselves any form of inner conflict and negative emotions. Change within society can only come through the personal effort of single individuals.
Behind every human achievement, at the origin of every intuition, of every scientific or social conquest, behind the world’s largest financial and industrial corporations, and all that is, beautiful, meaningful, rich, there is invariably one man an individual and his dream. The life of an organization, of an entire civilization depends on the existence of visionaries, men and women, pragmatic dreamers, individuals. Without them no progress is possible.

The opportunity to express these ideas came from the invitation that I received to be a guest speaker from President Yavuz Canevy President of the Forum Istanbul 2023. The Forum was at its eighth edition and gathers each year 600 of its best brains with the objective to provide an answer to the most crucial question: what can bring Turkey to play a key role in the world’s human development and global economic progress by 2023, 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic.

As I expressed in my speech, the crisis that the world is facing has little to do with economy and finance. The economical and financial problems are not the cause. They could just be considered effects. What we are really facing is a crisis of values and scarcity of ethical, impeccable leaders.

The main obstacle against which the most ambitious projects shatter is not the lack of financing or material resources, but a shortage of committed men capable of approaching business as if they were serving a cause; with competence, efficiency, honesty, in one word, integrity. Men and women who dream and love; doubtless, fearless people capable of conceiving brave ideas and committing themselves to their realization.

It was then that a concrete Project for the future of Turkey was brought to conception and officially announced. I named it “A Dream for Turkey”.

To make this dream come true, and to have Turkey belonging by 2023 to the Bric’s emerging titans (Brazil, India and China), Turkey needs to prepare a new generation of leaders, men and women free of any ideology or superstition. They are the healthy cells of a new humanity and the real wealth of this nation and of the world. Mass education cannot create them. They need individual attention; they need to be forged one by one.

Too many times we use the word individual without understanding how deep and crucial is the meaning built in it. Individual has an ancient Latin etymology. It finds its origin in the word “individuum” which means indivisible, whole… like to say having integrity. Therefore we should call all ordinary people, marked by a conflictual psychology, with a divisive attitude, “dividual” and reserve the appellation of individual to the few among the few who have reached this special inner condition of unity of Being, that central quality of leadership which we call integrity.

I concluded, affirming the belief that to educate the luminous young leaders that Turkey needs, is not a matter of money, knowledge, power or social standing so much as the development in the youth of self-knowledge, the capacity to free themselves from negative emotions, prejudices and obsolete ideas, and cultivate in themselves an indomitable passion for greatness.

In the following few days, this idea achieved widespread consent by corporations, Foundations and business people, and turned immediately into a Project for founding special scholarships, and the creation of a new Institution, a research centre and not a university, and a unique educational program, to be an example to the world. Its mission is to educate a new generation of leaders, visionaries, pragmatic dreamers, independent creative thinkers, individuals. They will be the real wealth of this Nation.

In the spirit of gratitude for Turkey, we have given a concrete start to the program funding the first fifty scholarships while further 100 are going to be founded by more donors by the end of this year. The first 100 students, the most talented and suitable for this program, will be selected among the applicants from mot of the Turkish universities, starting from the first day of 2010.

This is just the beginning of this beautiful, bold enterprise. “A Dream for Turkey – The Future Leaders For The World Program” in 2010 will attract new donors to the Project and the scholarships will soon become hundreds. The education of pragmatic dreamers, to develop their potentiality studying in Turkey and in Europe, the production of precious people, will be the one Turkey will be most proud of. There is not a better news to announce to the youth and not a better wish to convey to turkey for a Happy, Rich, Dreamful New Year.

Prof. Stefano D’Anna

There are not solutions out there to choose from. YOU have to become the solution. This is a revolution, an overturning of thought in political and business leadership”. (The School for Gods)

THE SCHOOL FOR GODS

Mankind afflicted by poverty, conflicts and endless evils, can only be healed man by man, cell by cell… Ordinary Schools and Universities cannot do it. We need schools for visionary leaders, pragmatic dreamers, where to learn that happiness is economy, Schools of Being where to develop a sixth sense: intuition, and a seventh one: dreaming.