LEADERSHIP
Sanyin Siang
Relevance Built on Diversity of Relationships BOB FE LD M A N
How many academics do you know with a social following of more than one million? Sanyin Siang does! Let me explain. In writing for this Relevance Report, I think of relevance as the imparting of perspective or ideas that serves our current and future moments in a way that resonates with a large swath of our society. But in our deeply complex and fragmented world, to do so requires the ability to draw from a diverse set of perspectives, datapoints and experiences. Sanyin is remarkable in this regard. Sanyin is the founding executive director of Duke University’s Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics (COLE) at the Fuqua School of Business. In 2004, Fuqua and Duke men’s basketball head coach Mike Krzyzewski partnered to create the center to help prepare Duke’s MBA students to be the type of leaders that society needs. Because of her prior experience
26
RELEVANCE REPORT 2021-22
in convening multidisciplinary leaders to explore the ethical, legal, and societal implications of technological advances in D.C., Sanyin brought a similar curation across diverse sectors and industries to Fuqua to help understand and contextualize the challenges that leaders face today. Sanyin is relevant because of her ability to share leadership insights and emotionally connect with an audience, whether it’s through posts she shares with her millionplus LinkedIn followers, mentoring a student, or advising a tech CEO. Her two decades of experience has helped her develope an incisive and uncanny ability to detect trends and scale ideas. Her scaffolding is the diverse ecosystem of platforms and relationships that she has fostered which enables her to identify patterns of leadership effectiveness for today and tomorrow. What makes Sanyin’s approach different is her direct engagement across diverse nodes
