Inspiring Journey - YLA

YLA - Youth Leadership Academy by McKinsey & Company, Malaysia. Yes. It's McKinsey & Co. It's one of the best management consulting firms in the world. It's been ranked No. 1 for 6 consecutive years in the Vault.com list of top consulting firms.

Having been selected as one of the YLA-ers is definitely an awesome thing. I'm so lucky, to be honest. Actually I wasn't that confident when I was interviewed on phone because I didn't really prepare for it and I just blah out whatever in my mind. I just sent in the form spontaneously when both Khai Sheng recommended this to me and at the same time, I received a circular from another friend of mine. I even failed to recall back what essay I'd written in the application form.

But this doesn't matter much anymore, as now I'm part of YLA. Kaka. YLA is a series of 3 workshops with the theme: Leading self, leading others and leading Malaysia. This is indeed an awe-inspiring program, providing you a lot of useful management tools and most importantly the McKinsey way to solve problems.

Practicing pyramid principle to synthesize the governing thought

Besides, in every workshop there will be a prominent leader to give us an inspiring keynote speech. So far, Datuk Vinod and Mr. Seelan.

Datuk Vinod shared his experience on how he started to be an entrepreneur when he's still a university student in the States. He kicked start his T-shirt business with only 50 bucks and at the age of 20, he sold his company off and turned into millionaire. He became Datuk at the age of 26 and dramatically he went bankrupt at 32. But today, he got back his millions again. Lesson from him: "Do what you think is right and it'll never go wrong".

Mr. Seelan shared with us the 5 crucial qualities to be a leader.

1st quality: Dreams that scare yourself

2nd quality: Take stretch opportunities with discipline

3rd quality: Find yourself caring mentors and partners

4th quality: Giving - giving makes us think from different perspectives

5th quality: Mental renewal and resilience - living the unfamiliar

Tips from him on how to know when there's an opportunity. Opportunity occurs when everyone keeps themselves away from it. He highlighted that YLA couldn't make us into a leader, neither does he, but only we ourselves could make us into a leader. And yeah, this is definitely true. Many people are expecting someone to bring them to where they want to be and in fact, they could only guide and direct you. At the end of the day, it's you yourself to walk to your destination.

And yeah, every YLA-er will be assigned a mentor and my mentor is Mr Megar Ardian. He's the Officer of MAS Transformation office and personal assistant of MAS's CEO. Besides my own mentor, I did learn a lot from other mentors too. They could provide you different perspectives to look into a matter and thus to solve it based on their experience.

YLA-ers during Dinner with Mentors at Le Meridien Hotel