“This is the most disruptive era of recent generations”

Bella Ikpasaja FCMI’s life-long quest for knowledge was seeded when she was a child. Her accountant and businessman father was a stickler for order. Every morning, he would instruct the young Bella to trawl the weekend broadsheets for an interesting nugget and report back on what she’d found. 

That active curiosity has served her very well ever since. She describes her decade in the advertising industry as her “happy place” – because of how much learning she did there.

“I made it my business to study trends,” says Bella. “Wherever I worked, if anyone had a question, people always said: ‘ask Bella, she'll know.’”

• More lifelong learners: “I haven’t finished developing – I’ve got more to offer”

Future-proof in a fast-changing world

Bella recently founded the Intentional Neighbourhood Consultancy, which helps organisations to improve their workplace culture. Her guiding principle is that safer workplaces can create stronger, more prosperous economies and help organisations to future-proof against a fast-changing world. 

In her advertising career, she worked in business development and built fruitful relationships with contacts at the likes of GSK, Kellogg’s and LV Insurance as well as UK Government departments. This gave her a wealth of invaluable knowledge, and sparked her interest in finding out what responsible business looks like “behind the shiny brands activity that the public gets to see”. She calls her Master’s in corporate governance and international business ethics at Birkbeck Business School “truly the best thing I ever did”.

Not enough leaders recognise the challenge of this evolving landscape 

Bella went on to design a LinkedIn Learning course to equip leaders and senior managers with tools to improve their workplace cultures. She describes the LinkedIn partnership as a “career highlight”, adding that the course has now reached 47,000 organisations around the world.