Gerald
Ang.

Gerald began by launching a digital and music lifestyle marketing startup — the experience that set the pattern for everything after it: people, innovation, and the culture that holds them together. He went on to serve as Managing Director at Warner Music and to hold regional and global marketing leadership roles at Discovery Asia, General Electric, SingTel and BlackBerry, with more than twenty years of P&L ownership behind him. He has lived and worked in Singapore, Toronto, Melbourne and Shanghai.

Ten years ago, preparing a conference talk at General Electric, he drew three buckets on a single illustration: everyone needs to think like a technologist, everyone needs to think like a behaviourist, and everyone needs to think like a business owner. He still has the picture. The third bucket became the Founder Mindset pillar of Future.Pro.

I don’t believe in future-proof. I’ve always believed in future-ready.

He describes that pillar as working from a place of scarcity, whatever your job title says. No fat budgets, no luxury of resources — so what do you do with what you actually have? He treated every corporate role he ever held as his own small business, down to asking whether a hire was worth the money if the money were his. Marketing director, intern, product developer: the identity is the same, and the effect on an organisation where everybody thinks that way is manoeuvrability and momentum.

He is unsentimental about the vocabulary around AI. Future-proof does not exist; future-ready does, and the difference matters because one is a state you arrive at and the other is something you keep doing. His own currency is time and value: if technology makes the work easier, the interesting question is what you do with the hours that come back. His fear level about AI, asked on his own podcast, was one out of ten.

Through Wild & Wise he designs leadership programmes around three intelligences — self, relational and enterprise — using CliftonStrengths alongside his own design-led Performance Canvas. Nothing off a shelf. He also hosts the Wild & Wise podcast.