Asheesh Advani
President and CEO, Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide
I really do believe that the leadership skills of the future … are about leadership by influence, not authority. You need to bring people along for the vision.
Summary
In this week’s episode of Leadership Matters, Alan is joined by a leader who has truly dedicated his life to championing global youth development through social and corporate entrepreneurship. As the President and CEO of JA Worldwide — commonly known as “Junior Achievement” — Dr. Asheesh Advani leads an organization serving millions of young people in over 100 countries.
Where some corporate leaders think years ahead in terms of products and services, Asheesh thinks ahead in terms of people. During their conversation, Alan and Asheesh have a wide-ranging discussion on his business experiences, leadership philosophies, and the importance of supporting the next generation.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Asheesh Advani is the President and CEO of Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide, one of the largest NGOs in the world dedicated to educating young people about financial literacy, entrepreneurship and work readiness. With offices in over 100 countries, the JA network serves more than 10 million young people annually with programs designed to prepare youth for the future of work.
Asheesh is an accomplished technology entrepreneur, having served as CEO of Covestor (acquired by Interactive Brokers) and CircleLending (acquired by Virgin Group). He began his career as a consultant at the Monitor Group followed by the World Bank.
Now living in Boston, Asheesh is a JA alumnus first exposed to entrepreneurship as a teenager participating in the JA Company Program. His experiences as an entrepreneur and leader were chronicled in case studies at Babson College and at Harvard Business School. Asheesh is actively involved with the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and the World Economic Forum, where is he is a member of the Global Agenda Council for the Future of Education, Gender, and Work and a member of the Civil Society Advisory Council.
He is a graduate of the Wharton School and Oxford University, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar.
Clips from This Episode
On what work will look like in the future and how young people can prepare.
On his story of overcoming a stutter, and relates how he tries to inspire young people.
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
You are listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. My guest today has dedicated his life to championing entrepreneurship and youth global development.
Dr. Asheesh Advani is the president and CEO of JA Worldwide — known by many as Junior Achievement — which has been creating prosperity for more than a century by teaching entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and work readiness to young people around the world. Under his direction and vision, JA Worldwide has steadily expanded internationally and is now helping young people in more than 100 countries create economic opportunities for themselves and their communities. Earlier this year, JA Worldwide was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for its leadership in tackling poverty and other causes of conflict globally. In addition to his leadership at JA worldwide, Asheesh is an accomplished entrepreneur, having led two venture-backed businesses from startup to acquisition. He's a graduate of Wharton and a former Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University. He also finds time to work as a professor and advisor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Asheesh, or Dr. Advani — since you’re my friend, I’m calling you Asheesh — thank you for joining us today. Welcome to “Leadership Matters.”
Asheesh Advani
Glad to be here. Nobody calls me ‘Dr.,” so I'm glad you're not going to use that anymore in this interview.
Alan Fleischmann
I'm thrilled you're here. I'm a big fan, as you know, of JA Worldwide and I've watched your leadership. I think several years ago, we sat next to each other at a dinner. And I knew a lot about JA, I'd worked with JA on many initiatives globally, especially in the Middle East and then in this country. It was early in your tenure, actually, and I was so taken by your vision, so taken by your commitment, so taken by your background that led you to take this on.
We're gonna get to all that in the next hour, but I'd like to start with a little bit about your early life. You were born in India, where you spent your early years of life. What was your family like then? Do you have any siblings?
Asheesh Advani
So we moved from India to Canada when I was six, and I have an elder brother, who's three-and-a-half years older. He felt more Indian than I did, because he'd been there, you know, until the age of nine and a half.
My family in India had had gone through some challenges because of partition. So like many Indian families, when you're on one side of the border and the country is split, you have to leave everything behind. So my parents and grandparents lived briefly in a refugee camp and had to scatter, along with many others who sort of had to suffer through that period. My mother moved to Malaysia and Burma, where she grew up. My father stayed within India and moved around a lot and became an engineer. So the reason for the move from India to Canada was because my dad got a great job with IBM, which was in many ways the Google of its day, shall we say. So for him, it was just an amazing, amazing opportunity. And he got a chance to move our family to Canada.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. And where in Canada were you?
Asheesh Advani
Toronto.
Alan Fleischmann
Great city. And the family's still there?
Asheesh Advani
We have quite a bit of family. My parents have retired and move south. But I have plenty of family still there. We go there three or four times a year for visiting friends as well.
Alan Fleischmann
You have spoken publicly in the past about your struggle with a stutter. We have wonderful role models now for people who have overcome stutters, but when you moved to Canada, how did you overcome that challenge?
Asheesh Advani
So the cause of a stutter when you're a kid can be many things. People don't really often know what causes these things. Obviously, moving from India to Canada itself was a big change. But I also… apparently, according to some of the doctors, they said that there was a couple of traumatic moments. I was lost in a museum for 9 hours when I was six, which some people believe could have been a direct cause, because I started stuttering almost immediately after that.
But on overcoming it, I'm not sure if I’ve fully overcome it — so you're probably going to hear a little bit of stumbling on this interview — but I went to speech therapy on Wednesdays after school at the Hospital for Sick Kids in Toronto. I credit so many good public speaking behaviors that I learned during those speech therapy sessions. So it is truly a blessing in disguise, but it took several years and lots of practice of what was then called easy onsets, which is how you start a sentence. What often happens with stutterers is, they know the word they're going to stutter on before they say it. Which means you actually have to very quickly change the word in your head to a synonym. So I became pretty good at thinking fast and coming up with synonyms, particularly for words that start with A or H, which were two sounds I had particular trouble with. Including my name, by the way.
Alan Fleischmann
I do not hear a stutter. I'm always so impressed with young people who overcome that, because it has to be so difficult. And I'm wondering, were there great mentors in your young life that you can recall? You've clearly devoted your life to being a mentor who really runs one of the most exceptional mentor-oriented organizations in the world. I'm just curious if, on your young journey, whether there were some people who stood out. Clearly your father and mother played a role. But others as well?
Asheesh Advani
Yeah, sure. I think like everyone, you end up having mentors at different times of your life. And for me, looking back, I think my brother was probably one of my first mentors. He's older enough that, at times, he really was like a second father to me. He really encouraged me and pushed me to work harder. I have to give him a lot of credit for that. We didn't have the kind of sibling rivalry that I think a lot of siblings had. It was, I think, enough of an age gap that that wasn't true.
But after that, I had some really strong mentors. The first job I got after my undergrad, before I went to grad school, was with a consulting firm. The partner who sort of hired me, or I got to work with, was Michael Wenban. He's British, and I’d never thought of studying in England, I never thought that that could be part of my path. But by virtue of just knowing him and sort of feeling that, if people like him could do it, maybe I could. He encouraged me to think that way. It really helped me think more ambitiously about where I went to graduate school. I credit him for that.
And then, after my interaction with Michael, I met another person who ended up becoming an investor in my first company, his name's Howard Schwartz. And he really raised my level of self-confidence and showed me the way to build a company. I am so grateful to him as well.
So at different phases of my life, there have been different people who've really helped me. As I think back upon the advice I give to young people through JA, I think really focusing on identifying mentors, nurturing those relationships, and even learning how to get the best from their relationships — so you actually are consciously thinking about it, you're writing thank you notes, little things like that — are so important, such important life skills.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s great. These are the life skills that actually make people connect in a world that is so much built on technology and not on that human connectivity.
You went on to attend Wharton at University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University, where entrepreneurship was a key part of your studies. Your early work was a consultant, as you mentioned, and you focused on entrepreneurship. Was that the spark that made you want to dedicate your career to this topic? Or was it the experience of startups that you were involved in? How did that all happen?
Asheesh Advani
So I've done entrepreneurial things in various capacities, even though I never necessarily used the title of entrepreneur. In fact, I think a lot of people are scared of the word entrepreneurship. I think the media — particularly in the Western world, the US and Western Europe — has portrayed entrepreneurs as technology visionaries. Partly because there have been such famous technology visionaries that capture the imagination, that to some degree, it makes other people who are not that scared of the word. I spend a good portion of my time actually redefining the concept of entrepreneurship for people, to make them realize that a young girl in Kenya, or a young boy in Israel, who's doing really interesting things that are innovative and is finding economic agency to be able to do these things, maybe even creating a job for himself and a job for others by virtue of doing it… Those are entrepreneurs just as much as, you know, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
So my own self-identity with entrepreneurship probably started early in college. We had some clever ways to make money as undergraduates, which once again, we probably didn't call ourselves entrepreneurs, but we thought, “hey, this, this is working, so let's keep doing this.”
But I guess to answer your question, I started my first company in my late 20s. And that's when I could officially put the hat on. I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at a consulting firm I worked with, so they gave me office space and a chair and took equity in the company. Which in retrospect, probably wasn't the best deal to strike, but it made but it gave me a little bit of confidence and it made me feel that I wasn't completely out on the street.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s nice, actually. And it sounds like you've made relationships. Probably, that you've actually tapped on years later as well?
Asheesh Advani
Absolutely. The consulting deal was… Partly because of that person I mentioned, Michael Wenban, I went off to graduate school and, four years later, I came back. And I said, “I'd love to come back and do consulting. But I have this idea I'm interested in pursuing. Would you be open to the idea if I started to work on that, partly while I'm here, and see if that leads anywhere?” And he said yes, to his credit he said yes. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't have that safety net. I felt I did, which gave me, probably, a dose of extra confidence.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little bit the two companies you started, which you started from startup to acquisition?
Asheesh Advani
So the first one was called Circle Lending. It was a person-to-person lending company in the early days of the internet. It allowed people to loan money to each other. And this was pre-Facebook, so it was people who knew each other —what we’d call social network members now, but those days was called family and friends. It was a way to facilitate loans between people who know each other. And we did all the documentation and servicing for the loans using the internet in a really cost-effective, streamlined way. And did the credit reporting, so you could build a credit history by borrowing money from friends and family. You could borrow money for your first home, you could borrow money for your business, you can borrow money for education.
We realized — I had a job at the World Bank after graduate school, and the volume of these person-to-person, traditionally informal transactions is huge around the world. In fact, in some countries, it's the only way you finance things, because the formal credit systems are just not well developed. So using the internet to facilitate that felt like a very logical thing to do in the early days of the internet. Since then, there have been many, many other person-to-person lenders. The industry has changed because of social lending and social finance. Now there's all sorts of variations on a theme.
So that was the first business. It was acquired by Virgin. It was one of these crazy stories where one day, I got a phone call from somebody who works for Virgin, and they said, “we've been tracking your business, we're interested in talking, let's see where it goes.” And it morphed, that conversation, into Virgin wanting to launch a US-branded financial services entity, which they had in other parts of the world, called Virgin Money. So we became part of the Virgin Money global ecosystem. Our business became a small part of that, and Virgin launched other things: credit cards, mortgages, et cetera.
So it was a really fascinating change from being a founder — even owner, I would say, although I had lots of investors — to working for Richard Branson and his team, and being part of a global enterprise. That was a very different style of leadership, obviously, when you're a founder versus part of a larger enterprise. And I think part of my leadership journey has been trying to continue to change my own leadership style and improve, in light of the people I work with and the people I can learn from.
Alan Fleischmann
How long did you do that, work for Richard and that team?
Asheesh Advani
Two years. So the whole experience was eight years in total: six years of running Circle Lending, and two years as CEO of Virgin Money.
And it was amazing. He's an amazing person to work for, I learned so much. I'd raised money, prior to that deal with Virgin, from Jeff Bezos. So I got a chance to meet Jeff, I flew in and he gave me a little tour of his office in the early days of Amazon. I feel I've had a little bit of exposure to some incredible people. Even spending a few hours with these people, it sticks with you forever. And we raised money from all sorts of different, really successful investors, who were very kind to give me an hour of their time after their deal guys invested in the company.
But working for Richard, I got a chance to travel with him. I went to Necker Island a couple of times, and I really felt I could spend time learning from his vision for how he builds a brand. He's just built the kind of brand that people want to be part of and want to be associated with.
To me, when you look at the Virgin structure, it's just basically a branded venture capital fund. He has a brand, and he loans the brand to management teams all around the world. And they build amazing businesses. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, and he's okay if they don't. He’s sort of got this eternal optimism that is always looking around the corner for the next best thing. I really feel grateful to have had the experience of working for him.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s great. What did you do when you left there after two years of being there? Was that when you got involved in your next startup?
Asheesh Advani
Yeah, I did. It's a bit of a circuitous story of how I got the next place, but I got to lead Covestor. So in this case, I wasn't the founder. I was hired as a CEO by the venture capital firms who'd invested in it, it had attracted some really great VC firms.
Circle Lending was in the business of facilitating and improving the lending and borrowing experience. So for the consumer, the side of your consumer balance sheet that's about debt, like borrowing for a home, borrowing for education. However, Covestor was about the other side of the consumer balance sheet. It's about investing. So how make investments to optimize returns or reduce risk. And we realized that so many people had been investing in mutual funds, and investing in a handful of stocks that they'd heard good things about, that there was a better way to lower the cost of investing and also allow individuals to effectively pick money managers, maybe even hedge fund managers. But do it in a way that used the internet for what it's built for, which is transparency and cost reduction.
So we built this marketplace where people could go shopping for a money manager and make comparisons. So it wasn't just, “hey, my brother in law told me to invest with this guy,” or “I'd heard good things about this guy,” or, “this person seemed to have a good track record based on some PowerPoint slide loop he or she sent me.” We built a very transparent way to compare money managers and let consumers choose, or even change their mind and not have their money stuck with one person.
So that was a really great new opportunity in the early days of what came to be known as digital asset management or digital wealth management. The company was acquired four years later by Interactive Brokers, which is one of the largest online brokerages in the world.
Alan Fleischmann
Now at this point, you've actually started, built, and then sold two companies. Is that when you decided that you wanted to get involved with JA Worldwide, or was there another gap between that?
Asheesh Advani
No, it happened right away. So right when the acquisition for Covestor was finalized, almost a week later, I got connected to the board and the recruiting team who were looking for the next CEO of JA Worldwide. I knew enough about JA to be dangerous, because I went through JA when I was a kid and my wife ran another nonprofit that did things very similar to JA. So I was intrigued, but I was hopefully humble enough to walk in the interview and not tell them that I know exactly where things should go. But it was great timing, it was literally a week later.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. And did you immediately think you wanted to be the CEO? Was it one of those things where you went through a courtship period, or was it one of those things where, you know, they wanted me, I wanted them, and we're off to the races?
Asheesh Advani
I don't think we I don't think we knew enough about each other to recognize the fit right away, I did meet the board chair, his name is Francesco Vanni d’Archirafi. And Francesco — who is, by the way, also involved with American University, as I know you are — he invited me to spend a few hours with him just as part of the interview process. I was very captivated by his vision for where he wanted to take the organization: be more ambitious, more global, and more focused on impact. I found that to be very compelling and I felt that I could be a partner to him to make that happen. And then I met the rest of the board and was equally impressed.
One of the great things about JA is, we have — and I know this is gonna be an astounding number — well over 6,000 board members around the world. Every time I say that to people, they're like, “oh my God, the level of complexity and potential dysfunction that could exist with that many board members.”
Alan Fleischmann
But it's a board for each one of the local chapters.
Asheesh Advani
Exactly. I need to clarify that: each local, national, regional, global entity has a board of directors. They're all volunteers, and they volunteer their time, their supporters, and donors, and they give time, treasure, and talent to the organization.
So Francesco was the global board chair at the time, he introduced me to the global board as part of the recruiting process. And you know, these are such impressive people. Who just choose to volunteer their time to help young people and give back. They're so thoughtful, actually, about addressing the underlying root causes of poverty and the underlying root causes of inequality, recognizing that when you reach young people at the time of their life where they're determining who they are and who they can become, it is such a rare opportunity — frankly, a responsibility — that you have to do more with that time you have with young people.
Alan Fleischmann
How do you define entrepreneurship? We use the word loosely, like we use the word “community” loosely. There are those who get involved in entrepreneurial activity on the social side of things. There are those who do it for profit. And nowadays we're doing both, you know: it's doing well by doing good. And I'm curious, how do you define it?
Asheesh Advani
I think one of the standard definitions of it, which I like, is that it's about creating and innovating under conditions of uncertainty. So, it's not necessarily about creating profit — it could be about creating a product. That's why social entrepreneurship gets broadly looped into entrepreneurship. Obviously, if you're a for-profit commercial entrepreneur, you are very much about creating economic value. But I like to think of it as a broad definition.
Even, by the way, in politics, this term “political entrepreneurship” is now broadening the definition. Babson College created this framework, called “entrepreneurship in all its forms,” which is really about planning under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And that's what entrepreneurs do really well; they live in that world where you don't know what's going to happen next year.
Alan Fleischmann
That's right. You're listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischmann. I'm here with Dr. Asheesh Advani, who is president and CEO of JA Worldwide — known by many as Junior Achievement. We're talking about entrepreneurship and how we really can transform our future by giving young people the tools, the access, and the mentorship that they need in order to do right by them for themselves and for the community they live in. Which is how I think of I think of JA as being very local, very community-driven, and very global.
I know you sit at the global stage, but it must be really hard to manage from a leadership perspective. You had been a consultant, you've been a CEO and founder of startups; you know what it's like to actually say something and people listen. I'm sure a big part of your leadership skills require you to be highly persuasive, highly inspirational. And while you're motivating others to do other things, you probably can't tell the local board of directors what to do, you can't tell the local CEO what to do. Because I think, if I'm correct, the model is built on the idea that you're all part of an international movement, an international organization, so you do have real independence at the local level.
Asheesh Advani
Absolutely. And I really do believe that the leadership skills of the future — not just for decentralized organizations such as ours, but even for more traditional, hierarchical organizations — are about leadership by influence, not authority. So you need to bring people along for the vision, as opposed to tell people here's where to go and why you should go there.
And you even use the word “manage,” I think you said it must be challenging to manage the network. I think of this very much as an empowerment exercise. So, is it a challenge to empower other people? Sure, it can be at times, but it's considerably easier to empower other people than it is to manage other people. And so how do you create an environment where people feel truly empowered to act within a set of rules or bounds? So we developed a really simple framework, it’s called fixed, flexible, freestyle. Some things are globally fixed. Some things are regionally flexible, so stuff that happens in Europe obviously has to be different than stuff that happens in Africa. And then many things are locally freestyle. For things like programs, you obviously want to have much more integration with the local education authorities in schools. So lots of flexibility on program design, but maybe not on impact measurement and certainly not on things like brand and brand values.
So, borrowing from Richard Branson and Virgin, building a really exciting brand at Virgin, but giving lots of autonomy to the local management teams at Virgin to create value and customer experiences that delight the customer. But the brand values of Virgin and about customer delight are very clear. Similarly, at JA, we've got very clear brand values, but a lot of autonomy at the local level.
Alan Fleischmann
And how often do you — pre-COVID, I guess more than anything else — do you find yourself traveling to meet with local chapters?
Asheesh Advani
Oh, pre-COVID it was all the time. I was traveling 75% of the time. During COVID, it's obviously changed the way we interact. But we've launched many initiatives which have only been possible because of COVID.
For example, we used to have a leadership conference where we only invited the #1 or #2 person in each of the chapters. We have 340 chapters in 115 countries, so we'd only sort of invite the top couple of people to come. But during COVID, we opened up our leadership conference to everyone. So we had every level of the organization, from the person interacting with the students to the person interacting with the volunteers. We had way more diversity than we've ever had before. And frankly, I think we're a better organization because of that level of connectivity. So I'm looking for some of the positives, at least. Of course, there have been lots of negatives and challenges, but that's at least one of the positives.
Alan Fleischmann
That's true. I mean, you couldn't physically bring everybody in the same room before, and you couldn't have constant conversations with all the all the entities that are part of JA Worldwide. But now you can through technology.
Asheesh Advani
And also, visas. I mean, this is such a simple thing, right? It's kind of unfair in the world that you've got some people who just can't get a visa to travel, but yet, they're doing incredibly impactful work. Everybody wants to hear their story, and then the last minute, they can't come. COVID has made it possible, at least through more engaging video experiences, to have their voices heard and elevate them to be equals to those who've got great visas.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. There are a lot of unique elements in JA Worldwide’s coaching methods. What do you think have been the key ingredients to JA’s success? Because it has been enduring. What I understand is that there are some things that you do improvise — I shouldn't say improvise, you do evolve and create new ways of doing things as the world changes. But there's all sorts of ways that you guys do coaching that I think have been around for decades. Tell us a little bit about that.
Asheesh Advani
To summarize what's made us succeed over 100 years is very challenging. But I would say that the local teams have been so responsive to the needs of three key stakeholder groups.
One is local business. Two is the educational establishment in the local place — so it could be the school system, it could be the federal authorities, it could be the regulator, it could be whoever controls school time. And then three is students; being very responsive to what students want is core to what's made us succeed. So, taking all three stakeholder groups and doing it at a very local level and pivoting.
Just to give you an example, we were one of the first organizations to bring computers into schools, decades ago. We are one of the first organizations to bring really comprehensive education on financial capability, which is different than financial literacy, to schools. Schools have been teaching financial literacy for years. But if you look at the results, young people are still not great savers. They're still making irresponsible decisions and aren't necessarily prepared. Financial capabilities is about behavior change, not just knowledge acquisition. So you don't tell people “hey, you’ve got to save.” You create all these incentives and mechanisms to help people want to save and learn why savings is important. That is, I think, what JA has always been good at: being able to focus on behavior change, not just education and skill acquisition.
Alan Fleischmann
There's a lot of research showing that Gen Z’ers are much more interested than previous generations in working for themselves. In your view, is that true? And is there a shift that towards more entrepreneurship? Or is it that we're learning — which I think it is — that it's not that they necessarily want to start their own thing, but that they want to be in an entrepreneurial environment?
I'm actually a big believer that not everybody should be an entrepreneur as an founder, like you were with two startups, but should go work for and with entrepreneurs to help build firms. I think that's what I'm seeing more and more of — that people are looking for the agile organization or business that is actually doing things a little differently, a little more originally, and see that as an opportunity. Not necessarily that they want to start their own firm, but they want to be part of an entrepreneurial firm.
Asheesh Advani
Absolutely. We’ve done some great research on this with partners on the desire for creative control. So this idea that you can have some degree of decision-making rights and creative control over your life, the products you build, or the people you interact with. I think that younger generations are more interested in that than we were when we were younger.
That translates to people wanting to be entrepreneurs, but also translates to people working for organizations that respect that and create those environments for young people.
Alan Fleischmann
I think that's right. I think that's putting pressure on large organizations, large businesses to be more entrepreneurial, to actually curate creative opportunities for young people. It's hard to do when they're a large organization, but I think you're seeing evidence of that happening as well. So people can feel like they're creating and curating new ideas, new products, and new opportunities within larger organizations as well.
One of the entrepreneurships of the future is workflow — workplaces are going to be different. Are you changing the way you're advising, coaching, or witnessing workflow at workplaces? How society is going to look at work? Is that changing the way you're coaching? Are you witnessing things that actually show that the standard job of the past is no longer the standard job of tomorrow?
Asheesh Advani
I would say that we know that so many of the jobs of the future have not been invented yet. So by virtue of the fact that we reach youth at a relatively young age, we have to be not just about teaching skillsets, but teaching the mindset of being able to be curious, being able to have that self belief that gets you through the challenging times when there is a pivot in your career.
You think about it, if the average young person is going to have at least 20 jobs and at least seven careers — that's what the data shows — you're going to have to change careers and jobs multiple times. Sometimes it's going to be involuntary changes, where it's not because you want to do it, it’s because your employer says that things are changing. So you're gonna have to have the resilience to be able to make those pretty significant shifts.
So how do you teach resilience? And how do you build resilience? Well, entrepreneurship skills are all about resilience. So we really focus our programs on allowing young people to come out of the schooling experience having had at least some experience with failure, trying, pivoting, and changing, recognizing that this mindset of the future of work is very much about being intellectually curious, to pick up new skills, being constant learners, and being able to pivot and change.
Alan Fleischmann
I think that's great, I think it’s not 100% clear whether people are going to change jobs in different places. But it's clear that people are gonna change jobs, even if they're in one organization. I hear conflicting things — one thing about people changing many careers, and then also people changing their jobs and careers within one place that is amenable to their growth and amenable to changes because of the way they're growing.
But your point is exactly right: no matter what, people are going to need to be challenged, to have different jobs, and expect to have different jobs within their own organizations as well.
What skills do you think are required for that? We don't know what all the jobs are for tomorrow. But what are the skills that we need?
Asheesh Advani
There's actually a whole taxonomy of skill sets; over 20 of them, but I'll just pick a couple. One of them is communication skills. So, really investing the time to communicate to different types of people and to put yourself in settings where you might be challenged and, at a young age, be forced to learn these new skills.
That's why I'm very grateful, frankly, that I went through all of the speech therapy I did. Because it improved my ability to communicate in different types of settings. One of the exercises they made us do was extemporaneous speaking on random topics. We had to quickly and fluently speak about a topic they just put on a note card in front of us. That sort of skill will be more important in the future.
Another skill is curiosity. So, fostering this sense of actually wanting to learn, wanting to read books, wanting to browse the internet to learn about new fields. ManpowerGroup calls it “learnability.” So, do you actually have the ability and willingness to want to learn new things?
Those are just two on the taxonomy. The World Economic Forum has a really great Future of Jobs Report. Now they're doing an Education 4.0 Report, which lays out all of the jobs of the future and all of the skills which are needed in a really systematic way. In a very broad way, of course, because it's such a global organization, but I’d encourage you to check that out if you haven't.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell me a little about the culture and organization itself, JA Worldwide. What kind of people work there, especially at the international, headquarters level, where you are? Tell us a little bit about that and who are the kind of people that work with you.
Asheesh Advani
Yeah. So we've got a very diverse team from all over the world. So JA Worldwide is structured where we have regional operating centers — one in Jordan, one in Argentina, one in Ghana, and one in Singapore. And even though we have got these bases around the world, we actually have staff all over Sub-Saharan Africa, all over South and Central America, and in Asia Pacific and the Middle East. So we really are very global team.
We interact quite substantially with the team in the US — JA USA, which is based in Colorado Springs, Colorado — and the team in Europe. That's based in Brussels, but has a pan-European staffing model as well. So we really do feel like a very global organization.
In terms of the types of people, they're very youth focused. I think a lot of people have had experiences at a young age which made them want to give back. The motivation for working at the organization is very, very mission based, which just makes it an enjoyable place to work. Because people are genuinely trying to make the world a better place.
Alan Fleischmann
And then how do they interact with the local chapters? Is each one regionally focused within your operation? Are they working on functional issues, geographic issues, or both?
Asheesh Advani
Both. It feels complicated, but it's actually quite simple. We have 115 national offices, they each have a national leader and board. And then we've got six regional offices — Europe, Africa, et cetera — and they have a regional leader and regional board. We've got the global team that I just mentioned, which has a global board, and me and my team, and we interact through both staff-based collaboration and board-based collaboration.
So we’ve got all sorts of staffing opportunities to get people together. We have a philosophy called One JA, which has communities of practice that bring all the marketing folks together, all the tech folks together, all the learning experience and program folks together, et cetera.
We also have ways to collaborate at the board level. One reason people get involved with boards, of course, is they get to meet each other and they get to have great experiences. We create these pretty cool board experiences as well to get them connected to young people, get them connected to each other. So we have board meetings all over the world. All the board members pay their own way to go, so it really is a giant volunteer organization where people are willing to give up their time, treasure, and talent.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. I love that this combination of global, regional, and local, and that you're actually building these affiliate organizations we talked about.
What advice would you give — because you've had to hone your persuasion skills, as we talked about earlier — what advice would you give to folks who don't necessarily see those skills as natural, but need to develop them? Do you find that, because you guys live by what you preach and actually are coaches as well as living it, that makes it easier? What would you recommend to the aspiring CEOs, the CEOs, and others in leadership positions who are listening to the show today? How would they actually go about developing those skills?
Asheesh Advani
I think there's two really simple pieces of advice I give. One is, don't make it all about your idea. In fact, if you're able and willing to be humble enough to realize that somebody else's idea might actually be better than yours and be willing to have the dialogue to ensure that, even if you may not fully see and appreciate their perspective, the other person's idea, you should be able to take a back seat and let them feel like they own it. Because people just own ideas when they feel they were part of creating them, that’s human nature. So I think the first piece of advice I'd give is, really work extra hard as a leader to empower the ideas that come from the team and your colleagues, across the world or across your organization.
The second is to build your empathy muscles. People think of empathy as being this soft and fuzzy thing that's sort of nice to have. But empathy is… I'll put it in brute commercial terms. The best salespeople in the world have empathy, because they can put themselves in the shoes of their customer. So if you want to be a great, persuasive leader, build your empathy muscles, because the more you can put yourself in other people's shoes, the more effective you'll be as a leader.
Alan Fleischmann
So particularly for young people, entrepreneurship is tied to a desire to do well on the planet and to dwell in their communities. Tell us a bit more about the values, not just the value, proposition. The values that you see as necessary and that you see scaling in communities around the world.
Is it your experience that the definition of entrepreneurship is also changing because of that? That how we define ourselves, how we look at entrepreneurship, is changing? In a way that it has to have a good element, not just a successful financial element to it?
Asheesh Advani
One of the things that gives me a lot of hope for the future — I know we have a lot of negatives in the world right now and a lot of real risk — is the young people I see through the JA organization who are building businesses in high school, who are doing this program that's called JA Company Program. It's a global program. In almost every country we operate in around the world, there's a group of high school kids are building businesses as we speak. About 500,000 kids went through the program last year, and when I see these businesses, 70% of them are ones which have a social element that is all about helping the world and building a more sustainable society. 70%!
So what we now would call social entrepreneurship is the best way to think of these businesses, even though they might be very commercial in their nature. As I look at that statistic and I just sort of fast forward to the future, I really do believe that this idea of capitalism having a sustainable future — as opposed to losing the battle with other forms of economic engagement — I really do believe capitalism is changing and it will survive and thrive. So that gives me hope. I don't know if it gives you hope, but it definitely makes me feel happy about the future.
Alan Fleischmann
That's wonderful to hear, actually. The good can be great.
Obviously, we're living through a significantly volatile time, geopolitically, economically, socially. There's a lot around vulnerable communities, systemic racism, and racial discrepancies and disparities. We've got inflation, we've got instability in so many communities, and we have the war in Europe. I mean, it's a pretty negative period if you're looking at it through that lens. But what I love about JA Worldwide is that, no matter what the difficulties are, there's something in your work that helps to inspire hope.
We just had Jane Goodall on the show here recently, and she's a good friend. She's been on the show now twice, and her mission in life is to remind us of what's good and hopeful. Tell us a little bit of a what you see, in the work that you do and the scale that you’re doing it, that would give us a little bit of that hope.
Asheesh Advani
Yeah, I love what Jane does. And I aspire, I would say, to be able to be as effective as she's been in delivering and creating a sense of hope.
I will say that for us at JA, similar to hope it may be a different side of the coin is optimism. When I look at the data around what young people believe, young people are more optimistic than their older peers. We did some research into why people lose optimism as they age. And we realized that there's some very specific, let's call them optimism behaviors, which you can instill in young people. Things like being able to turn a negative into a positive through gratitude, right? Things like being able to realize that when you identify things on a daily basis that you're grateful for, you start to take neutrals and negatives and turn them into positives so that when you're older, you actually have the ability to do that when you confront a difficult situation. Or even keeping a journal. Journal-izing. That is a behavior that, when you start to write down things that you reflect on, it helps you build this optimism muscle.
These are the types of things that you can do to maintain your youthful optimism as you as you get older. I think JA, historically as an organization, has put kids in front of mentors who've helped them see their future selves and see what their future holds. That just gives them a sense of hope and optimism for the future. So I think that's what I would say is our special sauce.
Alan Fleischmann
What is the biggest piece of advice that you teach your kids about entrepreneurship? I know you've got twin high schoolers, right? What do you tell them?
Asheesh Advani
I do. What do I tell my twin high schoolers? Wow. I feel very bad for them, because they have a mom who's in charge of the science fairs and they have a dad who's in charge of entrepreneurship programs for kids. So these poor high schoolers have to deal with us barraging them with new ideas and new theories on how they need to constantly improve. I do have some degree of empathy for my own kids.
I’ll leave you with a couple of examples of things that we do. So I mentioned this gratitude exercise. On a daily basis, we ask everyone in the family, not just the kids, to find three things that they are grateful for. And really, that exercise allows you, particularly when you get to the third thing, to take a negative or a neutral and turn it into a positive. I know for one of my sons, who is, let's say, not naturally the most optimistic kid, he's said numerous times that this exercise has made him, you know, look at the ice cream cone that dropped on the floor not as “oh my God, I lost my ice cream,” but as, “geez, am I not lucky to be in a family where I can even have ice cream.” I mean, that perspective for a kid to have is rare. I would say it took him three years of doing this before he got there, and probably has more to go on this dimension. So I guess that's at least one example of a behavior that we do.
On the entrepreneurship side, they're involved in all sorts of activities — thankfully, through their school, not just through their family, which allows them to feel that they've created things and innovated and worked with teams. We’ve put them in JA, of course, and they participated in a really great program called JA Global Youth Forum, which they still remember to this day as being quite seminal for them, where they got to meet kids around the world.
So they're obviously lucky kids, and I fully recognize that there are kids around the world who don't have access to these great experiences. I will say, though, that JA is free. We don't charge for any of our services. So really, it's about making sure your local school has access to JA if you want to get your kids involved.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. One of the things that I don’t think many people know is that JA Worldwide was nominated this year for the Nobel Peace Prize. Tell us a little bit about that, what that meant to you, and really, what it symbolizes about the mission and purpose of the organization and its leadership.
Asheesh Advani
Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. I mean, it really is incredibly humbling for our organization to be on the same plateau or stage with some of the other individuals and organizations that have won the Peace Prize.
The Peace Prize was created about 100 years ago, and one of the elements in Alfred Nobel's will was about fraternity among nations. I can speak just from real, authentic personal experience of how amazing it feels when you bring young people together. We had the Global Youth Forum I mentioned, and they were kids from over 50 countries all together. And they really look for what brings us together and our similarities. There were kids from Israel and Palestine, kids from India and Pakistan, kids from parts of Asia that have been at war for many generations. You bring kids together, and they just look past all that history and they look at opportunity — commercial ties through entrepreneurship, obviously, but they're young kids, so they're perhaps not even there yet in terms of doing business with each other. But the chance of them doing business together goes up by virtue of these early youth experiences.
I think of the first flight I ever took when I was a kid for a school event. I still remember it distinctly. And for some of these kids who've never been on a plane before, to come to a JA event, to get on a plane and meet kids from around the world, it changes their entire worldview. So the Nobel Peace Prize, for me and for our organization, really highlights that when you bring young people together across borders and really focus on economic empowerment and entrepreneurship, you're fostering job creators who will ensure that that they themselves won't get tempted to be recruited into groups that prey on youth disillusion. Right. So it helps the individual, but it also helps society, because these young entrepreneurial people create jobs and economic opportunity for others that reduces poverty in a given country. There's a strong correlation between poverty and war.
So for me, I feel really grateful that somebody has recognized this connection between entrepreneurship and peace. And that JA can help bring more attention to that connection for the world by virtue of this nomination.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little bit about some of the data points — your size, the geography, and then some of the impact points that you'd want people to know about this 100-plus-year-old organization and what it's actually doing every day.
Asheesh Advani
Sure. So we reach over 10 million young people per year. Last year, we reached 12.5 million young people. We do that by having about 500,000 volunteers and teachers who deliver our programs. This is not a completely staff-based model — we do have staff in 115 countries, but really, this is a highly leveraged model, a very low-cost model, because we work through volunteers and teachers in most countries.
As I mentioned, we've got about well over 6000 board members who are supporters and donors. We’re supported by over half of the Fortune 200, so we partner with many companies as well to deliver volunteers. In addition to providing some resources financially, they also give volunteer time from their staff. And we’ve been ranked as one of the top 10 NGOs in the world for the last three years running, so we've built a bit of credibility in the non-governmental organizational space, which really helps because it helps us build partnerships. Corporations and businesses really do care about partnering with credible nonprofit organizations. So I hope those data points give you a sense of our scale.
Alan Fleischmann
What are the questions that no one ever asks about JA Worldwide that you wish they would? And then, one of the questions that no one ever asks about you that you wish they would? And then let's ask those questions.
Asheesh Advani
Oh my goodness, that's a tough one.
Well, I think one question that our funders and our partners are rarely asked is how we're able to get people to collaborate and cooperate across borders. I think people just assume that it happens and they're quite pleased. But there's some incredible inequity in the world. It's possible for people to just develop a sense of resentment, jealousy, and hatred as a result of inequity. You know, $5 million in one country goes a lot further than $5 million in another country just to give you a sense of how it really adds up. And we work really hard in our organization to ensure that we don't create a culture of resentment, jealousy, and hatred, which takes time. It takes empathy, it takes dialogue, it takes leaders at the national and regional level who are not people who normally would harbor those tendencies, which means basically recruiting great people.
So I would say that's a core element to what we do that sometimes just gets forgotten or glossed over, when you look at all the scale and all the data and the impact we have on youth. But I'm so grateful to my colleagues, because without them having that innate culture of fairness and equity, we probably couldn't do what we do.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. What about you?
Asheesh Advani
Jeez, what do I wish people asked me? You asked the question about mentors. But we all have a family and friends who provide real emotional support to us. And I think at times, so many of the questions for me are about the organization and about leadership, not about the family behind that support and the friendships that have allowed the social, emotional, and economic stability to be able to do what I do. So that's, I think, one of the things that true not just for me, but for any leader. It takes a village, and I am very grateful to have that village. And I completely recognize that there are others who don't, that haven't had the benefits that I've had.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. Well, this has been such a pleasure for me to talk to you. What's the next thing you want to tackle in your life? And what is the next thing you want JA Worldwide to tackle?
Asheesh Advani
We're building a microcredential, which is a fancy way of saying this thing that has value for young people. It is not just a high school degree or a college degree, it's something else. And it's called an Entrepreneurship Skills Pass.
As you know, credentials have become a big part of what companies care about and what the world is starting to care about beyond just degrees, because credentials are about skills, mindsets, and behavior. And we've created one which showcases to the world that a high school kid has gone through an entrepreneurship program where they've actually built a real business in school and they've taken a pre- and post-assessment for what they've learned, these soft skills. So we've rolled this out now. It started in Europe, with funding from the European Union, and now it's in over 45 countries around the world, including in South America and Africa. A couple of US states are also rolling it out too. I'm very hopeful that if you fast forward five years, we're going to have this be really the world's first, and perhaps even most substantive, high school-based credential for young entrepreneurs.
Alan Fleischmann
And what about you, when you're tackling your leadership? Is there is there an area that you want to expand your own skills and expertise?
Asheesh Advani
Yeah, sure. So we do a 360, I've done it several times now. And in the latest one, what came out at the bottom — I'm very transparent about what I’m bad at — one of the things I'm very bad at is cultivating individual talents. Which basically means that, sometimes we're going so fast as an organization, focusing on innovation, creativity, and thinking outside the box, that I sometimes forget that I need to make sure that, at all levels of the organization, we're doing career paths and professional development. Giving people who work for our organization a chance to build their own career and their own skills. So that's a real big area of focus for me and the organization: how do you create those in a resource- constrained nonprofit where we're really a network of teams of five to 25 people in every little geography we work in, whether it's a state, or town, or a country in some parts of the world? It's difficult to create these career paths, because if you only work with 10 other people, and there's only one person in marketing and you want to be promoted, where you're gonna go?
So, a big challenge and a big opportunity is for us to think globally on this dimension and start to have the teams move around, maybe across borders, and really feel like we're giving a true career path and allowing individuals to live up to their full potential, even in our organization.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. You've been listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM Radio. I've had a pleasure today talking to a pretty extraordinary friend and CEO of JA Worldwide — known as Junior Achievement to many of us — Asheesh Advani, who has had an extraordinary career as an entrepreneur himself, was a Junior Achievement member as a young person, and now is the CEO of this worldwide organization. As we look at all the challenges that are facing us and all the risks that are out there in the world, knowing that we've got young people who are dedicated to coming up with ideas, solutions, and opportunities for others in their community and beyond — that gives us that hope that we're looking for.
It's been a real pleasure having you on the show today, and I'd love to have you back on. Congratulations on the Nobel Prize nomination. We will be watching that closely. Just know that as you scale, we are rooting for you, because we know you're doing great things in the world and you're a great CEO. So thanks for joining us today.
Asheesh Advani
Thank you, Alan. This was wonderful.
Alan Fleischmann
Really a real pleasure for us. I look forward to having you back. Thank you, my friend.