78% of Australian businesses plan to enter a new overseas market this year. How do you get your company and your team internationally capable?

Welcome to Insight Edge the podcast all about leadership from the Australian Institute of Management. My name is Kirsten Lees

This week we’re looking at trade delegations: What should you expect? Do they deliver? And how do you prepare? We talk to BRIC and China expert David thomas, CEO of Think Global.

David has been facilitating business relationships between developed and emerging countries in various capacities for thirty years. He has led a number of trade missions into Asia, with a special focus on China.

We asked David, do trade delegations deliver for small and medium sized businesses?

Leaders - and their businesses - who succeed in business in Asia will need to be 'Asia literate', have ‘deep experience’. How do you learn ‘Asia literacy’ and how do you best gain ‘deep experience’ that’s relevant to your business?

In this month's Insight Edge, from the Australian institute of management we’re looking at international dimensions of leadership, with a focus on the world’s fastest growing market, Asia.

How can leaders tailor their own skills and enable their organisations to take advantage of the Asian century, and what are some of the barriers? Today we talk to Megan Mulia, Director of Research and Education at Asialink Business.

In 2014 Asialink business published the 11 critical capabilities for business success in Asia. What are they and how do Australian businesses stack up?

This week, in the last of our series on Insight Edge on leadership careers, and we talk to Maddav Chinappa, Director of Strategic Relations, News & Publishers at Google.

Few industries have seen quite the disruption that the media has been through in the past two decades. Maddav cut his teeth in the news room of the Associated Press, Asia desk and the BBC. Six years ago, he made the switch to a leadership role at tech giant Google.

What do millennials need from leaders? What are they like as leaders? How do they feel about the concept of working into their 70s, let alone sharing the staff kitchen and the office with people old enough to be their grandparents?

So much of what we know about ‘millenials’ come from surveys and data sets. We ask four young people in the early stages of their leadership journey some key career questions.

What does the leader of tomorrow look like? We talk to leadership recruitment specialist, Tony Simpson about the lessons all leaders can learn from disruption in the media industry. What skills are transferable from old world leadership to leading challenger brands like Vice and Buzzed? And what skills once valued may now count against you?

We learn that there is a shortage of appropriate leaders as challenger brands become large multimillion (and multibillion) dollar companies; that soft skills matter more than ever as leaders of the future prioritise emotional intelligence and consensual leadership styles. We hear companies are looking for leaders who are willing to take risks, to take responsibility for and to learn from failure; and that

diversity is as important in the leadership team as it is across the company, if the business is to reflect ethos and the values of the products they are creating and the customer the must reach. Finally we hear that leadership skill is no longer heavily industry dependent. Leadership careers are cross-industry and global.

Here's the latest Insight Edge featuring London Business School's Lynda Gratton, former chair of Leadership at the World Economic Forum and author of #100YearLife, living and working in the age of longevity. Lynda talks about what the collision of technology and longevity will mean for careers, for leaders and for organisations. What do we need to think about to have a happy, prosperous and productive 100 years?

What does 'the end of lockstep' mean and how can each one of us shape our own multistage career path? How must organisations - and leaders - change to accommodate these big shifts?

Episode one of a four-part series on careers and leadership that took me to the common rooms of Melbourne University and the HQ of Google in London.

Subscribe now to receive all four episodes and to catch up with past interviews.

This month we’re looking at the tools on the market that help leaders understand who they are, and how they work with others.

The leadership development market is worth $14 billion dollars in the US alone. A good chunk of that goes on off the shelf and bespoke diagnostic and development tools.

But do they really work?

Phil McCredden talks us through 360 degree feedback. What can a leader learn from asking everyone around them what they think? What are the risks? And how do you take the download of feedback and weave it into a development plan that takes the individual and the company on to bigger and better things?

Then we talk to Dr Ben Palmer, one of the brains behind a suite of Emotional Intelligence tools developed in Australia 15 years ago that have been embraced worldwide. He unbundles why emotional intelligence matters and what its like to take a room full of leaders and tell them it’s time to talk about feelings.

Finally a new field of leadership development that’s gaining traction: personal excellence. Alex Crossley of the Institute of Customer excellence has built a unique international data set on a range of behaviours and habits of the highly successful. It’s time he says, to measure our excellence and if we want to compete with robots, learn how to boost it.