A Taxi Company Funds Ali Mahlodji’s School Lesson for 1,600 Students
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What does a taxi company have to do with education? “Nothing,” says the taxi company itself, and it paid for a school lesson for 1,600 teenagers anyway. On Wednesday, the Viennese taxi dispatcher Taxi 40100 teamed up with the education entrepreneur Ali Mahlodji to bring students from 20 schools in Vienna and Lower Austria to the Raiffeisenhalle at the Gasometer. Under the title “futureRocka: die Fahrt deines Lebens” (“the ride of your life”), the two-hour session covered training, careers and the future of work. According to Taxi 40100, it was probably Austria’s biggest school lesson ever.
More Than You Think You Can Do
The focus was on personal strengths, curiosity and what the students, aged 14 to 19, can make of their opportunities. Mr. Mahlodji said he wanted them to go home feeling they are capable of more than they had thought. The future does not simply happen, he said, it is shaped by people who have the courage to help create it.
What stuck with the students also shows how much A.I. is on the next generation’s mind. One student said she was looking forward to jobs that do not even exist yet, but feared that A.I. would replace some professions. Two others took away the lesson that good grades are not necessarily required for success.
Mr. Mahlodji knows what he is talking about. Born in Iran, he came to Austria as a child with his refugee family, dropped out of school and worked dozens of jobs before co-founding the career platform whatchado. Today he is the chief executive of futureOne and says he has worked with more than 800,000 young people. He has experience with mass lessons: In 2023, around 17,000 students from 220 schools in Austria, Germany and South Tyrol tuned in to an online format promoted as “Europe’s strongest school class.”
The Backstory: Responsibility Over Core Business
What stands out is who picked up the bill. Taxi 40100 covered all costs, so participation was free for the schools. How much the company spent has not been disclosed. There is no business connection, and that is precisely the point. Asked what the workshop had to do with the taxi industry, the company’s secretary general, Eveline Hruza, answered in the announcement with a single word: nothing. But if every company invested a little in the next generation, she added, people would notice the difference. Her conclusion after the event: Education is not the company’s core business, but responsibility is.
Mr. Mahlodji called the commitment pioneering work. The attitude of business shapes the future of society, he said, and companies are needed that take away young people’s fear of the future. Taxi 40100 describes the initiative as a contribution by a midsize Viennese company to the education of young people.
From Students to Executives
For Mr. Mahlodji, working with young people is only half the job. Today’s world is shaped by executives, he writes in his newsletter, and their actions lay the foundation for the working world in which young people grow up. That is why he is increasingly working with managers who are expected to align purpose, people and performance. To that end, futureOne hosts the Future Leadership Day, which after its debut last year will take place twice this year because of strong demand: in Innsbruck in early November and in Vienna at the end of November.
Next up is a large event in Linz, with young people during the day, the general public in the evening and 80 executives in between. The workload keeps growing, and so does its importance, Mr. Mahlodji writes. His message to everyone else fits a man who has been known to pay for strangers’ meals on the train: In a world where you can be anything, just be kind.
