Human development is not a common term used in companies. You hear about human resources, performance and learning but you don’t see how human development is an integrated system in the management of a company. That has changed with Bob Aubrey’s work on human development for great companies. Today, human development is more strategic than ever for companies as they deal with global organizations and integrate technologies like robotics, machine learning and automation into the workplace. With the invasive power of reading people’s emails, reading their facial expressions on cameras and tracking their movements with GPS systems, human development has also become a major ethical issue for companies.
Bob Aubrey is a well-known international consultant with a background in psychology and philosophy. He has also written many books, articles and white papers on human development and he is devoting his talents to making the workplace a more human environment for people to develop. Bob was born in the USA in 1948 and has lived 30 years in Europe where finished his PhD in philosophy and an MBA, before moving to China in 2002 to contribute to the human development revolution taking place there. He now lives in Singapore. He has worked in over 25 different countries on 6 continent, been a business school professor, entrepreneur and worked on human development policy. His long experience in the field has made him a voice to listen to when it comes to managing people at work.
At the peak of his career, he is focusing on human development in Asia. The world’s three largest workforces are now Asian (China, India and ASEAN) and that is where the majority of the world’s university graduates come from. Bob is concerned that the economic and political shift to Asia made it necessary to define what kind of human development goals, systems and practices will be developed as Asia takes on global leadership. Of the three mega workforces, ASEAN is the most diverse since it does not represent a single nation and there are enormous differences in the political institutions, religions and cultures of the area. In the West, such as system is the European Union. In Asia the system will be ASEAN, which already has a fifty year history as a regional community.
After completing a study with business leaders of ASEAN, Bob was able to define different human development models for China, India and ASEAN that will compete and cooperate for leadership in the “Asian Century”. His understanding of the challenges for creating human development systems in Asian companies that would have a beneficial effect on the world led him to create the ASEAN Human Development Organisation in 2018.
Apart from being an entrepreneur, consultant, professor and writer, Bob Aubrey is a voice for encouraging leaders to make work more human in the future.
Bob has written many books on human development in several different languages. Some of the classics in English classics:
- “Measure of Man: Leading Human Development” (McGraw Hill 2015)
- “Managing Your Aspirations: Developing Personal Enteprise in the Gloal Workplace” (McGraw Hill 2011)
- “Creating Aspirational Leaders: The Global Workforce Advantage” (McGraw Hill 2012)
- “Working Wisdom: Timeless Skills and Vanguard Strategies for Learning Organizations” (Jossey Bass 1995)