Stanford Professors Reflect on Fostering Grit & Nurturing Growth

Full Transcript

(00:00)

Darius Teter: If you’re an entrepreneur looking to grow in whatever way that is for you, I encourage you to apply for the Seed Transformation Program. Stanford Seed will be accepting applications for this 10-month, part-time program which includes a combination of face-to-face teaching, networking, and virtual learning. You’ll have the opportunity to participate in a cohort of like-minded entrepreneurs from across your region. Founders and CEOs of companies based in sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, and South Asia with annual revenue of at least $300,000 are eligible to apply. For those interested, please apply at stanfordseed.ceo/grit. Applications are due by May 1.

(00:41)

Jesper Sørensen: One of the most important roles for a CEO to embrace is this idea of both thinking outward — about what’s the strategy of the firm? How are we going to position ourselves in our market? How are we going to have a competitive advantage? — and the ability to look inward at the organization and say: What do all those choices imply for how I’m going to build my organization, how I’m going to lead my teams, the kind of culture I’m going to create in my organization?

(01:09)

Darius Teter: Hi, this is your host, Darius. We started this podcast nearly five years ago because at that time there were lots of shows featuring the founders of Silicon Valley unicorns, but very few featuring the stories of entrepreneurs in Tanzania or Kenya or India. Over the past four seasons and 90 episodes of Grit & Growth, we’ve shared their voices along with insights and advice from Stanford faculty and local experts. Fast forward to 2025, and I’m happy to say that there are literally thousands of relatable, locally produced podcasts doing just that. So we’ve decided to close this chapter of Grit & Growth to focus on expanding our impact in new ways, such as using emerging technologies to help us deliver even more effective, accessible educational content to entrepreneurs like yourselves around the world. For this final episode, I sat down with four of our most beloved Stanford professors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule, Jonathan Levav, and Baba Shiv. They have all been guests on this podcast, and they’ve all spent years working closely with entrepreneurs from across Africa, South Asia, and now Indonesia. What followed was less of a lecture and more of a reflection, a conversation about resilience, transformation, and the kind of learning that flows both ways.

(02:39)

Jesper Sørensen: So the very first time we ran the STP, we were discussing various kinds of strategy and leadership issues.

(02:46)

Darius Teter: One of the most powerful moments I’ve seen in our Seed Transformation Program happened in the middle of a leadership discussion led by Professor Jesper Sørensen.

(02:55)

Jesper Sørensen: Towards the end of the program, towards the end of the week, one of the participants, one of the leaders, stood up and said, “I have discovered what my problem is in my organization. It’s me.”

(03:07)

Darius Teter: Jesper has spent years teaching strategy and organizational behavior both in Silicon Valley and across Seed’s markets. But working with founders in emerging economies has challenged him to think differently, especially about the isolation of leadership and the courage it takes to look inward.

(03:23)

Jesper Sørensen: Strategic leadership is kind of inherently a very lonely task, right? So if you’re the CEO or you’re the founder, at the end of the day, you’re responsible for a lot of decisions. Those decisions have a lot of uncertainty. It’s very hard to predict what the future is going to be, and yet you still need to make decisions about major investments and initiatives that you might undertake. The sense of, I’m just doing this by myself, and instead feel like, okay, I have other people who are on this journey with me. They are struggling with the same kinds of problems in their own environments, and we can talk to each other because part of what the Transformation Program does is it gives them a common language and a common set of frameworks so that they become more intelligible to each other. So it’s not just about, this is what my particular narrow business is about, it’s about a more general set of problems.

(04:17)

Darius Teter: Peer networks can alleviate that sense of loneliness that all entrepreneurs face, and so can a strong and empowered team. So what does it take to really let go of control, to delegate not just tasks but trust? That’s something Sarah Soule has thought about deeply after working with leaders across the globe.

(04:36)

Sarah Soule: A lot of leaders all over the world have trouble with that. The concentration is higher, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and it’s exactly as you just said. They explain it to me that this is not part of the culture, that the leader is the leader, and it’s a very command-and-control. Again, I’m making generalizations, but I hear this again and again and again. So when we try to teach them skills and teach them ways to think about delegating, it often doesn’t feel very authentic because it’s not expected of them as a leader.

(05:07)

Darius Teter: Sarah’s time in the Seed Program has shaped how she teaches leadership, not just as a skill, but as a mindset shift. Delegation isn’t just about giving up control. It’s about building a system where your team can think, challenge, and lead right alongside you.

(05:23)

Sarah Soule: The common challenges that leaders across all of these different populations of leaders tend to focus around: How do I motivate my team? More recently, how do I think about hybrid work and having distributed teams and keeping them motivated, keeping them engaged? How do I make sure that I’m making good decisions, decisions based in a lot of data and critical thinking, and with the ability to have people on the team challenge those decisions?

(05:52)

Darius Teter: Baba Shiv, a professor of marketing and a neuroscientist by training, he shares a similar take.

(05:58)

Baba Shiv: We tell people that it’s best to delegate, keep delegating. You’ve got to become a post-hero kind of leader, right? He’s not a hero out here. You got to delegate to him, but how do you delegate when you don’t have people you can delegate to? And there’s always that talent gap. It’s more of a confidence gap, not just knowing what to do, but doing that independently. I also tell people that busy is the new stupid.

(06:25)

Darius Teter: Baba’s work with Seed entrepreneurs pushed him to reflect on how burnout, overscheduling, and the illusion of productivity can erode real leadership.

(06:33)

Baba Shiv: You think that you cram your calendars with meetings and so on, and not only that, you allow other people to cram your calendars. You need time not just to think, you need time to refuel yourself, otherwise your juice will not flow. You’ll just kind of suffer a burnout very quickly. That’s what I learned over a period of time, that initially the questions will often be about something, about the concepts and so on, but if I meet them four or five years later, in general, the question is about: How do I manage my own time? How do I be a better leader?

(07:04)

Darius Teter: Jesper Sørensen has seen the same pattern and a similar breakthrough.

(07:07)

Jesper Sørensen: When leaders start to see how it is that they unintentionally undermine the success of their company and that it can be addressed, and I think that’s a super powerful moment.

(07:24)

Darius Teter: One of the most consistent challenges that Stanford faculty hear from founders and CEOs across the globe: talent. Not just finding it, but developing it.

(07:33)

Sarah Soule: I’ve heard that mentioned again and again as well. And so one of the topics that I think we could do more on is thinking about how we can better help our leaders to create developmental opportunities for people below them so that they have a next level, they have a bench at that next level, and then they can begin to think about succession planning.

(07:53)

Darius Teter: I spoke earlier about how important it is for peer networks to help alleviate some of that loneliness of being an entrepreneur. Well, what that means in practice is that you’re able to name your challenges and share them.

(08:05)

Jesper Sørensen: I think what our entrepreneurs discover is that they’re not unique in the problems that they face, even though it often feels that way before they come into the program. I will say that one thing that is great about our participants is that they’re very open about what their challenges are, including themselves. They’re also very open with how they might be a part of their problem, how their way of approaching problems might be a part of the organization’s problems, and I think seeing the way they resonate with each other and the community that they’re able to build with each other, I think is a super energizing part of the STP experience.

(08:43)

Darius Teter: That kind of reflection builds trust and that trust spreads. When a leader models transparency, it gives their team permission to speak up to challenge ideas, including yours, and to step into problem-solving mode with their own sense of ownership.

(08:57)

Baba Shiv: The best way to empower people is to give them the confidence that they can actually talk. I mean, you see these pockets of innovation not just in the marketplace, but also within the culture of the organizations. When people feel empowered, they will give the best.

(09:16)

Sarah Soule: One of the things that I taught for years was growth mindset.

(09:21)

Darius Teter: Mistakes, setbacks, failures. These are all inevitable in business, but what matters most is how you frame those experiences.

(09:28)

Sarah Soule: And thinking about how you need to anticipate and think about failures or foibles as opportunities to do better and to continue to grow as opposed to sort of thinking about them as huge obstacles. I think the reason that resonated so much was that many of our leaders have faced incredible obstacles, yet they have persevered. They’ve continued on with amazing amount of grit.

(09:57)

Baba Shiv: The thing I always tell people is that winning and losing in life is not the outer game. It is that inner game that you have to play, and to be the inner game out there, remember that you have to put on oxygen mask first before you can help others.

(10:12)

Sarah Soule: This idea of growth mindset, I think, to them resonated a lot. And so what I would sort of suggest is whatever they can do to build in nudges on their team to create growth mindsets among their team members will serve them very, very well. In any entrepreneur, any small and medium-sized enterprise is going to encounter bumps and roadblocks along the way. But it’s how we process those, how we deal with those that separates those who will grow and scale from those that will flounder.

(10:45)

Baba Shiv: I mean, necessity is the mother of invention. So someone would’ve come out and always look for these kind of extreme cases where someone in the midst of all these challenges are able to come out with solutions.

(10:56)

Sarah Soule: One of the questions when I first started teaching was, well, this is all great, but you come from Silicon Valley, and “failing fast, have a failure party, celebrate failure” doesn’t actually really work here. And so then I began to think about how can we deconstruct failure and think about it in a more sophisticated way and point out that there are some kinds of failures that we do want to actually punish the team for. Sabotage, for example, inattention and so forth, those are the kinds of things that we really do need to stop and not celebrate. But really well-intentioned failure in which the team has done everything they possibly can to study what they’re going to do, to do simulations of what they’re going to do, to pilot, to prototype, and then if there’s a little bit of a failure, at least it was well intentioned, it was well argued, and they did their best to prevent the failure from happening. That’s where we learn. That’s the kind of failure we learn from.

(11:52)

Darius Teter: I also had a chance to sit down with Jonathan Levav, a no-nonsense but deeply funny marketing professor who’s not afraid to ruffle a few feathers as part of his teaching methods. Many entrepreneurs in our programs have been through the gantlet, with him, sharing their marketing assets up on the screen in front of their peers, only to have him pick it apart with his expert eye.

(12:13)

Jonathan Levav: If they segment, they say, we make clothes for women ages 25 to 45, and technically that’s a segment, but it’s not based on a need, and it’s worse than that. I mean, I know that I won’t make clothes for children, but it doesn’t give you a guide for decision making.

(12:29)

Darius Teter: To segment your customers effectively, you need to understand what they actually need and why. What problem does your product solve?

(12:37)

Jonathan Levav: They think of segmentation purely in terms of demographics. Demographics helps me know if you have a diaper. It doesn’t describe behavior with respect to most other products, even for the functional, so relatedly, they don’t know what problem they’re solving. They know what they make, they don’t know why they’re making it, and they have a terrible time articulating their value proposition. At least think that they’re articulating a value proposition. They’re just doing a bad job of it.

(13:04)

Darius Teter: Another key marketing insight is that once you understand your customer’s needs clearly, you still need to figure out how to communicate the value of your product.

(13:13)

Jonathan Levav: When I travel down the street in Ghana, the way people do marketing is very literal, and they still haven’t gone to the next step of going to the figurative. You think about Nike. So Nike, I have a woman running down a road with trees and maybe see the sneakers and then just see her, and then it just says, just do it. And so that’s figurative, right? It’s trying to evoke an emotion. It doesn’t say, Hey, we’re a pair of shoes. It evokes a lifestyle. Whereas a lot of the advertisements I’ve seen both from our own Transformation leaders, but also just kind of out in the street, the equivalent would be, we are Nike. We are a sneaker that makes you fast on the road.

(13:53)

Darius Teter: For entrepreneurs in the Seed Program, this often means re-imagining how they connect with their customers. Take a very literal approach. “Our shoes make you faster” doesn’t necessarily build your brand, but an emotional message, one that captures identity, aspiration, purpose, that can.

(14:11)

Jonathan Levav: It’s always something I feel I have to really emphasize a lot in the context of the Seed Transformation leaders.

(14:17)

Darius Teter: As a professor of strategy, Jesper is also deeply interested in positioning.

(14:22)

Jesper Sørensen: One of the most important roles for a CEO to embrace is this idea of both thinking outward — about what’s the strategy of the firm? How are we going to position ourselves in our market? How are we going to have a competitive advantage? — and the ability to look inward at the organization and say, what do all those choices imply for how I’m going to build my organization, how I’m going to lead my teams, the kind of culture I’m going to create in my organization?

(14:49)

Darius Teter: For many Stanford professors, teaching outside the U.S. also means confronting just how different the operating environment can be. Baba Shiv and Jonathan Levav both described the experience as eye opening, not just for what entrepreneurs are dealing with, but for how those constraints reshape their own priorities.

(15:08)

Baba Shiv: We know that entrepreneurs’ lives are such that you wake up in the morning and you think you’ll do X, Y, Z, and you’re not doing A, B, C, except that you had to do A, B, C, D, F as well. And most of this is putting out fires, right? I mean, things that we take for granted out here, having infrastructure, for example, they’ll get a call saying that, Hey, I was supposed to deliver my goods out there to a customer, and the truck is broken down. What do you do about it? Or it’s been stopped on the way or by some regulators are coming in, and so it’s a lot more chaotic. They’re dealing with a lot more chaos.

(15:39)

Jesper Sørensen: So there’s no doubt that a company in Nigeria, a company in Madagascar, a company in a remote rural state in India faces a different set of challenges than a company based in Silicon Valley, right? So we have challenges related to corruption. We have challenges related to the rule of law. We have challenges related to transportation, infrastructure, etc., etc. My impression for a long time, having worked with and taught Seed entrepreneurs and founders, is when you meet somebody who’s built a million-dollar business in Lagos, and you compare them to somebody who might have built a million-dollar business in Western Europe or something like that, they’re both impressive entrepreneurs. But the Nigerian entrepreneur has done a lot, right? Because they’ve not only built a great business, they’ve done it in a much more challenging environment.

(16:35)

Darius Teter: Jonathan Levav had a similar realization, one that fundamentally challenged how he thinks about marketing strategy and customer experience.

(16:43)

Jonathan Levav: I had a Transformation leader from Liberia one year, from Monrovia, and he said, yeah, we have days where we have one or two hours of electricity. I said, well, what happens if you’re on the operating table? And he says, well, we have a generator. Well, how long does the generator last? About six hours. What happens if my surgery is more than six hours? Well, you have a problem. When that’s your reality, maybe the customer journey and the feeling people have, and when they start thinking about what hospital it is, it is subsumed by the more fundamental question of: What do I do when I run out of electricity while I’m having surgery? You don’t have the luxury to worry about the customer journey if you don’t have electricity. That’s the part for me a lot of times as a faculty member that’s kind of jarring, it’s kind of different. In other words, how should a person who doesn’t necessarily have electricity in this hospital think about marketing?

(17:29)

Darius Teter: But let’s not overcorrect on the uniqueness of your operating environment. Sure, things may look completely different from the United States when you’re in Lagos or Jakarta or Hyderabad, but it turns out that some of the best principles of running a business, they’re transportable.

(17:44)

Jesper Sørensen: What we try to teach in the program, just like what we try to teach in the business school, is a way of thinking about business challenges that can travel.

(17:52)

Darius Teter: After years of working with founders in emerging markets, Jesper has come to a very powerful idea. The leadership frameworks, the business best practices — they’re not just academic. They’re adaptable. They can be taught, they can be translated, they can be applied across border sectors and cultures.

(18:10)

Jesper Sørensen: So one way to think about what we do at the business school in the MBA program is that we emphasize mostly traveling across industries or traveling across economic sectors, but it should also be able to travel across individual regions and countries. And the mind of a business leader should be able to go to any kind of particular context and figure out how it works. I think one place where you see that working and proof of this concept in the Seed Program is in our coaching program and in our consulting programs where we take coaches who have years of experience working in Silicon Valley, right, working for big companies in Silicon Valley, and they travel to Ghana and they become coaches for companies in Ghana and Nigeria and West Africa. And you might say, well, what does knowing how things work in Palo Alto have to do with knowing how things work in Ghana? And it turns out it has a lot to do with it. And we see an incredible value added by those coaches precisely because they’re able to think about the problems that the business leaders think in a abstract kind of conceptual way, and then they see things and then they say, okay, well, these specific particulars mean that this won’t work, but we still have a particular logic that we can pursue here.

(19:26)

Darius Teter: That ability to think systematically beyond local constraints is a hallmark of great business leaders.

(19:32)

Jesper Sørensen: There are ways to think about that problem and solutions to that problem. And once you acknowledge that it’s not just you and that particular supplier that’s the problem, you’re in the same boat as lots of other organizations, then you can start to find solutions, right? But doing that kind of diagnosis is the first step.

(19:49)

Baba Shiv: You got to think everything is just a framework. It’s a way to think about issues out there, and you’ve got to adapt it to the context that you are in. And if you can tell me the context you are in, I’ll be able to say how, provide an answer as to how you can utilize a particular framework or a concept that can be applied to the context. And sometimes you’ll have to change the framework. You’ll have to modify that, and I’ve done that on several occasions. When you learn and you say that this may not apply to a specific country, a Nigeria or Ghana or Botswana, whether there are very different cultures out there, very different way of doing business, and you’ll have to modify the frameworks and the concepts accordingly to the context.

(20:30)

Darius Teter: One of the biggest lessons we’ve taken away from all the entrepreneurs we’ve worked with is that leadership starts from within. All the systems and strategies and frameworks — they just don’t matter if the person leading the business is burned out, reactive, or unfocused.

(20:43)

Baba Shiv: You’ve got to take care of yourself, your mind, and your body first. We sometimes measure success only on how much of investment is coming, but in a larger scheme of things, I think the impact is much bigger, and that is a message that I’ve been — and it’s resonating extremely well. The last few cohorts that I’ve taught at the STP, I mean, that has really resonated with them and they’re adopting some of the practices. Teaching in Seed for me is always a reminder to have that humility, that coming into that place, you might know so much, but there’s so much more to know, and especially from these people who have faced these challenges in unique environments and emerge successfully in their own way, they emerge successfully in those environments, and it just brings a lot of humility going into this.

(21:30)

Darius Teter: And that impact isn’t just theoretical. The Seed model, putting boots on the ground in these markets — it was bold and ambitious from the start, and over time I think that work has created a positive feedback loop because being present in these countries hasn’t just shaped entrepreneurs, but it’s also changed the way we teach and think about business at Stanford.

(21:49)

Jesper Sørensen: I’m often struck by how bold and ambitious the vision for Seed was. Here you have a business school located in a university where the entirety of the university, the entirety of the business school’s operations are located within a few square miles in Silicon Valley. And here was an ambition to be boots on the ground in emerging markets and take the knowledge that exists in a business school, one of the top business schools in the world, and bring it to bear on the problems and the challenges and the opportunities of mid-size companies in emerging markets. I think there were a lot of people who were skeptical, right? Could we really do that? Is it really possible for a Silicon Valley-native school to have that kind of impact? And I think what the Seed Transformation Program has demonstrated is the answer is yes, right? That you can have an impact, you can make a difference. And what we know here is super valuable there, and I think what it has also demonstrated is that being active in those markets has enormous benefits for the school itself. It makes us a better school. It makes the knowledge that we generate and that we teach here at the school so much better as well.

(23:05)

Darius Teter: And every now and then, there’s one moment that brings it all home.

(23:06)

Jesper Sørensen: Teaching in the Seed Transformation Program has been enormously beneficial for how I think about my teaching more generally. I think it has helped me see, by seeing such an amazing variety and to see the challenges that these leaders face in these environments and so on and so forth, it reaffirms my faith in the idea that these general principles are powerful, they’re useful, they make a difference. And that makes it easier to stand in front of any audience to have that belief because, again, you can see, wow, they took that idea and they put it into practice and it made a difference quite quickly. That’s powerful. As an instructor, you love to have that impact, and it kind of helps you go into the classroom and make a difference.

(23:54)

Sarah Soule: Another way in which those of us who have been lucky enough to teach in Seed have brought some of Seed back, is through our case-writing efforts as well as our very granular examples of the companies with whom we’ve worked, and those have been just solid gold in the MBA classroom. A common complaint at the Stanford Graduate School of Business is that the MBA classroom focuses on a lot of tech companies in Silicon Valley, and there’s a real desire on the part of our students to have content to know about companies in other areas of the world. And so we’re able to write case studies, use them in the MBA classroom, but then also just use really wonderful examples of the companies. And it’s just enriched, I think, the entire MBA curriculum as a result.

(24:47)

Darius Teter: Over the course of this episode, we’ve heard reflections not just on frameworks and strategies and business practices, but on people. These professors have spent years with Stanford Seed teaching business leaders from nearly 30 countries and learning alongside entrepreneurs who are tackling immense challenges with creativity, with resilience, and with heart. What’s become clear through these conversations is that this isn’t a one-way exchange. Teaching in Seed has fundamentally shaped how these professors think, teach, and lead. I don’t imagine this is the end of our Grit & Growth journey. But as we sign off for now, we’re turning our focus to something new: expanding the reach of this show. This summer, we’ll be translating this episode and many others into multiple languages, making it easier for founders around the world to access the insights, stories, and voices that we’ve gathered here. So stay tuned. We’re not done. We’re just growing in new directions. I’d like to thank Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule, Jonathan Levav, and Baba Shiv for sharing their insights and for challenging the way we think about leadership strategy and business growth. Their experiences remind us that building a lasting business isn’t just about scaling, it’s about embracing change, empowering others, looking inward, and leading with intention. If you’d like to hear more from all of them, you can go back through our catalog because they’ve each been on at least one and sometimes more episodes of Grit & Growth.

(26:14)

Erika Amoako-Agyei and VeAnne Virgin researched and developed content for this episode. Kendra Gladych is our production coordinator, and our executive producer is Tiffany Steeves, with writing and production from Nathan Tower and sound design and mixing by Ben Crannelll at Lower Street Media. Until next time, I’m Darius Teter, and this has been Grit & Growth. Thank you for listening.