From Russia With Leaders – Good 2 Work With

    The Club of Leaders Good 2 Work with seems to be one of the well-kept secrets of Russia (and would have stayed so, had it not been registered on ArcticIndex). Good 2 Work is a virtual place (or sort of a closed social network) for executives and entrepreneurs of different levels and from different industries and countries. It is meant as tool for leaders to learn from and about each other in the field of business leadership. The primary means are professionally pre-recorded video conversations.

    The club was established in April 2008 by Yuri Barzov, who was a partner with the executive search companies Ward Howell and Spencer Stuart. Yuri has also founded the 200+ thousands strong Russian learning community of managers, E-xecutive.

    It is mentioned the Good 2 Work project got started as it was discovered that competency-based structured interviews, which are normally used for executive assessment, can, with some modifications, and in combination with modern video streaming technologies, also serve as a powerful leadership development tool.

    The materials available to the members of the club include videos and transcripts from interviews with VIP participants and guests. More than 200 interviews from over 150 executives are said to be done to date. The interviewees are from major corporations such as 3Com, Allianz, Banque Société Générale Vostok, BMW, Cisco Systems, Citigroup, GE Money Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, HP, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Volvo, and Western Union… Only a third of the material is in English, though, but even so, it is a pretty good bunch. Three fourths of the interviews are with CEOs and business founders, mostly from IT, Financial Services, Consumer Goods, Retail and Consulting.

    There are some partial video materials and comments available on the site also without logging in. Anyone feeling like a leader is welcomed to apply for the club if wishing to learn from leaders and helping the other leaders to grow. However, there is an evaluation process in place where the existing members will screen all new applicants and decide whether to allow them join or not.