Written by Student Reporter, Cynthia Subroto (MBA 2019)

SBM ITB had the opportunity to get public lecture from Ikatan Bankir Indonesia (IBI) on Thursday, 20 February 2020 about “Leadership in the Midst of Disruptive Forces and Global Volatility”. The lecture was also the implementation of IBI Goes to Campus program. The lecture was given by Mrs. Anika Faisal who is the Secretary General of IBI.  She was the former Director of Compliance at PT Bank Danamon Indonesia Tbk and PT Bank BTPN Tbk.

Mrs. Anika opened the lecture by saying that experience does not mean anything today because the banking world is now different from earlier times. “Past performance does not guarantee future performance”, she added. Her area of expertise are law, compliance, and risk management, but she always learns new things every day, even from her own children to get more insights in order to face today’s problems. Problems now are more varied than in the past which were usually homogeneous. She also explained about the differences between academic and real life. In real life, problems cannot be compartmentalized and much depends on anything, whereas in academic, problems can be considered black and white.

The disruptive forces were explained in the next segment. The examples of disruptive forces are China emerged and produced high quality product with cheaper price so they can challenge the United States, population of China and Japan over the next few years will be dominated by non-productive age (65+ years old), environmental damage such as corona virus which is currently endemic will affect the world business and economy, OECD countries already experiencing poorer younger generation compare to their parents, and technological sophistication with the advent of robots that can replace some human work.

Mrs. Anika added that we must have a purpose in working in order to make us happy and passionate doing our work. If there is no purpose, the enthusiasm in working will be extinguished in just one or two years. A leader must be able to form such an environment. In the past, the leadership style that prevailed was that leaders gave direction to their subordinates while now are more collaborative and influencing.

In the last session of the lecture, Mrs. Anika gave suggestion for students to develop leadership skill as an university student by study hard and study smart, make friends with diverse group, participate in extracurricular and organization to train your soft skills, read a lot, participate in internship where you can bridge the academic and real world, be tough and resilient when facing failure, exercise regularly, maintain spiritual health, obey rules and regulations, and last maintain values in life.

To close the lecture, Mrs. Anika recommended students to learn about relevant technology in industry 4.0 such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, internet of things, fintech, etc. from the internet. “There is no reason that children today are no smarter than people in the past because now we can access everything with the availability of the internet,” closed Mrs. Anika.