Last year, we designed and launched an innovative new leadership track for a top-ranked business school. The track treats student leaders as executives, providing them with hands on leadership training in which their actions create visibile results. In other words, we created a playground for budding leaders. Well, we’re proud to say that tomorrow night the program will begin its second year; it survived and thrived after our departure. Below is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Professor Dave Hofmann, who heads the track, on one leadership lesson I’ve encountered in the last year.

And always remember, innovation is leadership.

I was down in LA for an awards ceremony and my brother Bernard’s inauguration as President of the Burbank Jaycees (Junior Chamber). His vision for the organization? Leadership development, of course! It must be in the blood. He wants to radically improve the Jaycee’s use of community projects in developing leaders and attract even better people to the organization, aspiring professionals looking to develop themselves. The crowd loved his vision and he received a standing ovation, which apparently never happens. My family was thrilled, Bernard alone among the eight of us never finished college, but we’ve been so proud of everything he has done.

Which brings me to an important lesson. The keynote speaker at the event was Glenn Stearns, 39 year-old entrepreneur, owner of 26 companies, and real life millionaire (who recently played and won as the millionaire on the Real Gilligan’s Island reality show). He was not a great public speaker but his speech was fantastic. Glenn barely made it through college with 2.14 GPA, but now has a net worth of $500 million. That’s half a billion dollars. A lot of money.

His secret? Well, I believe he understood better than most the need to surround himself with brilliant people and to build a better system for business. He knew he wasn’t brilliant, so he knew he needed help. Most of us so-called "brilliant" and "successful" individuals never learn that lesson, we’ve gotten by so long on our own that we never learn how much we really need others. We tend to think it’s about us and forget that it’s really about building something that’s greater than us. And by far the most successful people are the ones that surround themselves with better people and who build better systems.

It should be obvious that there really is a limit to how much one person can do or to how much one person can earn; as leaders, we should be looking for ways to create exponential value. Remind the next batch of leaders about that every time they think about going it alone. For a developing leader, every time you succeed by going it alone is just reinforcement of a bad habit; the success blinds you from seeing how much greater your success could have been if you had looked beyond yourself. Sure you may be brilliant, but doesn’t it make so much more sense to leverage that brilliance with others?

Me? I fall into this "brilliance" trap all the time, and time will tell if I’m still in the middle of it. With all my academic and workplace success, my family has always figured I’d be the really successful one. But I’m betting on my brother. I think my brother "gets it" much better than I do. Awards or not, all my past success was mostly measured as an individual, and I can’t help but wonder what exponential value I left on the table . . .

Here’s to old dogs and new tricks. Best of luck with the next batch of leaders.

Patrick

The World Bank’s "Poor People’s Knowledge: Promoting Intellectual Property in Developing Countries" is a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners covering the subject of knowledge development and intellectual property in the Base of the Pyramid. The book (available in PDF) is an informative and thought-provoking read. Today we touch on Chapter 2 "Handmade in India" by Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy.

Handmade in India: Traditional Craft Skills in a Changing World

India’s 9.6 million craftsmen contribute an estimated $3.3 billion to the Indian economy. Crafts also provide part-time income to seasonal agricultural workers and women, a means for workers to remain in their villages rather than move to overcrowded cities, and act as archive for India’s rich cultural heritage. Handmade in India discusses the struggle of traditional crafts making in the face of more mechanized, cheaper alternatives and intellectual property problems.

"Artisans in India face the same IP problems as in other developing countries: cheap knockoffs, extensive copying among artisans, artisans who pass along (and sometimes sell) designs belonging to a client, and buyers who have a sample designed and produced in India, then manufactured in bulk somewhere else."

"Problems with enforcing ownership are particularly complex given what the artisans themselves accept as norms of behavior. Copying among artisans is a long-established tradition. Artists acquire their skills by copying."

The authors note that successful craftsmen are market-accepting individuals, who understand that societies evolve and that [outside of a museum] no craft can or should survive without a viable market. As entrepreneurs, craftsmen must seek new markets for their skills, but face four major shortcomings in doing so:

• Lack of knowledge on how to increase quality, productivity, and technical innovation.
• A constrained worldview that keeps them unaware of and an unable to access the new market opportunities available to them.
• A lack of working capital and access to credit. Even if a craftsman receives a large order, they do not have the upfront capital to fund the work and materials.
• A total lack of civic, professional, and social service infrastructures.

In the end, effective solutions to promoting and protecting poor peoples’ knowledge in India will need to account for Indian culture, community & family structures, the Indian caste system, and even deeply held beliefs about individualism: "Aesthetic forms are often thought of as springing from a kind of universal, divinely inspired subconscious." The authors suggest two types of solutions:

• Adapting traditional skills to new products for changing markets.
• Repositioning skills and products for upscale markets that appreciate and are willing to pay premiums for handcrafted quality and character.

On the flip side of a problem is always an opportunity. Organizations that offer effective methods to deal with the problems and solutions described in Handmade in India have the potential of opening up huge market opportunities in the Base of the Pyramid. Just remember that the promotion of innovation must be deeply ingrained in culture, a lesson not lost on us here at BRINQ.

This question came up in a recent discussion with a colleague from the Univeristy of North Carolina. Dozens of students graduate each year from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School with a top-rated MBA degree and a passion to pursue Base of the Pyramid (BOP) opportunities, but few companies are hiring for these types of positions. You can always start your own business, but how does an aspiring entrepreneur from the top of the pyramid attract the resources needed to launch a new business in the BOP?

Just like any other entrepreneurial endeavor, it’s all about building credibility.

Credibility gives your entrepreneurial idea the power it needs to become a true business innovation. The higher your credibility, the higher your probability of finding funding, partners, customers, etc: i.e. all the resources you need to get going. The farther afield you are going in terms of geography, expertise or industry, the farther you have to build up your credibility to win the resources your venture needs. MBAs are taught how to do business planning and how to detail the growth of our companies, but rarely do we think of the same step-by-step methodology to plan the growth of our credibility and how we will pay for our learning curve. And credibility is critically important in the Base of the Pyramid where ideas greatly outnumber available funding*.

David Bornstein, who chronicles social entrepreneurs in his acclaimed book "How to Change the World", offers a description of this process. Bornstein states that social entrepreneurs typically start with what they know and issues they feel passionate about:

Social entrepreneurs, like business entrepreneurs, should begin with what they know best and should focus on an idea or issue that resonates deeply in their lives. Entrepreneurs rarely come up with their ideas suddenly. Typically, they spend years thinking about them–often searching for the right moment in their lives to move forward. Sometimes their ideas can be traced all the way back to childhood interests.

The budding social entrepreneurs then go through a stage of credibility building.

Before starting out on their own, they often work in jobs that teach them how a particular type of business or industry operates. Social entrepreneurs go through the same types of "apprenticeships." They usually work for several years in a particular field, profession or organization, acquiring the knowledge, skills and contacts that enable them to branch out on their own and improve upon what is currently being done. Then they enter the "launch" phase–when they start preparing to build their own organizations. Again, like business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs usually begin by tapping their personal networks–friends, families, colleagues, teachers, mentors. They often start with a few well-selected tests of their ideas–to demonstrate early viability–and build credibility and momentum. They enlist advice from well-connected and experienced allies about how to raise funding, think through strategy, and build a team of supporters and advisors.

For MBAs and others starting ventures in the BOP, creating a series of projects to build relationships in your target area is critical. Even if these projects are volunteer or charitable works, the credibility you build will be invaluable. For example, here at BRINQ, we seek to gain experience in new markets by running small toy-design contests with local non-profits, helping us to build the relationships and credibility we need to promote our commercial "sow & gather" approach to innovation. For another example, take a look at Theresa Williamson in Rio, Brazil, described as a "powerhouse" by WorldChanging.com. Williamson founded her high-impact "Catalytic Communities" four years ago as her doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania. Williamson recounts her own learning curve in detail in her dissertation “Catalytic Communities: the Birth of a Dot Org” (PDF).

The key lesson to learn is that when you’re starting with very little and need the most help, you have to find ways to give the most help you can. And not just to the people you want to serve, but to the people you most want to partner with. You need to go beyond networking to credibility building. Afterall, you measure your network by the number of people you can call when facing a problem, but you measure your credibility by the number of people who will call you.

And when people start calling, the resources will follow.

* To illustrate the scarcity of funding, BRINQ recently made it to the semifinal round for Echoing Green funding. Echoing Green is one of the few organizations that will consider funding "for-profit" socially oriented ventures. We were one of 700 groups Echoing Green was considering for funding in 2005, we’re now one of 150. Echoing Green will eventually select 12 organizations to fund, a funding rate of under 2%.