BEST IU, India Foundation launches the School of Global Leadership in Delhi

In its efforts to reformat the way through which leaders must be trained in the 21st century, the Bharatiya Engineering Science and Technology Innovation University has allied itself with the India Foundation to open the School of Global Leadership, SoGL, today at ITC Maurya. This institution will seek to generate leaders to succeed in a diverse and dynamically shifting world.

It included in its ambit important decision-makers, former diplomats, university chancellors, representatives of various sectors, and youth professionals, which en masse can be seen to especially emphasize in their definition various stakeholders for SoGL to include in its ambit. Moreover, there was emphasis placed upon the challenges in this generation being allowed to move across various sectors such as governance, business, and technology and so on, which in turn requires decision-makers to be capable across various institutions and not be constrained within the lines of their own particular sector.

Pradhan identifies the constraints of the conventional leadership development process.

“The School of Global Leadership bridges the gap which exists in the classical leadership education programmes, wherein the more focus is on equipping tools and tactics rather than developing leaders equipped to manage uncertainty, systems, and tangible decisions," Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan was quoted as saying on the occasion.

 “It thinks of leadership as an intellectual discipline as well as a practitioners’ discipline wherein it concentrates on developing systems thinkers, ethical leaders, and idea doers," he added.

Ex-MP & Ex-Chair SoGL, Dr. Jayant Sinha said, "SoGL, founded by BESTIU, a university retained by UGC, in collaboration with the India Foundation, Knowledge Partners, remains deeply rooted in the Indian experience of development & civilization, even as it remains engaged in the ongoing discourse on leadership across the world. Simply because the deepest learning on the topic of leadership has, in recent years, come to us from societies which are, in their own fashion, grappling with problems of size, diversity, & the speed of change." SoGL offers one-year PGP-GL with global residency programs One of the hallmark features of the SoGL program is that it is driven by practitioners, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and innovators, who, together with the faculties of the institution, ensure that the program is driven by policy interventions, knowing that knowledge is everything but implementation is everything else. 

Additionally, launched during the inauguration event is the key program of the SoGL, which is the Post Graduate Programme in Global Leadership, or PGP-GL, a one-year, full-time program that involves residency programs across the world, including India, China, UAE, USA, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The program’s learning outcome tracks a combination of governance, strategy, public policy, innovation, and ethics, with real-world learning import through engagement with real-world challenges that exist within the world of practice. Leadership, application, and SoGL emphasize that at SoGL, learning applications entail highlighting the ability to sense complexity, judge, and create institutions that work for the public. Learning paths include entering the immersive global labs, innovation immersions, and the future-tech policy labs where novel ideas produced from the world of knowledge are constantly being checked-out against the world of applications. Given these conditions, the BESTIU and the India Foundation recognizes that the SoGL is a disruptor within the mainstream paradigm for global leadership education—a generation that is capable of dealing with complexity, exercising powers responsibly, and generating resilient futures for inclusive growth.