 Hello and welcome to another edition of the Leaders Room. My name is Michael Kosslin. It's my pleasure today to be speaking with Dr. Paul Chan, the co-founder, vice chair, and president of Help University. Dr. Chan has had a very interesting career both as an academic and economic advisor and as an entrepreneur, as you'll learn during the course of this interview. He's read economics at the University of Malaya, McMaster University, Canada, and completed his Ph.D. at the Australian National University. Dr. Chan has a very distinguished academic career, including being the chairman, division of applied economics at the University of Malaya, and in 2012, he received the Premier Branch Icon Leadership Award for recognition of his contribution to the community. Paul, it's a pleasure to have you here with us today, and thank you for taking time to join us. There's an honor for me to be here. So let's start by talking about Help University. You started Help University in 1986. You literally started it in a shop lot with only two classrooms and 30 students, and I've got to confess to you, I had to look up what a shop lot is. It's literally a corner store in a building. And from there, Help has grown to become a household name here in Malaysia, and it's attracting international attention in the field of academia. What was it like starting something from the ground level up? Actually, it's somewhat of a crazy idea to start an education institution in a shop lot because you need to have a campus to do it, but I have no resources. But my wife and I had a conviction that it is a noble thing to do to provide equal access to the disadvantaged people, especially for tertiary education. So we had and still have a conviction that everyone deserves a sound education. Not be the best in the world, but a sound education that can prepare him to be successful in life. So the conviction became a cause, a religious cause. So in our corporate motto, shall we say, educating is our cause. So I think that provides the drive and the purpose for setting up Help. And incidentally, it means at that time, higher education, learning program. But later, about 15 years later, it became higher education, learning philosophy. So it is our aspiration that in perhaps another five to 10 years, help stands for help, education, learning philosophy. So that's the background of how we started Help. That was your inspiration for the shop. And we started only with about 25,000 ringgit or about 5,000 US dollars because academics don't have money via poor people. So it was very difficult. You want to get some seed capital, who would believe that at that time, you can start a private tertiary education and to have some quality. So that was a real challenge. That was a real challenge. Well, I want to come back to help in a little bit, but I'd like to focus on you and your own career path. And sometimes starting out with humble beginnings can be a real obstacle to one's career path and their advancement into leadership. And when we look back at your life, you were one of nine children in your family. You had to come home from school and help your father in his own business. But yet you persevered. What were some of the lessons you learned simply in those humble beginnings? And how did they influence you? I spent a great part of my life living in urban squatting areas. Actually, the nine of us live in a squatter settlement. There was no water, no electricity, no toilet facilities. And we used to slap on the mud floor. And I can remember that every evening, my sister and my brothers, all of us had to carry water on Kerosene can every evening. But I think that gives us the appreciation of good things in life, because we had nothing. So it made us emotionally resilient. It made us robust. And there's no such thing as hard work. Hard work becomes a virtue. So we are not scared of failures, because there was nothing to fail. So every little success is a great celebration. So when you are so poor and so down below, everything becomes an achievement. So you continue to excel and build up on all the previous platforms. You see, my father was a petition writer in the streets of Kuala Lumpur, in Jalan Mountain, it was called. And when I was young, I accompanied him. And maybe every other month, he had to appoint his Olivetti type writer. So I know how tough life was. And unfortunately, the younger generation are now affluent, because the previous generation, their parents work hard and have wealth and opportunities. So they don't really appreciate the difficulties and challenges of life. That it is something ennobling to create things. I remember that I told my students when I was teaching in the University of Malaya, a faculty of economics, don't come and ask me for a job. You create a job. You see, we must learn to create opportunities, create an employment, not consume, not consume, create. So that becomes a sort of energy inside us, because we need also a certain predisposition. And I think that has to be cultivated by the circumstances of life. It's not something that you pick up in a leadership course, in a top university. It has to be learned in the real hard way. So there's not such thing as a failure, but there are lessons. Not failures, lessons. And it sounds like you've learned a lot of lessons. But not enough, you know. I mean, being a human being, I remember Margaret Dushman's book on the march of folly. You know, there are pitfalls, sometimes you still march into them. There's a problem about human beings. You know, there are landmines all over the place, but you still move into them. Because our DNA is such that we are not a complete person. We are not like a software that we can improve first generation, second, third generation. Every person that is born has to learn to crawl and walk and learn how to speak a language. Those were the most difficult challenges. But after that, the rest should be simple, but actually not simpler. We mess up our life all the time. So to me, every day is actually a learning lesson. So life is a work in progress. And we cannot be a complete, well sculpted piece of Michael Angelou's work. The journey never ends. It's a lifetime journey. Exactly. But I think the important perspective is to enjoy the journey, even if there are failures. So don't be afraid of hard work. No, never. Always be looking up, appreciating what you've got and what you can still obtain. But you also, the very first phrase you used, Paul, was you said, it taught you resilience. Yes. And how often have you had to draw upon that personal resilience? I mean, when you look back over your career, before you started Hope University, you attempted several other things, not once, not twice, but several times, it didn't work out the way you expected. How did resilience play a role? I think the reason why I failed in quite a number of businesses, whether it's construction, rubber gloves or whatever, is because I think I never really believed in them. I had no conviction. I think neither did my wife. Because to succeed in something, you must have the passion for it, that the values of doing something is more than just the bottom line, that as I've said earlier, it should be ennobling in terms of making other people successful. I think part of the reason was maybe I spent too long a time in the academic world. And I did not realize that that should be my core competency. So although I failed in the other businesses, I must say that I did the right thing by starting the other businesses first. Because that taught me a lot of lessons about the things I should not do, rather than the things I ought to do. Can you give us some example? You see, we should not do things that we do not really believe in, that we do not really have the capability. And that in exercising your leadership, you cannot mobilize the hearts and minds of people. Because when you talk to your colleagues, they must genuinely believe that you have this type of leadership to create the direction and the destiny that they want to willingly follow you. Because if not, it is just a transaction. I want this job, you pay me so much. So there will not be a shared vision, values, or a very strong sense of identity and ownership. So yes, they will contribute, but they will not commit. It's just like a hand will lay an egg. But when the hand dies for you, it's a commitment. So nobody dies for a company. Perhaps maybe you die for your religious beliefs, but for some multi-level organization, the ownership is stronger, and so on. But otherwise, in most organizations, it is pleasant and nice to talk about vision, mission. But real down, when you lead a group of people into battles, are they willing to die for you? That's most important. So you've told us two things, two critical things, lessons of experience, if you will. One is how important it is to be resilient, to not to give up, even when faced with failure. Another thing that you've learned is passion. It's one thing to have a vision, but you've got to be passionate about that vision. Without passion, you can't engage other people. You can't expect that. Yeah, you must have the energy. You've also been quoted in the media talking about how important things like self-awareness are to you, and the importance of self-awareness and knowing one's limitations. Can you say a little bit about that? Because earlier you were saying, my humble beginnings taught me to always look up and to believe that more was available if I worked hard. But now you're also saying recognize your limitations and be self-aware. Tell us about that. I think the first thing to know is to know yourself, and to know what you actually do not know, so that you can cultivate on your strengths and develop good habits in thinking and behavior. So if we are applying to ourselves that we have a lot of self-limitations, then we develop a sense of arrogance and hoardiness, especially when you are reasonably successful in the beginning or in the short run. Look at all the big major companies, big names in town, the reason being Blackberry and so on. If you do not cultivate a high sense of self-awareness, reflective, even meditative or contemplative, then every day you continue to do what you have been doing. But without a great sense that the world has changed and you have not changed, that you may be strong, but you're actually not adaptive. So sooner or later you will perish. But being self-aware is more than just being successful in business. It is about character formation. You see, every night I would spend a couple of minutes to find out what foolish things I've done in the day, because you may have an outburst or too endosciastic about some ideas. And sometimes you really regret doing certain things and some of the things that we do are not reversible. And when I get up in the morning, I also notice it's like, oh, it's like a miracle. Where were you during the last eight hours? But suddenly you open your eyes, you are alive. So whether you believe in God or nature, you are given another day to live. It's a miracle. So if you don't remind yourself that you are so blessed to live another X hours of a wonderful life, then we are just stupid, blind, and foolish. So that's why I say that self-reflection, as many times as possible, is a good habit. So what I do, if I can remind myself, I'll take a minute per hour just to say sing through a little bit before you go through a meeting or you're going to meet somebody like coming here today. Just one minute is enough rather than one hour at the end of the day. Paul, you and I have both been through enough developmental experiences. And we've heard other people say exactly what you just said, how important self-awareness is, reflection. There's a lot of research that says that one of the problems why executives fail is they have these opportunities to learn, they go through them, but they don't slow down enough to really reflect on what the learning was. Did something happen to you that forced you to slow down and say, wait a minute, I need to really think about this experience? I mean, where did you learn the importance of self-awareness and self-reflection? That something like that doesn't come from the book. As I was sitting here listening to you, you spoke with conviction about that importance of it. How did you learn that? I think some of us have cultivated this from very young or was a very independent person. So every little decision that I had to make, I had to make myself because I had no mentors. My family was poor and there to make do with life. So you don't have the luxury of someone teaching you about great universities, the importance of education. You really have to muddle through. But I think as you do that, you cultivate a certain frame of mind and certain good habits that you need to think through a little bit before you do something. But of course, when we started, it was not a perfect model, but you built this up as a frame of reference. So after a certain age in our life, we should have this frame of perspective and having this cultivated reflective mind. So over the years, I have developed my own frame of reference, first to begin with, I have a contemplative mindset and of course an analytic mindset. But above all, a consequential mindset, meaning decisions that are trivial, forget them. Only consequential decision that impact your life, other people's life to begin with, then bottom line and so on. Otherwise the rest is not worthy of our talents and the little time that we have in this world. So I think each of us has our own way to remind ourselves. Some are blessed with great spouses. My wife is a constant source of reminder, so we say, and she will remind me. I have some great colleagues, although they are not holding high positions, they will also remind me. I think we must have this humility to listen, then only can we develop this self-awareness. Because on our own, it is very difficult to teach your mind to improve the mind. Because the mind is reconditioned. So how do we teach a conditioned mind to uncondition itself? That itself is a challenge. So that's why a lot of us as CEOs find it very tough to uncondition ourselves. Yes. Well, you were telling me earlier that these life experiences and the importance of contemplation have helped you form what sounded to me like a relatively unique life's philosophy. And let me just kind of quote from what you were telling me. You said that you believe in the three C's, character, competencies and leadership and competencies and profession. Can you tell me a little bit more about them and especially how you see those three C's relating to leadership? I think the first C is the easiest to acquire. Competency in a certain profession like accounting, engineering and so on. It's just acquired knowledge and passing some exams and so on. And then you are considered competent to do something. Then the next C is about leadership and that's a very difficult part. To manage yourself as we grow, including the family. But the more important part is just managing resources, making certain decisions. But how to be capable in leading towards the future? Why should people believe in you? So it's not just being a great engineer, you must have the leadership at some point to lead. So competency in leadership must be acquired. You therefore can be a great accountant, but you can be a complete failure in people-to-people relationship. That's why this second C is important. But the point is this, having the first C being competent as a professional and even having leadership competencies is still not complete because we often have moral failures. So this character is most important, the last C. Because it's all about moral choice between right and wrong. And it's just not about right and wrong, sometimes it's also between two rights. So I think the character formation part is the ultimate part. You look at some great leaders, they are fantastic mobilizer of human beings, whether it's a Mao Zedong or Hitler or some chief executives of failed companies. But they may lack the moral character in them. These certain finer qualities of life. As we all say, we must walk our talker. So what we say must be consistent in what we do and what we believe in. So I think the three Cs are therefore a must. So the professional competency, the leadership competency, but the most critical one to you is the character. Of a person. Okay, so let me ask you a slightly provocative, chicken or egg type of question. You talked about competencies of leadership. Do you believe that leaders can be developed or are they born? I think they can be developed, but most of the time you have to acquire in your own way. It's not like having the 10 commandments and you know the 10 commandments from a Harvard course and Presto overnight. You are a leader. Leadership is an influencing process. Ultimately is why do people willingly want to follow you? It's as simple as that. So yes, anyone and everyone has leadership predisposition. We are born with various qualities of leadership. It is how we develop them, because some are more extrovert, some less, but it does not mean that they are not leaders. I'm not having the leadership attributes. I think the way I look at the world, there are only two types of people, the learners and the non-learners. You cannot be a leader if you refuse to learn, that's about all. And learning is not just being taught or driven by some leadership mantras, but actually having the humility to learn from everyone and all the experiences and exposures. I think that's the way to learn. Look at President Carter, he was not very successful as a president, but in other engagements, it became a great success. Yes. So sometimes the context may not be there and we have to search for it. A few moments ago, Paul, you said that leadership is an influencing process. You and I have probably both met individuals that said, I'm the leader, I'm the one in charge, you do what I say. That certainly doesn't sound like an influencing strategy. It sounds more like a command strategy. Can you expand upon that statement that leadership is an influencing process? I think ultimately our ultimate task, if you want to achieve anything, is to influence people to willingly follow us and to act happily. But at times you need to act top down because the situation and the circumstances may be different. So it's like when to be a conductor, as they say, if you're a conductor for the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, you have to follow. Right. So maybe during crisis time, you must follow me because I know what I'm doing, but if I cannot, somebody else must take over. Other times, since I'm playing jazz, you allow your colleagues to play the drum a bit longer, to saxophone better. You can dance in there with the audience. So I think leadership requires a lot of judgment, when not to act top down and command people in an authoritarian way. But sometimes you need to be quite authoritarian, otherwise things also may not be done because there's a crisis happening. So it's a great judgmental skill and it is very difficult to teach someone and say, this is the time and this is not the time. It sounds like perhaps one of the leadership competencies that somebody needs to be able to develop is to colloquially, I might say, be able to read the situation, to be able to assess the situation. It's very contextual. Very contextual. And knowing whether the situation requires me either to use an influencing style that is more engaging, more enrolling versus one that is more authoritative and commanding. To use your example, it's a crisis situation. I'm not gonna ask your opinion. I'm gonna take the decision. Yes, definitely. You cannot decontextualize leadership when you make a decision. I mean, look, every country has a different type of government and governance. For example, President Obama must appeal to his people, to Congress, to support him whether to act or not to act. In another country, maybe it doesn't need to do it, but the situation is different. But at his level, the leadership required is sort of an alliance leadership. It's not leading a team or even an organization. It's, as some other leaders have said, it's a collision type of leadership. I was reading recently that one way of defining leader versus leadership is leader is a singular entity. Leadership is multiple people. And in an organizational setting, leadership is a collection of individuals that come together with a focus, purpose, or to use your language from earlier, a passion. But let's not forget that in the process of acting out our leadership, we have what is called responsibility areas. But you cannot run away from accountability. So in collective leadership, you still must hold one person accountable for failures or shortcomings. Otherwise, you cannot hold the whole group collectively. So there must still be, shall we say, someone who stepped forward and said, I am accountable for what happened. But yet you read Fortune magazine, you read Forbes magazine, you read articles on Harvard Business Review. You don't often see or hear leaders of corporations stepping up and saying, I'm the one that is responsible. I think therefore, there's a lot of hype and hubris and you read lots of management books, leadership books, teaching us what to do and so on, it's all of idealism. But the real world is actually very tough. How to be ethical, how to be moral is really a serious challenge. It goes back to the character of the one, one of the three C's that you mentioned, okay? Well, let's come back to help university if we could. And you've been quoted in the media saying, and let me paraphrase here, help started as a social business enterprise so that the less fortunate would have an opportunity for education. You mentioned that at the beginning of our conversation. What's your rationale behind that vision? And more importantly, Paul, what have you done to ensure that helps stays true to that vision? You see education is somewhat different from other businesses. In fact, it may sound like dirty word to use industry or business to characterize education. Although now it's, shall we say, legitimate and accepted. When we say help is a social enterprise, maybe without realizing it, we were somewhat ahead of time. Because nowadays everyone says we must have a corporate social responsibility. When I write whatever I have to write about help, I do not have to say I have corporate social responsibility. Well, there's a very reason why we exist. There's a very rational why we have help to begin with, that it is a social engagement, that it is Arthur-centered. Not self-centered. Other centered businesses. And using education as a social enterprise requires us to be responsible, steward of whatever resources that different stakeholders have given us. But in particular, the trust that parents, students have given to us. And therefore, this is a very heavy responsibility. So whilst we have to make ends meet, but profit is like oxygen, water and blood, but we have our idealism. So for an education institution, we must live by our idealism. So that's why it is a very interesting challenge to combine what we do as servants for people, to serve the people, using education. Because education has noble ends and the act of education is noble. Therefore, it's ennobling. It's not that other businesses are not ennobling, but without offending my other colleagues in the world, I must say to educate someone is very different. It's not the formal process of having a campus to educate. The whole life process is about teaching and learning. That's why in Asian societies in particular, a teacher is revered and highly respected. It's different. And while education and academia can be ennobling, there is still a business element to it. And earlier when we were talking, you were saying that you are guided, your business choices are guided by an acronym, IEDI, which stands for Innovation, Expansion, Differentiation and International. Can you tell us a little bit about that acronym and why you see that as being different when applied to an academic institution as opposed to palm oil business? Okay. You see, over the years, I have developed my own, shall we say, frame of reference, my own template. In looking at business and education. And I have four acronyms to begin with, the four A's and the four S's. So the first A is, are things available? Availability. Are they accessible? Accessibility. Are they appropriate? Appropriateness. Are they affordable? Affortability. So this gives me my first reference of whether I should do something or not to. Then the four S's will come in. The first S is standards. Do we have standards? At least industry standards. But we aspire to have global standards. But the best is we set the standards. The second S is scalability. To grow a business, there must be scalability. So the models of handling resources, human beings, and giving a good value proposition to, in my case, the students is important now to scale it up. And have a global reach, R-E-S-H, without destroying the rich R-I-S-H, as in richness. The third S is sustainability. Because if we cannot persevere and sustain, then we die. See, we must remember that, as Peter Drucker has said, probably our first duty as a business organization is to create a customer. But let's not forget the Darwinian principle and what is built in our DNA. We also have a duty to perpetuate the life of an organization, or our species as human beings. So between creating a customer and perpetuating the life of an organization, we therefore have to do things efficiently and effectively and rightly. And the last S is, coming from the academic world, I realize we are very slow in decision-making because there are so many layers of decision-making committees and so on. And the academics have a very different world view. It's a timeless world, you know. So I therefore added in the last S, speed. Speed. Yeah, speed after long reflections, speed to the market. So the four S and the four S would govern us. But I also noticed over the years, we have three things that are not well integrated. One has to do with entrepreneurship, like starting help in 1986, or the startup business. So starting up a business, the type of entrepreneurship is different. Now we have matured into a sort of a bureaucracy. There are roles, procedures and so on. These are good, but organizations are not meant for entrepreneurship. They are only meant for efficiency at best. So the more procedures and rules you have, the greater will be the chance of leadership dying. So how do we develop intra-preneurship, corporate entrepreneurship? I admire great companies like the 3M, where the mission statement states very clearly that it must renew itself, renovate its products, innovate new models and so on. But to do that, we must have a growth mindset. A growth mindset. Coupled with certain types of competencies. So I developed an integration of e-entrepreneurship, L-leadership, M-management. So I have my own M model. Okay? M is the name of a tree, but it stands for entrepreneurship, leadership and management. And recently, our graduate school at Help University is called the M Graduate School. Because when you look at the literature, it is now starting to recognize that we need to integrate the entrepreneurship, the leadership and the management. So when we started in 1986, our leadership competency was very low. But now as we grow to manage an alliance of partners, the leadership is very different. So the leadership has to grow. Not just personally, but also as you say collectively. So that is the great challenge. But in the meantime, what about the M? The management. We only managed a couple of thousands of dollars in 1986. Although proportionately, there was high risk. But now we have to make decisions about a few hundred million relating to campus development or whether to have a campus overseas and so on and so on. So the management competency must also grow. So you have this triangle, the E, the L and the M. So all these together, the 4S, 4S, the growth mindset and the ELM competencies will act on the I and the EDI. So I use innovation as a verb. Not as a now. So I have to innovate, expansion, differentiation and internationalization. Now if I don't innovate the EDI, the EDI becomes DIE. So we will die. We will just perish. And in our case, especially in my early life, I've learned this lesson. There's no option for failure. So I constantly remind myself about, if I remember, you said Apollo 13 or something like that, that you are in outer space. You're going to have two days, so much oxygen, and there's the oxide coming. You have to take care of two, three lives. You cannot blame anyone. The command center on Earth cannot help you very much. You have to make do with what we have. So in running help, we need to develop a robust business model, a set of actionable strategies, and all the time deliver on an hourly basis in our case. Because if you don't teach well, you'll be challenged in the Facebook. It's as tough as that. It's as tough as that. We cannot replace broken promises. For some other businesses, if you deliver a car and it doesn't work, I can replace it. I cannot replace three years of a person's life. So we have to act like doctors. The way I look at running an institution like a university, I have to treat every student like the doctor treats his patient. That means everything is almost life-threatening. The reason why customer care is so poor and bad in every organization is that we do not have the mindset and attitude of a doctor, the type of caring attitude. Doctors make the wrong every morning. How are you? What's the temperature? Teachers don't do that. CO don't do that. Don't look at the end results, the quarterly results or the semester results. Then only we react. But doctors have to make the wrongs, especially if it's a life-threatening problem. So I think we must cultivate that type of attitude. So I seldom look at what other universities do, that they're not great, they're great in other ways, research and so on. But to care for a customer, I have to look at maybe the hospitality industry, but in particular, healthcare. That's how I look at some of the things to innovate what I do. Well, and people at your age, given all the achievements that you've had and are continuing to have, would be pretty happy at just moving into retirement. But yet you've stayed very active with help. What is your source of energy? What keeps you going? What gets you up in the morning that you haven't pursued other things that you're sticking with help? When I say I'm going to stay on some of my colleagues may not be so happy. I better leave us alone. The only reason if I have one to continue with what I do, but not necessary to hold positions, is that I genuinely have a love for people and a love for, shall we say, wisdom. And what I have been doing through education offers me those moments. Every moment is a moment to learn how to be wise and wiser. There's no other opportunity like education to self-educate until we lose our breath and to help to educate other people. So if I give up what I love to do, how can I find an alternative? There's no second best alternative about self-education and to educate people. So it's more than a business, more than anything else in this world. Whether you're with a formal institution called a university, you are educating yourself, your family members, like in my case, I have five grandchildren, and I suddenly discovered that I have forgotten so many things. And as I've mentioned earlier, I noticed that for a human being, it was a remarkable thing that a baby learns how to stand up and walk. And he also does not fear or feel ashamed when he mispronounces words to learn a language. But when we grow up, we fear to learn things because we fear criticisms, we fear failures. So even watching my grandchildren learning how to walk and to learn how to speak and pick up words and phrases, it's already teaching me in an educating way. So I cannot give up what I do because everyone I feel should be involved in education in some ways, not necessarily the formal way. If so happens, I have a structure to do it. It's the only difference. It also sounds like if I were to link back to something you said much earlier in our conversation, it's that personal passion that you have as being one of the sources of your leadership energy. It's your passion, it's your values, the different acronyms of four A's, four S's and L's, that all are some of the sources of your energy. Yes, definitely. Some people ask me to have hobbies. It's not that I don't have, but to me they are secondary hobbies. My first hobby is what I'm doing because to me sometimes I tell myself, eh, do you give up what you do for the last 12 hours and certainly switch to carpentry as a hobby? No, but in my case I'm so blessed. I love what I do. So how can I get tired of loving what I do? Consider John Kees. How can I get tired of composing poems with his friends in the Lake District? Or consider Patu and Mossad and all these people. Should we tell them to stop composing and rest a little while and do some carpentry or gardening or something like that? No, because you love what you do. So you cannot get tired of it. You cannot say your energy is drained. Your energy is drained only when you feel very tired of people and tired of what you do and think. That's why you need to have recreation. But I'm actually doing my recreation every moment. There are some people that might say you are a workaholic, Paul, with that type of definition. But another way of looking at it, and I think this is the way you're looking at it, is how can you call me a workaholic when I'm doing something that I love, that I derive great pleasure from? I think even if you call me an alcoholic, it's a good one. Because, as I said earlier, it's other-centered. Because I do it to serve people. I'm not consuming to be drunk and forget the environment and lose my sense of the context and the future. Whatever I do, in fact, enhances my sensing of the environment. And that gives me a very centered way of living it. Lose my sanity, inspire or despise all the pressures. Because they are not precious. Because there are things to be sculpted and improved. You see. Final question for you, Paul. What's the legacy you want to leave behind? I did not dream of living big things. I seldom think about these because I know this will lead to some hoardiness and a sense of self-importance. I think what really matters is, have we, over the years, together with my other teaching colleagues and partners, created a set of conceptual, creative, critical thinking skills for the students. Such that they are enabled to continue to succeed. That's why our mission is very important. To help people succeed in life and to live a life of significance through education. So the first part of the statement says that it is our duty to create some enabling competencies. But the second part is more important in a way that we must not forget the purpose of life. That's why significance, which is beyond the maintained success of life, having lots of money, power and status. So to support our mission, which incidentally took us 20 or years before I put it down, because nowadays I notice many companies write down a mission the moment they start their business. We actually had no mission. We just practiced and lived what we were doing and suddenly one day I said, this is in fact our mission to help people succeed in life and to live a life of significance through education. So later on I supported these with just five statements about our values. And the first one is pride of achievement. It's all self-motivating. There's nothing to do with money and power. Pride of achievement. Number two, sharing success, which means that it is other-centered. We must have the willingness to share our wealth but in this case our knowledge and so on. Then the third value is the courage to be as in being, to have this courage to choose who we want to become. So from be as in being to becoming, a beautiful English, be and becoming. The fourth value is to be compassionate. I mean the world is full of violence and turbulence. Everyone is talking about how to subjugate other people, how to make you submit. It's through wars and weapons but not through education. So recently in fact I created a platform entitled Education for Peace and Prosperity. So I'm going to develop that. And the last value is to be significant, meaning to not waste our life. Even if you live up to 33 like John Keats, make sure you have written some great poems, like Oath to Autumn or whatever. So I think these five values will support our mission very well. But at the same time I also created another acronym. I have a WOW, a V-O-W. A WOW is a commitment. V stands for values, the values that I just articulated. And all opportunities, jobs, there's a chance to study. And W is very interesting. W means wealth. But in Chinese there's a Chinese character. You can spell it as C-A-I. And it's pronounced as chai. Chai is written differently when you write the characters. But it's pronounced as chai. Now it has two meanings. One is intellectual wealth or knowledge. The other one is material wealth. So you see this beautiful word chai has two meanings. It's not just creating material wealth or assets, but also the intellectual development. So I have a WOW. So when you look through all this process of the M model and the IEDI and our mission, our values, ultimately should we or shouldn't we, therefore depends on WOW. So I have a WOW in whatever I do. And I have conceptualized all these. And I think my next stage of what I would love to do is to promote worldwide. And I hope many people will join in education for peace and prosperity. Paul, I'd like to thank you for your time, for your generosity, for sharing your thoughts about leadership and the insights about Hope University. We'll take a vow with you. So I'd like to thank everybody for joining us with this edition of the Leaders Room. And we look forward to seeing you the next time.