Creative Leadership Innovative Enterprise Scale-Up Design
High up on the top floor of an Amsterdam hotel a vision is realized: a hundred entrepreneurs and corporates from all over the world are meeting for a celebratory dinner. It’s called the Meeting of the Minds. Some have just completed an 18-month program that others are still in the middle of and that yet another group, possibly with the most bewildered look, is just beginning.
Each has come with their own dream: a project or company which they are conceiving, realizing or scaling. The program itself includes extensive coaching on creative leadership, working intensively in small innovation teams on societal problems and the nurturing of their own brainchild through feedback, business plans and by connecting across the globe with each other. They are what THNK dreamt of: excited engaged creative leaders from around the globe, the first four classes of THNK participants, coming together for a meeting of minds and hearts.
THNK School of Creative Leadership is a school without lectures, classrooms, reading lists, grades, or diplomas. There is no theory taught for the sake of theory; there are no case studies and simulations. Everything is real: real people, real plans, real companies, real impact and real change. It’s only when you experience how hard it is to explain what THNK is that you realize how radical this approach is.
How did this happen? What is the story of how the vision of THNK became true? To the extent it is of course. The vision is never truly finished. It aims to support hundreds, nay, thousands more creative leaders and enterprises in realizing their visions in the world. And also THNK is still a start-up, so let’s not proclaim victory too early.