APIC is an investment holding company. Its investments are diverse, spanning across the manufacturing, trade, distribution, and service sectors, with a presence in Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Turkey through its subsidiaries.

In 2022, APIC called upon IMD to help them develop 18 of their future leaders. We developed a learning journey of seven months duration. This was structured around several customized modules and also included exposing the 18 future leaders to the IMD Orchestrating Winning Performance program, where each of them followed their own individual learning schedules with managers and leaders from around the world.

During a seven-month program, they worked on five major enterprise projects, which were presented at a graduation ceremony in December in Amman, Jordan, attended by the Chair of APIC Group and 20 executives. Such was the success of the program that the Chair decided to invest in all five of the projects and implement them throughout the group.

In 2018, the pan-African financial services provider Absa Group Ltd completed its separation from its majority shareholder, Barclays. Entering a new chapter in its history, the bank faced the challenge of articulating a new growth strategy and successfully rebranding itself with existing and new customers across the African continent. Adding to the enormity of Absa’s task was the intensifying competition and digital disruption in the banking industry.
Could Absa live up to these challenges and redefine its identity and purpose as a boldly relevant, digital-first, and proudly African enterprise?

Absa partnered with IMD to develop an integrated offering, organized into a series of learning journeys that targeted the bank’s young talent, middle managers, and senior executives. Through a mix of custom modules, open programs, coaching, pre- and post-workshop learning, and enterprise projects in a number of countries, the aim was to accelerate the development of a thriving entrepreneurial culture at Absa. One of the goals was to embed new habits and practices traditionally associated with startups – speed, customer-centricity, hands-on learning, agile experimenting, and prototyping.

Absa is committed to fueling growth across the African continent: its managers are spearheading and successfully implementing tech-powered and other innovative projects – country-based as well
as pan-African – that create real impact for local communities.

This is how the concept of Africanacity – the distinctly African ability to always find a way to get things done – was born. It was a new word for an age-old attitude unique to the continent and defined by ingenuity, tenacity, creativity, audacity, and positivity.

For the fourth year, Absa will collaborate with IMD to launch five learning journeys developing more of Absa’s leaders and talents from all over the continent.

In 2020, we started the journey of transforming our Asian operations by adopting a country-based strategy to increase our presence, impact, and revenues in key Southeast Asian markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. Building on our initial success in 2021, we began to collaborate with more business development representatives in large economies where we had already operated, such as Indonesia, as well as new ones like India and Australia.

At the same time, we accelerated our activities in Japan, with an increased commitment to the Nikkei Management Forum, which allows us to influence major conversations taking place in the Japanese business community, and with the formation of the Japan Management Forum, which seeks to improve the competitiveness of the country as a whole.
Towards the end of the year, we integrated our activities in Northeast Asia with those in Southeast Asia. These changes, coupled with a restructuring of our operations in China, allowed us to create a unified Asia and Oceania presence supported by centralized regional marketing, program development and program delivery resources from our hubs in Singapore and Shenzhen.

We also moved to our new state-of-the-art campus in Buona Vista, Singapore. The campus is hosted in shared facilities, which allows us to expand the campus to accommodate up to 250 participants in 22 different learning spaces, and scale it back when not in use. We used this campus to run the largest Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) program ever held outside Switzerland. Over 240 executives spanning 35 countries, representing 78 companies from 26 different industries attended the week-long OWP to accelerate their development and increase impact.