Education is a core strategy – not just for individuals but also for society as a whole, to keep pace with a world fraught with more and more confusion, accelerating progress and sometimes revolutionary change. Let’s say that education is the means for us as human beings to get fit and stay that way for modern living. Then, given the complex, fast-moving, revolutionary environment we live in, education should extend to the life-long development of our competence – as a means to cope with the new and different, as a must-have in staying part of this world.

Education – or the honing of competence in all areas of life – is neither a privilege of the elite nor an activity limited to specific vocations. In other words: Education is a right that each and every one of us is entitled to, almost a duty to everyone. But those most obviously affected by this duty are the people who occupy a higher profile in their role as leaders in society. Given the increasingly complex nature of society and the faster and faster pace, not only do we need well educated – i.e., more skilled – specialists, we need managers with a proper education. Experts from the world of science and academia joined their counterparts from business to examine and discuss these issues from a variety of angles at the 2011 Stuttgart Competence Day. Educating people to be and become leaders was the core theme of the fourth Stuttgart Competence Day organized by Steinbeis University Berlin.

The fifth Stuttgart Competence Day will take place on November, 29, 2012.

Video documentation