The man who learned leadership from goats

Smiling Gecko, in rural Cambodia, is a place that challenges your assumptions and welded on beliefs. An hour and a half outside Phnom Penh, the potholed road eventually leads you onto a sprawling campus of schools, farms, workshops, gardens, fish ponds and community spaces. Children move through shaded walkways in neat lines. Teachers greet students by name in both English and Khmer. Farmers work in fields nourished by recycled water systems. In the centre of it all stands a circular cultural building known as The Gong; part performance space, part philosophical statement.

Nothing about the place feels accidental. And yet, listening to the founder of Smiling Gecko, Swiss artist and photographer Hannes Schmid, you realise almost none of it began with a master plan. It began with curiosity. Then heartbreak. Then a refusal to look away.

I had the privilege to interview Hannes for The Giving Habit podcast, a new miniseries exploring the grit, hope and creativity of social impact. This article works both as a standalone piece and as an accompaniment to the full interview which you can find here.

Hannes Schmid, Founder, Smiling Gecko

Intention

I first visited Smiling Gecko as part of the Distinguished Senior Fellowship Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The programme brings together experienced global leaders from business, government, academia and civil society for immersive dialogue, reflection and field-based learning focused on leadership, societal challenges and regional engagement across Asia.

As part of the programme, our cohort spent three days at Smiling Gecko, exploring and learning about this unique social enterprise. I was not alone in feeling our time there was too short. I came away with more questions than answers. Questions about cost and financial viability. Questions about culture and self-determination. Questions about methods of intervention and scalability.

As soon as I got home I reached out to Smiling Gecko, seeking an interview with its enigmatic founder. Three weeks later I found myself back in Cambodia, in a modern recording studio on campus, sat opposite Hannes.

Immersion

During our conversation for The Giving Habit podcast, Hannes recounted the unlikely chain of events that brought him to Cambodia. In the late 1990s, while documenting Taoist opera traditions in Singapore and across Asia, he encountered the story of a young Cambodian girl who had been burned by her father and sold into a begging syndicate after financial desperation overtook the family. He helped organise medical care for her and accompanied her back to Cambodia.

That journey exposed him to an even deeper crisis. Entire communities living on garbage dumps, families stripped of land, children surviving without education, nutrition, healthcare or safety.

What struck me most was not simply the scale of suffering he described. It was his decision to immerse himself completely in it.

Rather than visit briefly, write a cheque and leave, Hannes moved onto the dump site itself. He rented a small shack and lived among the families. He wanted to know why, after decades of aid agencies, NGOs and international intervention, so little had fundamentally changed. That question became the seed of Smiling Gecko.

Intervention

It is easy to mistake relief for transformation. A bag of rice matters deeply when someone is hungry. Milk powder matters when babies are malnourished. Clean water matters when disease is everywhere. But as Hannes discovered, each intervention exposed another systemic failure. You buy milk powder to help feed babies only to find that the contaminated water makes the milk unsafe. School access required uniforms, and those uniforms required non-existent laundry systems.

One problem was always connected to another. It forced him toward a deeper conclusion: poverty is rarely solved in fragments.

The modern charitable landscape often rewards specialisation. One organisation focuses on sanitation. Another on literacy. Another on maternal health. Another on vocational training. But Hannes became convinced that communities cannot be rebuilt in isolated compartments. Real change, he argues, must be holistic.

This thought process led Hannes to build Smiling Gecko, a holistic social enterprise and charitable campus in Cambodia that provides disadvantaged rural families with housing, education, and vocational training. Officially registered in 2014, it empowers communities to achieve self-sufficiency through sustainable projects in agriculture, craftsmanship, and hospitality.

Inclusion

Central to Smiling Gecko is providing a decent education for children, but where that education is not merely about literacy or numeracy. It is about dignity, hygiene, nutrition, confidence, structure, possibility and inclusion. A school, in his mind, is not simply a place children attend. It is the foundation upon which an entire society stabilises.

Hannes’ philosophy stems from his own childhood. Growing up in a tiny mountain village after the Second World War, he experienced what he now recognises as a complete local ecosystem: schools, apprenticeships, tradespeople, farmers, food distribution and small businesses all interwoven into daily life. Switzerland’s success, he argues, did not emerge solely from banks or pharmaceuticals. It emerged from stable systems, vocational competence and community infrastructure, an integrated identity of what it means to be Swiss.

So rather than build a traditional charity, Hannes is building a social ecosystem. Today, Smiling Gecko includes schools, agricultural operations, vocational training, carpentry workshops, hospitality programmes and small enterprises designed to create employment and financial resilience. The goal is not dependency. The goal is participation.

Iteration

Many impoverished communities in Cambodia have learned to distrust outsiders, particularly those who arrive briefly, bearing slogans, branded T-shirts and promises. Hannes realised very early that trust could not be demanded. It had to be earned slowly, relationally and humbly.

That humility is central to his leadership philosophy. Built on the lessons he learned as a young goat herder in the Swiss Alps. Managing 120 goats, he argues, is better leadership training than most executive programmes. But beneath the humour lies genuine wisdom.

“You have to find the leader of the pack,” he explains. “You cannot beat them up. You guide them.” It was one of many moments where Hannes revealed an instinctive understanding of leadership as influence rather than control.

Modern leadership culture often celebrates certainty, dominance and scale. Yet the most effective leaders I encounter are usually those capable of listening deeply, adapting constantly and remaining intellectually humble. Hannes embodies that tension. Despite building an internationally recognised organisation, he still speaks like an artist experimenting in real time. He questions assumptions, revisits decisions and openly acknowledges mistakes.

“Mistakes are the best way to learn,” he states simply. There is something refreshing about that honesty. In an age obsessed with polished narratives and strategic certainty, Smiling Gecko feels profoundly human. It is unfinished. Iterative. Sometimes messy. And perhaps because of that, deeply authentic.

Infrastructure

Should you visit Smiling Gecko, (and I encourage you to do so), you will be struck by the quality of the architecture. After my first visit with NUS, I wondered whether the campus was too ambitious, too aesthetically refined for the surrounding context. The schools are beautiful, intentionally so. Open-air walkways, bamboo ceilings, circular gathering spaces and climate-sensitive design principles create an environment unlike anything nearby. It is also quite obviously super expensive to build and maintain.

For Hannes, architecture is philosophy. Beauty communicates worth. If children grow up in environments that signal care, intentionality and permanence, it subtly reshapes what they believe is possible for themselves. Architecture becomes psychological infrastructure.

The design choices are practical too. Buildings collect rainwater, minimise energy use and reduce heat naturally through traditional Cambodian techniques. But they are also symbolic. Hannes spoke often about circles (the gong, waves of communication, cycles of life, shared ownership) and the campus architecture is a physical manifestation of that thinking. The place itself teaches.

We cannot ignore the fact that, as a social enterprise, Smiling Gecko is not yet self-sufficient. Despite excellent resort facilities and numerous revenue generating models, it is still a philanthropic endeavour that relies heavily on external funding, and specifically on Hannes’ personal and professional network. The ambition is there, but there is still much work to be done.

Identity

Art and culture sit at the centre of the Smiling Gecko model. The campus includes a truly world-class events and recording space called The Gong. The school possesses an impressive array of local and international musical instruments, plus a workshop for maintenance and repair.

For Hannes, restoring cultural identity is not ornamental work. It is foundational. Cambodia’s history — particularly the devastation of the Khmer Rouge era — fractured not only institutions but memory itself. Art, music and tradition were interrupted. Reclaiming culture, therefore, becomes part of reclaiming dignity, and is central to the philosophy at work throughout Smiling Gecko.

Across the world, many societies are materially connected yet spiritually fragmented. We speak often about economic development while neglecting meaning, belonging and identity. Yet human flourishing has never been purely economic. People need stories. Rituals. Music. Shared symbols. They need reasons to feel proud of where they come from. Smiling Gecko recognises this.

Ideology

The organisation’s philosophy also challenges many assumptions about sustainability. Hannes is wary of simplistic environmental narratives. He supports renewable technologies where they make sense, but constantly returns to context. In rural Cambodia, he argues, biodiversity, soil health and water quality may matter more immediately than symbolic sustainability initiatives designed for wealthier economies.

Again, what impressed me was not ideological certainty but practical thinking. He is relentlessly empirical. What actually works here? What genuinely improves life in this local context? What creates resilience over decades rather than headlines for months? Those are difficult questions. And perhaps the most honest answer is that nobody fully knows.

Introspection

Hannes admits uncertainty. He worries about succession. He worries about financial sustainability, and whether the model can survive beyond his own lifetime. A sense of unfinished responsibility, a work still in progress.

Yet maybe that is the deeper lesson. The people who create meaningful change are rarely those convinced of their own greatness. More often, they are people who remain troubled by the gap between what is and what could be.

Hannes does not speak like someone seeking admiration. He speaks like someone still searching. And perhaps that is why Smiling Gecko feels so compelling. It is not built on perfection. It is built on participation. On showing up. On refusing cynicism. On the belief that systems can be redesigned if enough people are willing to engage deeply enough with reality.

Inspiration

Smiling Gecko pushes back against modern society’s growing individualism, and promotes the primacy of community. “We have forgotten that we are humans,” he believes. “We are living from each other, we also have to contribute to each other.” That sentence captures the essence of the Smiling Gecko project, (as well as the core purpose of the programme run by NUS, incidentally).

It speaks also to the reason why I built The Giving Habit podcast miniseries. Many of us feel the desire to contribute, but we do not always know how to get started. What Smiling Gecko teaches us is that developing your own giving habit is about attention, responsibility and participation. It is about the willingness to care enough to act, in whatever way we can.

Most of us will never build a 1,500-hectare social enterprise in Cambodia. We may never found schools or redesign agricultural systems or influence governments. But we can all choose whether we walk past suffering or move toward it. We can choose whether we remain consumers of the world as it is, or contributors to the world as it might become.

And perhaps that begins, as it did for Hannes Schmid, with something remarkably simple: curiosity, the courage to ask better questions, and the willingness to stay long enough to hear the answers.

For more information on Smiling Gecko, please visit here. It is deserving of our support.

For more information on the NUS Distinguished Senior Fellowship Programme referenced in this article, please visit here.

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