WELCOME TO THE YEAR 2112 Let us tell you a story that began a century ago in the year 2012 when globally responsible leadership had just started to emerge. It was an amazing time. After 200 years of intensive development, society had all the economic and technical capabilities necessary to enable 7 billion people to live on the planet. However, they had not focused on living well; more than a billion people were starving at that time. Not only that, but they also held with the peculiar idea that you could design and maintain a system which delivered perpetual growth on a nite Earth. In hindsight it seems a laughable concept, but in 2012 most people actually believed in that system. Every country on Earth (except Bhutan) had, if you like, a national goal of growing gross domestic product. At the time it seemed a perfectly logical approach, given how they believed in the fundamental idea that tangible products make you happy. They expressed the equally odd idea that the primary function of busi- nesses was to make its shareholders as wealthy as possible. People didn't yet understand that the things that make human beings happy and life worthwhile largely involve less tangible aspects, like love, being part of a community, the quality of their relationships, meaningful work, service, and living in an unspoiled, natural environment. Interestingly, during this tumultuous period a group of people emerged who held a different view. They were working towards the idea of glob- ally responsible leaders. Globally responsible leadership was really built around very simple questions, such as What kind of world do you want to live in? and What kind of world should we create with the extraordinary technical and economic capabilities that we have mastered? These people had realized that pursuing perpetual growth for its own sake was not eco- logically possible, or even sensible from the perspective of human progress and well-being. The business world further witnessed a new movement around glob- ally responsible leadership. The movement was built on the idea that we need entrepreneurs people who could create new initiatives to build the kind of society that we have in 2112; but also statesmen, people who would lead on behalf of society using the resources of their own organiza tions in service of the common good; and thirdly, above all else, leaders. Leadership in the new context was dened as being about sensemaking, about understanding the real context in which a leader was working. It was also about sense-giving, providing clarity about what everybody in the organization was working for. The early twenty-first century saw the emergence of a new type of leadership, 3 more inclusive and holistic approach where people started to organize more organically. Movements like Occupy and Indigns were early expressions of such new ways of organic organizations. The crisis in the early twenty-rst century was centered on an unsustain- able economic system and their collective failure to create a world worth living in for all the people on the planet. At that time they expected the population to reach 9 billion people worldwide. During this period their priorities began to shift, culminating in the birth of globally responsible leadership. With this agenda of global responsibility, people started to explore the fundamental questions of purpose, and the purpose of the role of business in particular. In 2012 the common business mantra was all about short-term prot. Despite this collective folly, no chief executive of a great company went to their grave fondly recalling how they had doubled the earnings every year for 10 years. Profit does not feature in the legacy of any leader. Neverthless, that was how their system determined the fate, failure and success of organizations. Something new emerged from this crisis of purpose: the idea of purpose- driven organizations that joined the dots between what society needed from a social and environmental perspective; and what their organization was doing - not only the incremental aspects. If you read the history books you'll nd something called corporate social responsibility which, as a famous academic jokingly described it at the time, was basically about putting lipstick on a bulldog. The trouble with corporate social responsi- bility concerned a misdirected mindset, in that \"we should try to produce our products with less energy and waste" without ever asking whether the products were needed at all. During this transition, global society, leaders and organizations explored the notion of purpose, their rat'son d'tre, repeatedly asking themselves the deeper question: What kind of world do I want to create? An increasing number of companies and even business schools saw themselves as stakeholders in the creation of a very different kind of world, a sustain- able world where people lived well. All of them. Such concepts took them into the landscape of different behaviors, of being entrepreneurs, leaders, statesmen and, critically, of living true to their values. This is something that we in the twenty-second century tend to take for granted, namely that the journey of reaponsible leadership always starts with an inner journey. If you don't look at yourself you can't effectively consider the potential of your own organization. If you don't know who you are, how can you lead others? Since the second half of the twentieth century, people in management education and business schools in particular focused on creating diligent administrators, capable managers and, in the political sphere, lobbyists pursuing largely self-interested goals. At some level they wanted to create leaders with the courage, awareness and the inner wisdom to do the right thing, make the right call, to say yes to what is right and no to that which makes no sense. But, more often than not, people in management educa tion were equally trapped, just like the business organizations they trained, _ the policy makers and pretty much society at large. Everybody was caught in the twentieth century paradigm of perpetual growth, shop-until-you- drop, and short-term profit maximization. A small group of people tried to do something about it. They imagined a world where management education was made available to everybody, not only to the elite. They wanted to develop leaders across all kinds of organizations who would contribute to the well-being of those they con nected with, and develop solutions that would improve the planet's fragile state. The leaders we have been celebrating over the past decades emerged from this movement, the creators of the learning circle which they called the collaboratory. It may well be difcult to imagine, but back in 2012 it was unusual to have students and researchers meet with design engineers, environmental scientists, students and business leaders to work out new solutions. In 2012 the dominant way was the so-caIled sage on the stage a professor lecturing several hundred students in an antiquated lecture theater. They believed that the role of the teacher was merely knowledge transfer, as if the man (and it usually was a man) standing on the podium had the answer: magically attained knowledge of some eternal truth. It was during those heady days that the shift from teaching to learning commenced. The emergence of the Internet brought with it a range of distinctly bizarre products and services. For example, students consulted media- issued rankings on business schools that did not take into account what students would learn or contribute to society upon graduation. Instead, these rankings measured how much more students could earn after gradu- ation, or how many articies from the researchers at a given school were published in specialized journals that were distributed to very few readers and generally had no requirement for societal value whatsoever. In the decades before the European and U.S. governments went bank~ rupt their ministries of education would pay a great deal of money to edu cational institutions which maintained this perplexing model, rather than pick the best places to fund against any measure of societal value. As often as not they simply supported the institutions that had been in existence the longest. Students had to borrow money to pay for their education, money that they were supposed to pay back after graduation. To make matters worse, many graduates failed to nd jobs at all, By the mid twenty-rst century youth unemployment touched 50 percent in most developed countries. In the United States, student loans grew so bloated that they surpassed the accumulated debt of all households. After the presidential elections in 2016, mounting student debt resulted in a revolution that helped to break the U.S. dollar, which until then had still been the leading world currency. In the decade that followed the higher education system simply collapsed, together with the government. Nobody could afford to pay for education anymore, while those in the emerging nations who needed education most still had extremely limited access. This period of economic and social turmoil gave rise to a new system. The upheaval must have been quite something a time of fundamental change throughout the world. What nally emerged from the shambles were several related initiatives that provided learning to all those who needed it. The collaboratory movement resulted in 'pop-up' business schools emerging all over the world. These schools were built around the idea that all stakeholders within a system need to come together to resolve the most pressing issues of this world, and that subject experts had to make sense of the contribution of their fields based on the needs of a given issue. The simple truth was that any given problem always requires the involve ment of many different fields of expertise. Research scholars developed new ways to contribute to these issues, collaborating with many people outside their functional disciplines. Transdisciplinary research was still a new frontier. The year 2012 was also the twentieth anniversary of the famous 1992 Rio Earth Summit. How we wish we had been present to witness the birth of this transformation! Consider transporting yourself back to 2012. Imagine what it was like. Think through how you would react, and what you would have done to create a society which is globally responsible, a future for the kind of world which, a hundred years later, we now can enjoy a world where everyone lives well, where social inequality is a thing of the past, and where we live in balance with the natural world. We hope you enjoyed this short history lesson. Now we invite you to further explore the concept of global responsibility and how it evolved. Let us begin the journey