As the world looks back to look ahead, nothing could ring more true today than Alvin Toffler‘s prophesy: “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Somewhere along the way, as we chase our goals, deadlines, targets or simply our daily to-do lists, we tend to forget the real issues in the world outside our windows. This post may seem a tad more emotional than my previous ones. I am emotional.

Recently, Thomas Friedman – the man who fired the imagination of world business with his book The World is Flat — wrote in his New York Times column: “We don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout

The professors of doom are pitching their tents once again on the pegs of a “leadership crisis.” This is nothing new. In fact, each time the world heads into an economic downturn we see soul-searching begin on the quality of leadership.

So you’ve found the leadership at the bottom of the corporate pyramid – those smart hidden gems with the iPod earplugs peeping discreetly through carefully careless hairstyles: Generation Y, the young Millenials termed by Fortune as potentially most high-performing generation in history.