To Build Your Dream Venture, Look to the Streets
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter | 11:00 AM
December 4, 2012
The holiday season in the Northern Hemisphere is often a time
for talk of miracles and displays of lights. Richard Fahey's story involves
both.
It takes place in Africa and involves solar technology, but
the miracle of getting the lights to work contains a widely applicable
leadership lesson: surprising solutions from using what I call "street
strategy."
Fahey is a successful corporate lawyer who had been a Peace
Corps volunteer in Liberia. In 2010, ready for another career of service, he
came to Harvard as an Advanced Leadership Fellow (in a calendar-year-long program
I head) to gain background for an alternative energy venture for Liberia. After
Fahey had started to line up partners in Liberia, he was joined by Robert
Saudek, a 2011 Advanced Leadership Fellow and former managing partner of a
large law firm.
The challenges were daunting. Liberia lacked efficient
logistics systems and business or consumer finance and was fraught with
bureaucratic entanglements for importing and exporting. But in the absence of
effective systems, Fahey relied on people on the street, with creativity and
local knowledge to found LEN (Liberia Energy Network, www.lightingliberia.org ).
Fahey enlisted Abubaker Sherif as the operational chief.
Sherif had been his wife's student when she was a Peace Corps teacher. His
sons, whom the Faheys helped send to university, became LEN'sde facto middle
management. Working out of a basement storage room in Monrovia, the capital,
LEN soon purchased its first shipment of 200 made-in-China solar lights. This
represented the entire asset base of the company at the time.
In February 2012, the lights finally arrived after a
five-month journey from China via Hamburg to Monrovia. Fahey arrived in Liberia
to clear the lights out of customs at the port — a difficult experience in
itself. But not a single one of the lights worked. Not one. Fahey contacted the
Chinese manufacturer who referred him to the electrical engineer in Denmark, a
run-around that could cost months and lose everything.
Though things looked bleak, Fahey and Sherif brainstormed
before giving up. Perhaps the lights resembled the electrical system of a car?
Fahey recalled, "Abu said, 'Let's go to Benson Street,' which is where
there are just kids, young men, former fighters, all up and down the street
with their heads underneath cars up on blocks. And the kids are all filthy
dirty. We start asking for someone who knows about the electrical systems. This
leads us to David and then William." Between David and William, all the
lights were rebuilt and started working.
Rehabilitation of the lights helped the venture continue.
But the most important outcome was the discovery of resources on the ground.
Instead of bringing in foreign technicians, LEN could do product support and
provide youth employment at the same time. Less then a year later, Fahey
accompanied David to the interior and watched him demonstrate solar lights in a
remote village to potential consumers with great confidence and purpose.
LEN distributed 2000 solar units in 2012 on a rapid sales
cycle, expecting to reach 10,000 in 2013 and 100,000 by 2017. There is a new
headquarters and showroom in Monrovia's commercial district and a rural
distribution pilot with the World Bank. A partnership with Save the Children,
Liberia's largest provider of maternal and child health, supplies solar lights
to their 150 clinics. Reliable lighting enables clinics to provide services at
night without relying on dangerous kerosene lanterns, and the solar lights can
recharge medical workers' cellphones.
Street strategy is the ultimate in creative
problem-solving. Being connected on the ground is only the starting
point.
The opportunity lies in valuing unexpected talent from outside the
mainstream and listening to wisdom from the bottom up.
In American hospitals, orderlies and laundry room staff
create their own safe, efficient ways of working around overly-cumbersome
formal hospital procedures, according to research by HBS colleague Anita
Tucker. Chinese factory workers making American consumer electronics deploy their
own unofficial productivity-boosters when given a chance for their groups to
work in private and raised performance with no loss of quality, as HBS doctoral
student Ethan Bernstein showed. When French champagne maker Moet Hennessey
started its first sparkling wine label outside of France in Napa Valley,
California, the American manager who established the Domaine Chandon operation
politely ignored many corporate directives and relied on street wisdom among
Napa networks, picking people without formal training and listening to novel
ideas.
Street strategy is implicit in many successful business
actions. Companies entering new communities, especially in emerging markets,
increasingly tap their new local employees to help them with grounding. Procter
& Gamble sends employees to live in the homes of people in new markets, to
see the world from the street up. For some companies, community service via
employee problem-solving teams is a street-level window into needs and
opportunities that might trigger innovations.
The lesson for leaders who seek innovation and impact:
Instead of spending all your time with elites, connect with the streets. That
can produce seeming miracles to light the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment