Grit & Growth

Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on talent — finding it and keeping it — featuring Claudia Salvischiani, an expert on all things HR. From workforce trends and interview techniques to structuring incentives and performance evaluations, Salvischiani gives candid advice and insights on how to attract and retain the best people to help your business thrive.It takes people to run a business, and the better they are, the better your business. So what can you do to not just get, but also keep, the very best? Claudia Salvischiani has a lot of strong opinions on how to do just that, grounded in real-world experience helping companies across India and Africa for over 25 years. Salvischiani believes that leaders play an essential role in keeping people happy. “When people leave, they are actually leaving their boss, not their organization,” she explains. “Your task as a leader is to develop people. Leaders are the ones who give meaning to your work. They explain to you why things happen.”Top Seven Masterclass Takeaways Create a sense of community, especially with remote workers. Salvischiani believes that having a sense of belonging is especially important for remote workers. Organizations need to change and she recommends communicating a lot and not just one-on-one. To find the best candidate, you need to prepare. “Be very systematic about what you're looking for in all aspects,” she advises. It’s extremely important to have the right profile for the position before you start sorting through resumes or else you’ll waste everyone’s time.When interviewing, don't let the candidate speak too much. “At the beginning, you speak, you set the tone, you set the structure, you explain how it's gonna be,” Salvischiani recommends. “You steer the interview, so you're not steered by the candidates.”Be honest when hiring. Salvischiani suggests being extremely honest about the context the person is going to be working in. Recruiting is a selling process, but you still have to be very clear about the challenges ahead.Higher salaries don’t earn you higher loyalty. While compensation is key, “you are not keeping people with the money. You're just postponing their leaving,” Salvischiani says. And she believes creating a salary structure is “absolutely necessary” for transparency, equity, and morale.Don’t incentivize individual performance. Incentivizing organizational performance over individual performance gets the entire department or organization to collaborate and intervene if others don’t perform. Give feedback honestly and frequently. Even though it’s one of the hardest things for managers and leaders to do, giving frequent feedback, even if it’s bad news, is essential. People actually feel valued when you give them feedback. According to Salvischiani, quick quarterly check-ins help with retention. Listen to Salvischiani’s recommendations and strategies for acquiring and retaining talent. It’s a delicate balance of understanding what you need as an employer and what your employee needs to develop and grow.The following music was used for this media project:Music: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Kevin MacLeodLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://incompetech.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Meet Jon Levin, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, economics professor, and eternal optimist. Hear his thoughts on the business world, innovation in emerging economies, the role of big tech, and how the GSB is preparing students to meet the challenges of the global economy — from climate change to inequality.Jon Levin grew up in an academic family, but he never imagined he’d be leading one of the most prestigious business schools in the country. An economics professor by training with degrees from Stanford, Oxford, and MIT, he became dean of the Graduate School of Business in 2016. From this unique vantage point and with his researcher mindset, he believes that businesses have both a significant opportunity to develop and deploy technology to improve people's lives as well as a responsibility to mitigate its potential harm.“If you look at the history of the last 150 years, it's the most extraordinary period in human history with standards of living doubling every 30 years, every generation,” Levin explains. “Today you look at the pace of change in innovation and it's happening everywhere in the world. The opportunity for businesses, for business leaders, to help use that technology in ways that will continue to double and increase people's standards of living is extraordinary.”Levin also believes that emerging economies with digital infrastructures in place have opportunities to leapfrog the developed world by going straight to the consumers and their cell phones without having to overcome existing institutions and infrastructure. Levin says, “If you think about areas like finance or education, you don't have all of the legacy businesses in emerging markets, and so there’s an opportunity to go in and provide services to people that just go straight to digital.”It's no surprise that Dean Levin is a huge proponent of getting an MBA based on his fundamental belief that business can be a force for good in the world and the school’s mission to instill students with a broader sense of responsibility to society beyond just doing well in their careers. “An MBA program is just the most amazing thing to do because you get all these different skills that enable you to be successful in many things,” says Levin says. “It's like having 20 jobs in two years, you get to see what it would be like to be an operator, an entrepreneur, an investor, to work in a nonprofit, to go into a social venture, to work on energy, real estate, every industry you see all of that.”Listen to Dean Levin’s perspectives on the future of business and business education, both on the Stanford campus and around the world with programs like Stanford Seed.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Franchises are taking over the world, from fast-food restaurants to furniture outlets. While they may seem like a simple, risk-free way to expand your footprint and revenue, franchising is tricky business. Vijay Kapoor learned firsthand how difficult it is to create a successful franchise in India for his fashion brand Derby Responsible Menswear. Hear his roller coaster of a success story and get strategic advice on if, when, and how to franchise your own business. Vijay Kapoor learned the importance of dressing for success early in his career when he was barred from a building because he wasn’t dressed right. Kapoor turned that experience into a business. He explains, ”I decided I'd get into clothing and help people dress well because if you're dressed well, you're confident, your inner strength and your talent comes out, and you can go out and succeed.”After 14 years of building his fashion brand in Southern India with 30 company-owned stores, Kapoor wanted to go national. But expanding would be expensive. So, he turned to franchising in 2008 — and by 2012 he deemed it a complete failure. But Kapoor didn’t give up, learning from his mistakes, strengthening his brand, and switching to a franchise-first mindset where everyone wins.Kapoor reflects on that time, “When we had these losses and when I had to sell away everything and bring everything back to the drawing board is when I realized the fundamental mistake or flaw in my whole thought process. The business model was successful in south India. But the way it was operated and expanded was absolutely flawed. Entrepreneurship is about sharing and growing together. Only when everybody wins in your value chain, will you succeed.”Today, Derby Responsible is 95 percent franchise, and Kapoor has created over 1,000 successful entrepreneurs in the process by focusing on the brand, location, talent, training, data, and communication. Listen to Kapoor’s setbacks and winning strategies and hear how he’s setting a new standard for franchising across India.Share your anonymous story about how corruption or ethical challenges have affected your business for a future episode. Send a VOICE MEMO via WhatsApp to +1(650) 206-3055. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Grit & Growth’s retrospective on a topic that’s on every entrepreneur’s mind: money! Hear from startup and early stage investors in Africa and South Asia about what investors are really looking for, how to vet potential backers, pitching advice, and more. These experts provide practical guidance and strategies on how to secure funding for your venture.Money, money, money. Entrepreneurs can’t stop thinking about it. Which explains why fundraising is such a critical — and ongoing — aspect of their job description.We turned to five experts for their wisdom on all things related to funding:Andreata Muforo, partner at Nairobi-based venture capital firm TLCom CapitalIdo Sum, partner at TLCom CapitalZach George, managing partner at Launch Africa VenturesSandeep Singhal, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners in IndiaPranav Pai, founding partner of 3One4 Capital in IndiaTop Seven Masterclass Takeaways Fundraising should be active, not passive. Andreata Muforo says “It’s something an entrepreneur does, not something that happens to them—which means you can get better with practice.” Cast a wide net when looking for investors. Zach George has a great strategy for getting valuable facetime with busy VCs: “ask for advice and you may get some money, ask for money and you may get some advice.”Early on, it’s less about the numbers, more about the people. According to Sandeep Singh, Seed and Series A funders invest just as much in founders as they do in ideas. “There are many people that want to solve problems, but these are people who are saying, I want to solve a problem at scale. I want to solve a problem with a group of people. I want to have people around me that are equally passionate about building things.”Don’t get too attached to your ideas. Be willing to listen and adapt. Singh looks for founders who are passionate and flexible “if you don't listen, then you are stubborn. And the risk of being stubborn is you can hit your head on the wall and never be able to get across it.”Scale can’t be achieved alone. Pranav Pai advocates for the importance of team. “If the human capital side doesn't keep up, you're almost always going to fail to meet expectations.”Due diligence goes both ways. Ido Sum urges entrepreneurs to do their homework on potential investors. “If you know what we're, after what we're investing in, how could you be relevant to what we have already invested in or to spaces we have looked at, this is extremely beneficial for us to see that you spent this time.”Know how you plan to grow. Be specific. Zach George wants the founder to have the details. “If you give me the, let me talk to my CFO, you've lost me. Like immediately, I've switched off, good founders will say, this is how I get to a hundred million dollars.”Listen to these funding experts and gain valuable insights, advice, and strategies for how to navigate the fundraising journey and establish successful relationships along the way.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Creating a startup is challenging enough. So, when you want that startup to also address social problems, the pressure on entrepreneurs to succeed and scale can be even more intense. Meet Sadaf Rehman of codeschool.pk in Pakistan and Sarika Kulkarni Pathak of Cresa GreenTech in India, and hear how these two women entrepreneurs are struggling and striving to make the world a better place.Many of the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs are no different than those of for-profit startups. Understanding who your customers are, the problems they face, and how you’re going to solve them — known as your value proposition — remain the same. But when you set out to improve children’s literacy and women’s health, the stakes are higher.For Sadaf Rehman, the failing education system in Pakistan drove her to create a coding school to prepare kids for the modern job force. Rehman believes that “the education system has to prepare children to think. We have to retool how and what we are teaching our kids and who is teaching our kids as well. And so what code school is trying to do is introduce a programming curriculum for young children at primary and secondary school.”Rehman reflects on the tensions of scaling to create impact vs. revenue: “I don't think that as an entrepreneur or as a person, I would feel like I was successful if all I wanted to do is make money. If you want to scale really fast, an easy way to do that is to lower your revenue. But there are always these forces and tensions pulling you in different directions as an organization.”Sarika Pathak’s master’s study and work with Johnson & Johnson led her to make a 100 percent chemical-free and biodegradable sanitary napkin which dissolves immediately in hot water. Pathak explains why she’s so passionate about her business: “According to a survey, around 23 percent of girls drop out of school just after starting their period, just because of unavailability of menstrual hygiene products. And 56 percent of girls face urinary tract infections due to unhygienic conditions in the washrooms and toilets. And because of the social and cultural taboo, people are not ready to talk about it. If they don't talk about it, how are these problems getting solved?” Her business idea has an environmental impact as well. “India has 12 billion sanitary napkins to take care of every year,” she explains “and it's very difficult to biodegrade any single sanitary napkin that takes 800 years to decompose. So, imagine the kind of waste that has been generated over the years.”Listen to some of the obstacles Rehman and Pathak are facing — from targeting customers to managing supply chains — as they seek to build and scale their social enterprises.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

To submit a story for our episode on corruption, send a voice memo to Stanford Seed via WhatsApp at +1(650) 206-3055.Women represent about 50% of the global population yet own only ⅓ of the world’s businesses and still get paid 37% less than men. Georgette Barnes, a Ghanian entrepreneur, and Stanford professors Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld and Margaret Neale share experiences, advice, and strategies for navigating the workforce as a woman — from power dynamics and negotiations to gender expectations and harassment.The challenges women face working in a man’s world keep stacking up, even as female entrepreneurs like Georgette Barnes learn how to overcome them. As a supplier of mining support services in West Africa, Barnes faced resistance from her very first interview, “I said nobody wants to give me opportunities. Nobody wants to give me the experience that you are asking for.”Dr. Deborah Gruenfeld is not surprised. She has been researching women and power at Stanford Graduate School of Business and says Barnes’ experience reflects a broader trend of who gets opportunities and why. Gruenfeld says “We tend to think a leader looks like a man. And so it's very easy to see leadership potential in a man because a man looks like what we expect to see. But a woman doesn't actually look to us like what we think a leader is supposed to look like. So, that's a way in which women are sometimes held back and not chosen first for leadership roles.”Gender expectations also impact the way women negotiate, according to Professor Margaret Neale. Her research shows that women negotiating face more challenges than their male counterparts because there is a societal expectation about how women should be in society. And to make matters worse, Neale says “women have systematically lower expectations for what they can achieve in negotiations than their male counterparts.”Barnes experienced this self-doubt when she explored the idea of starting her own business. “I knew I wanted to set up my own company,” Barnes reflected, “but I didn't think I could do it. And I didn't think that a young African Ghanaian woman should have that dream.”Barnes prevailed but Dr. Gruenfeld suggests women need to develop their personal power to “deal with the narrative in your head…to make sure that you take charge of how you interpret the situation that you’re in.”Listen to Barnes’ firsthand experience on the stereotypes and obstacles she contends with every day and hear Gruenfeld’s and Neale’s advice on how women — and men — can shift the paradigm for themselves and future generations.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Negotiation is at the heart of almost every business transaction — whether working on terms with potential investors or communicating with colleagues. Listen to Ghanian educational entrepreneur Charles Yeboah as he shares his real-world negotiation challenges and get surprising tips and insights from Stanford professor Margaret Neale on how to turn your next negotiation into a win-win.Charles Yeboah never imagined he’d be in the business of education. But after searching for a school for his daughter, necessity became the mother of invention. Today, International Community School is educating over 2000 students across Ghana with plans to expand to other countries. When it came time to expand, Yeboah needed to put his negotiation skills to the test with potential investors. He learned firsthand what Professor Neale researches and teaches: that walking away from a deal is sometimes the best outcome…even when a $20 million dollar investment is on the line.Professor Neale believes that negotiators require a different mindset, moving from the idea of negotiation as a battle to an opportunity for collaborative problem-solving. She advises to never begin a negotiation without understanding what your alternatives are or what happens to you in the case of an impasse? “If I have a really good alternative, then you're going to have to pay a premium for me to stay and play in this interaction. Otherwise, I can just walk” says Neale.Yeboah followed that advice in his own negotiations. “Whether it's talking to a banker or talking to a potential equity investor, you think about what you want to achieve with that investment and what they want to achieve with that investment. And then you want to make sure that you marry the two aspirations,” he says. Listen to Yeboah’s real-world experiences of sticking to his values when negotiating and get Professor Neale’s practical tips for preparing well and negotiating better.To find out more, or apply for Professor Neale's Influence and Negotiation Strategies Program, visit: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/exec-ed/programs/influence-negotiation-strategies-program See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The deadline to apply for our 2023 Seed Transformation Program is June 1st! To find out more, visit: stanfordseed.co/applyMeet Tony Elumelu, a Nigerian businessman, billionaire, investor, philanthropist, champion of African entrepreneurs, and steadfast believer in luck. Hear how and why he’s committed to catalyzing entrepreneurship across the African continent.Ask almost any entrepreneur about their secret to success and more than likely they’ll credit a combination of hard work and luck. Tony Elumelu is no exception. After an illustrious career running Africa’s largest bank, United Bank of Africa, and currently serving as its chairman, Elumelu says he decided “to commit the second phase of my life to helping, to impact humanity, to helping democratize the luck that I had growing up to help expand access to opportunities.” And he has done just that, funding thousands of early stage startups and empowering over 15,000 entrepreneurs across 54 African countries to solve the continent’s biggest problems.Elumelu says “I've come to appreciate the significance and importance of entrepreneurship in transforming families, in transforming communities, in transforming countries, societies, and humanity.” He strongly believes that the private sector has a role to play in developing the continent and making that transformation possible. Listen as Stanford student Chisom Obi-Okoye interviews Tony Elumelu about his career path, philosophy of African capitalism, and vision for the future of the continent.View From The Top is Stanford Graduate School of Business' premier speaker series. To hear more of their amazing line-up, subscribe to their podcast or visit their YouTube page.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on corporate governance, featuring Alexey Volynets of International Finance Corporation. From what structures make sense to employ, and when in the life cycle of your business you should use them, Volynets provides advice and insights on how corporate governance can be a powerful tool for your business.While many entrepreneurs fear corporate governance because they believe it means more legal constraints and less control, Volynets wants to change the way founders of small to medium-size enterprises think about governance. He has been researching and teaching companies about the ins and outs of corporate governance for years and understands why it’s  so challenging. “It's really hard to let go. It's hard to delegate. It's hard to allow people from outside the company to make huge strategic decisions on what it should do,” he acknowledges. But Volynets believes there comes a time in every company’s journey when leaders have to delegate and formalize systems and structures to support growth.Top Six Masterclass Takeaways Corporate governance goes beyond boards. Volynets defines it quite simply: it’s about how companies are directed and controlled. And second, it’s when companies have created structured policies that “mean you can take a vacation for three weeks and not be afraid your business will fall apart while you’re away.”The stage of your business makes a difference. You don’t have to have all your corporate governance structures done on day one. What makes sense for a mature, expanding business is far different than an early stage startup.Don’t be afraid to ask for external advice. And the earlier you start thinking about it, the better. It can be formal or informal, but relying on others with expertise you don’t have in-house is essential.Build a good management team, too. A good board of directors needs to have a partner in the company beyond the CEO. And realistically,  in the early days when resources are strapped, your management team can perform many of the functions you’ll later assign to a board. Don’t wait to create an organizational chart. While you’re focusing on growth, adding people and units, you need to start formalizing your organization’s key functions, and what those key functions actually do. And it might just come in handy for succession if one of your key people suddenly leaves. Ease into corporate governance with an advisory board. It can be a great stepping-stone as you formalize governance structures.Listen to Volynets’ insights, advice, timing, and strategies for how you can ease into and ultimately formalize and manage a board when the time is right.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Is it time to consider an advisory board? And if so, why? What skills do you need? And how do you find the right people who are willing to help? Aashish Agarwaal, founder and chairman of the Enerji Group, and Alexey Volynets of the International Finance Corporation share entrepreneurial perspectives and corporate governance advice to help you figure out what’s right for your company.Rare is the entrepreneur who is an expert at everything. Turning to others outside your company for advice can be essential for success. Formalizing that process with an advisory board is helping Aashish Agarwaal strategically transform Enerji Group, the digital publishing enterprise he founded in India. But it took awhile to figure out exactly what he needed, who could help, and how to run the board effectively.Alexey Volynets understands what Agarwaal had to go through to create the ideal advisory board. As an expert in corporate governance at the International Finance Corporation, he has been teaching companies about corporate governance  for years.The most common manifestation of corporate governance is a board — fiduciary or advisory. Whereas fiduciary boards have financial liabilities, advisory boards are simply there to provide expertise that you may be lacking. “As you are growing, and when you are on the top of the world, it's important to have a check,” Volynets explains. “External advisors, especially very independent voices will ask you the right questions and will challenge your assumptions.”Agarwaal figured out who he needed by first identifying the skill gaps in his company and what strategic initiatives he needed help with and how often. He suggests “I would say first what are the gaps, and second, do you need that help on a consistent basis or intermittent basis? Because again, you have to decide how much investment you're going to make in it.” Finding the right people isn’t easy, either. Volynets suggests the best place to look is your own networks to find the business people you trust with the criteria you need. But Volynets cautions entrepreneurs to avoid adding friends, suppliers, contractors, etc. to an advisory board, even if they have the requisite skills. He says “The most important characteristic is emotional independence.”  Listen to Aashish’s first hand experience on creating an advisory board and Alexey’s insights on how to do it strategically and successfully when it’s time to tap into the experience and expertise of other business leaders.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.