"I have never been more optimistic about Africa; mainly because of a new kind of entrepreneur!” – why leadership is key for a better world and how values help to drive the right kind of change.

Peter Reiling, Executive Vice President for Leadership and Policy Programs, The Aspen Institute, Washington DC, USA

The first time we heard the name Peter Reiling mentioned with deep respect was when Simon Winter, Head of TechnoServe South Africa, told us about Peter’s impressive idea of launching the Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI) back in his time as CEO of TechnoServe in 1998. This initiative encourages its Fellows, African business people under 45 and in positions of significant responsibility, to take more responsibility for the society in which they live and work – to move “from success to significance.”.
After meeting Isaac Shongwe, a very impressive South African businessman and Peter’s partner in bringing ALI to that country, our interest grew to meet Peter, the driving force behind ALI and the strategic change of TechnoServe.
As we almost expected, Peter, since 2004 with the Aspen Institute, is a very humble man full of passion and energy, always trying to find the greatest leverage for his skills and time to change the world for the better. In his current position as Executive Vice President for Leadership and Policy Programs of The Aspen Institute, he can drive change on a global level by helping some of the most influential people on our planet to better understand their core values and the necessity that they use their talents to contribute to the common good.
This new assignment means that Peter cannot live in his beloved Africa anymore. However, he stays in touch through frequent visits and personal contacts.

Enjoy reading selected thoughts and statements of our discussion with Peter Reiling in the quotations below. You may be able to read more in our book “MyImpact”.

Peter Reilings’ selected quotations:
"Spending two years behind a pair of oxen plowing cotton fields under the African sun, as I did as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, you really experience the day-to-day face of poverty."

"After 5 years in African development work, I was asking myself what next? USAID, where I worked after the Peace Corps, was a huge bureaucracy and, while I learned lots, I wasn’t sure how much I was really contributing to Africa as an unskilled Peace Corps volunteer. I figured that I needed to acquire some hard skills and went to business school."

"My engagement with TechnoServe after getting my MBA degree was one of the rare perfect matches one finds in life. The calibre of people there – staff, Board, friends and families - is unrivalled and the changes we were able to create by helping emerging entrepreneurs to make their visions a reality were incredible."

I have never been more optimistic about Africa - mainly because of a new kind of entrepreneur: young, inspired men and women going back home with great educations, global exposure and the willingness to change things for the better."

"Who can create the greatest change in Africa? Government? Probably not. NGOs? Maybe, but there are too few really solid ones and most are mired in ideologies that I think one could safely call “out of sync” with reality. Businesses? I believe so. By their very nature, businesspeople, entrepreneurs, look around, see opportunities, figure out what is needed to make them a reality and act. They aren’t all angels, of course, and they have their own issues. But leadership and creativity are necessary for change to occur and, for my money, businesses display more of both than most governments or NGOs."

"Many social entrepreneurs began their careers in "normal" business channels but, at some point, started thinking about their role in the society-at-large. Often they have a certain naïveté, the perception that social issues are easy to fix. But they quickly overcome this and have a greater impact due to their action orientation and skills."

"The Africa Leadership Initiative is now a growing network; 160-plus young leaders from seven countries have been exposed to the program in its first four years, 24 more are in midstream and two, maybe three more classes of 24 are planned for 2006. Combined with our other regional leadership initiatives – in Central America and, soon, in Brazil, Australasia, Central Europe, India, even China - we are creating a global network of entrepreneurial people with the same commitment to using their talents and energies for positive social change."

"Today, looking back on my time at TechnoServe, I get a great satisfaction by watching our African entrepreneurs grow and take responsibility for their communities. I love Africa and I love seeing these entrepreneurs proving to the world that they can succeed against all odds and all expectations.”

"My vision is to grow the number of young leaders who have taken the time to consider their role in society, to envision what a “good society” might look like, and who have made a real commitment to making their visions into reality. And I am convinced many of our current crop of Leadership Fellows will be presidents of their countries."

"I believe that those living in privileged positions have a responsibility to contribute to a better society, and I am convinced that business can be a positive driver of change in this world."

"We encourage our Fellows to design and carry out high-impact leadership projects of their own. But we don’t tell them what that project should be. Why? Because I know that if an activity fits nicely with someone's skills and interests, with their passions, the results usually come out well."

"Do something significant, something that lives up to the values that underly this program.” - That's what we tell our Fellows. And that’s what they do."

"I feel that I am very effective now because I am at a great leverage point. I have access to leaders and I am part of an institution that makes them think, reconsider and act"

"I spend 50% of my time expanding the Aspen Global Leadership Network and 50% overseeing the policy work of the Institute. I try to keep my feet in the developing world, travelling there 6-8 times a year."

"I have two young children at home. In reality, they are the two people in the world on whom I will likely have the greatest impact. Since 2000, after a very intensive work period -- reshaping and growing TechnoServe -- and thanks to my time with the Aspen institute, I have tried to balance my time better to make sure that this impact is the right one."

Some background on Peter Reiling:
Peter Reiling grew up in Baltimore and graduated in development economics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (BSFS). He comes from a Jewish family; his grandparents and mother were forced into hiding in Belgium during World War II and owe their lives to a farm family that also ran a one-room schoolhouse. It’s through their daughter, a missionary in the Belgian Congo, that Peter believes he acquired his fascination for Africa and later joined Peace Corps. He stayed in Togo for three years and, in 1982, was hired by the US development agency, USAID, first to help distribute emergency food relief during the drought in Niger, then to oversee a portfolio of agroforestry and health programs. After graduating in Business Administration from the University of California/Berkeley (MBA) in 1986, Peter started working for a small agribusiness consultancy in Washington, D.C.; however, he was quite happy to discover a TechnoServe ad looking for someone with his profile in the Sunday newspaper. TechnoServe, an international organization helping entrepreneurs across Africa, Latin America, and Central Europe to build businesses in their communities (www.tns.org), was a perfect match for his talents and ambitions. During the following 17 years of work for TechnoServe, serving as president and CEO from 1996 to 2004, Peter had the chance to have a great impact on many people in the developing world.

Currently, Peter Reiling is the Aspen Institute's Executive Vice President for Leadership and Policy Programs. In this role, he oversees the Institute's growing portfolio of leadership initiatives, both in the US and overseas, as well as its 18 policy programs. He is a trustee of the Aspen Institute, a Henry Crown Fellow (Class of 1998), and founder of the Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI), a joint venture between the Aspen Institute, TechnoServe, and four African business leaders. ALI has since been replicated in Central America as "CALI". The goal of these ventures is to stimulate a new generation of local business leaders to play a greater role in the social and political development of their countries.

Peter is a former adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and guest lecturer at the Institute for Developing Economies in Tokyo. He currently serves on the board of Agora Partnerships as well as on the U.S. Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Bretton Woods Committee, and was recently named "Outstanding Social Entrepreneur" by the Schwab Foundation in Geneva.

Peter is married to Denise Byrne of Fajardo, Puerto Rico, and is father of two children, Dylan and Eva Luna.

Some background on the Africa and Central America Leadership Initiative:
Peter Reiling is the initiator of the Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI) and the Central America Leadership Initiative (CALI), two of the currently six leadership programs (Socrates Society, Liberty Fellowship Program, Henry Crown Fellowship Program, Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership) of The Aspen Institute.

The Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI) brings together as Fellows successful young leaders from Ghana, Nigeria, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya. The program encourages the Fellows to take more responsibility for the society in which they live and work.

CALI seeks to develop a new generation of community-spirited leaders in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The region is home to a growing number of capable young leaders in all sectors of society. CALI is designed to capture the energy, the talent, and the resolve of these leaders who have already realized a certain level of success and inspire them to assume a more proactive stance in addressing the foremost challenges of their region and their times.

Some background on The Aspen Institute:
The Aspen Institute was founded by the Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke (1896-1960), chairman of the Container Corporation of America, in 1950. When visiting Aspen, Colorado, for the first time in 1945, he was inspired by its great natural beauty. He envisioned it as an ideal gathering place for thinkers, leaders, artists, and musicians from all over the world to step away from their daily routines and reflect on the underlying values of society and culture. He dreamed of transforming the town into a center for dialogue, a place for "lifting us out of our usual selves," as one visitor to Paepcke's Aspen would put it.
To make this dream real, in 1949 Paepcke made Aspen the site for a celebration of the 200th birthday Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The 20-day gathering attracted such prominent intellectuals and artists as Albert Schweitzer, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Rubinstein, along with members of the international press and more than 2,000 other attendees.
The next year, Paepcke created what is now the Aspen Institute. The Institute’s signature Executive Seminar is a forum based on the writings of great thinkers of the past and present. Through reading and discussing selections from the works of classic and modern writers, leaders better understand the human challenges facing the organizations and communities they serve. "The Executive Seminar was not intended to make a corporate treasurer a more skilled corporate treasurer," said Paepcke, "but to help a leader gain access to his or her own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and more self-fulfilling."
The Aspen Institute also gave rise to the Aspen Music Festival and the annual International Design Conference.
Its mission is to foster enlightened leadership and open-minded dialogue. Through seminars, policy programs, conferences and leadership development initiatives, the Institute and its international partners seek to promote nonpartisan inquiry and an appreciation for timeless values.

The Institute helps people become more enlightened in their work and enriched in their lives. Together people can learn one of the keys to being successful in business, leadership and life: balancing conflicting values in order to find common ground with our fellow citizens while remaining true to basic ideals.
Aspen Institute events have attracted presidents, statesmen, diplomats, judges, ambassadors, and Nobel laureates over the years, enriching and enlivening the Institute as a global forum for leaders.
Today the Aspen Institute seminar programs have expanded to include sessions such as Leading Change and Executive Seminar Asia. The Institute supports 18 policy programs directed by leading policymakers and practitioners. The programs explore topics such as international peace and security, health, nutrition and biomedical science; economic opportunity; social innovation through business; the nonprofit sector; and community initiatives for children and families.

If you would like to engage with the work of Peter Reiling or get to know more about the The Aspen Institute please visit www.aspeninstitute.org, or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly.