Transcript

4 strategies for tackling the toughest challenges

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A really small act may seem very small to you. creates this ripple effect of winning in which Other people start to do well. Great things start to come out of it. By accident we realized that the machines we have in our company could address А глобал урчен іщу

We thought What other big problem can we address? And I realized something. Not only was this the right thing to do It was going to be damn good business.

If you are trying to solve big problems, The work will never end. Hi, everyone. I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and your host, you're about to hear a special episode of Masters of Scale. That illuminates the power and the impact in attempting the impossible. When scaling a business, we often see impossible challenges in our path.

Many wise operators opt to gracefully sidestep those potholes. to find a way around them so they can more rapidly get up to speed. And that makes sense. As Reed Hoffman says, entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. You only have so much time to generate upward momentum. But what happens if you decide to go right at a huge challenge?

The risk is super high, yet if you succeed, the rewards can be phenomenal. We're gonna visit with four entrepreneurs We're taking on not just challenging problems. But what you might call unsolvable one. Challenge is so big and intractable.

They're arguably insurmountable. How these leaders are attacking these unsolvable problems provides lessons for every business person. The four guests highlighted in today's episode appeared on stage at the Masters of Scale summit. To talk about climate change. About societal inequity.

And about the lack of clean water for billions of people across the globe. The biggest problems in the world can seem insurmountable. Бо не зі сторі шо. By embracing work that will never be done. We can achieve unexpected and outside results.

For our organizations. For ourselves. And for humanity. This is the unsolvable problem.

Four keys to embracing work. That is never done. Number one. Find your why. Our first lesson comes from Bjarke Ingalls.

He's a Danish architect and founder of the Bjarke Ingalls Group. I first met him in twenty ten when Fast Company put him on the cover as one of our masters of design. The next year the Wall Street Journal named him an innovator of the year for architecture. and in twenty sixstine Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Bjarki has a passion that has expanded from architecture to larger systemic challenges. It's a passion. To up level the human experience through design. Foam guning that's the word for design in Danish. And as the the word suggests, it literally means

form giving because when you design You are giving form to that which has not yet been given form. In other words, you're giving form to the future. The first project we did two decades ago. Was the Copenhagen Harbour Bath.

that extended the life of the city into the water around it. And On the opening day I realized that А клін под із натолий с It's actually amazing for the citizens of Copenhagen

who now no longer have to drive for hours to get to the Copenhagen equivalent of the Hamptons. They can actually jump in the port in the middle of the city. And we thought maybe this is part of something bigger. We call it Hironistic sustainability Heedonistic sustainability.

It was a catchy clever idea. It was also a thread Biarky's why. When the pandemic descended Biarky and his team responded by repurposing a tool they used on a daily basis. By accident, we realized that the machines we have in our company could address

a global urgent issue. Our three D printers and the materials we make architecture models from could be used to making emergency medical equipment like face shields and ventilator tubes. And we managed to manufacture twenty five thousand of these items and give them to the local healthcare providers. Until the supply chain could catch up. We thought we'd have to do it.

What other big problem can we address? The experience awakened Bjarki's why. The desire to utilize design. To combat the pressing issues of our world. The issue he and his team zeroed in on.

Was climate change. We asked ourselves What if we actually Use our methodology. As architects and planners

To make it tangible actionable plan for the planet. At times, the sheer volume of complications in addressing climate change Can make it seem overwhelming. But Biarky knew his why.

And as he began to pull at the fray ends of our suffering planet, He started to uncover a path to solutions that the world could tackle. One thread at a time. We got in contact with Mask, the shipping company And every fifth container in the world has the seven pointed star on it.

So Mask has committed to converting their entire fleet to being powered by renewably sourced methanol. So essentially using sun and wind. To create a methanol.

And they've engaged us to work with them to turn all of their container ports into green growth hubs. Where the abundance of renewable energy can Convert not just their fleet. But the entire port The entire sity

And potentially the entire country that they are part of into renewable energy. So starting with The port in Tangier? And we're also working on Aqaba and Savannah. Essentially every port that they touch

Becomes a catalyst. for the energy transition of that particular region. So Not only are they turning themselves carbon neutral, but really accelerating the energy transition in the entire world. Of course. I'm not blind to the fact that it is somewhat

arrogant or metalomaniacal to even dare to start on a plan for the planet. But I think that the impact it has on ourselves and on mask Could actually also benefit others. Biarki's mission is daring to say the least. But as Bjarke's story shows

Once you find your why Енфос он. Even the seemingly insurmountable features. can become more manageable. Revealing tangible

actionable solution. Number two. Identify your allies. Today's second lesson comes from Aurora James. Founder of fashion label Brother Vellies.

Dedicated to promoting traditional African design. and founder of nonprofit 15% pledge. Which supports black owned businesses in retail. Aurora posits that when facing daunting challenges You need to power your efforts with the right support system.

Because we all need allies to turn intention into action. And to scale our impact. How could you be an ally? I've been studying this question for the last few years, and I'd love to tell you. What I learned.

My journey began with a shoe. In South Africa, the shoe's known as a Velvescoon and also locally as a Velli, and it started out as just being Pieces of leather wrapped around the foot from animals that were hunted. It eventually got its own rubber sole fashioned directly from the neighborhood rubber tree. When British people came to Southern Africa, they fell in love with the shoe. So much so that they brought it back up to the UK. They renamed it a Desert Boot, and they launched a company that you and I know today as Clarks. Clearly.

This is not allyship. Over the past one hundred years, Americans have donated. Tons. And tons of clothes to small communities all across Africa. And this

isn't actually aliship either. Because instead of helping support those communities, it actually had the opposite effect. Seventy percent of small workshops and apparel factories around the continent of Africa actually closed down, due in large part to these American Donations. Aurora saw a disconnect between the desire to aid underserved communities.

And the understanding of what true allieship requires. She was determined to disrupt the way the system operated and decided to go all in on being an ally, no matter the cost. I wanted to take everything I had, literally my entire life savings. which was actually only thirty five hundred dollars at the time. And launch my brand Brother Villies.

With the primary goal of including the world's artisans in the luxury fashion conversation and helping to preserve their jobs. For me, it wasn't just about launching a fashion brand. It was about setting out to actually be an ally and using my own individual privilege to create a pipeline of income for the descendants of those who had originally invented this shoe. He started quickly uncovering some of the most incredible artisans making things so beautiful you wouldn't believe it. And they were virtually undiscovered. A few years on, I ended up meeting my own fashion fairy godmother. Her name was Anna Winter.

And luckily for me, Anna took a great liking to what I was doing. And she became my ally. In twenty fifteen, I went on to win her CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund, which helped propel my business so much more forward and allowed me to continue my own aliship. By employing countless artisans across the world. When Megan Markle chose to wear our Mexican Harachis

Not only did we quickly sell out. But tons of tiny workshops. All across Mexico that were making the same style quickly sold out to. So it's a simple шучой. Megan.

Actually became an ally. Brother Valley is as a company. was starting to become the ally of many. Progress against an insurmountable obstacle is Is not the same thing as eliminating it.

Despite her contributions to under serve communities. Aurora discovered that she needed to pivot further. In the face of adversity. Everything changed for me. on May twenty fifth, twenty twenty.

When news and video footage started circulating of Mr. Floyd's senseless murder, in a lot of ways it felt like a grief that was almost too heavy to bear. I'm sure a lot of you in the audience here thought Wow. I would love to do something to help. In fact

Some of you here. As well as a lot of other CEOs and founders actually called me that week. Trying to figure out how your company should respond. To this sudden racial reckoning. And I knew this time things were going to have to be different.

We would no longer be able to work with just DEI policies or one time donations. We needed innovations. На час. We needed actions. На част ворд.

Вот ви нетво. Allieship. Aurora believed it was no longer sufficient for industry leaders to simply voice their solidarity with black owned companies and business owners. The actions taken by allies needed to be tangible. The idea for me was simple.

Black people are almost fifteen percent of the population. Major retailers should commit fifteen percent of their shelf space. To black owned businesses. And I thought

If major retailers started committing to the idea of the fifteen percent pledge Silicon Valley might actually be excited to take notice and start allocating more than just their traditional one percent of funds to black entrepreneurs. I thought about how much money would start being funneled back into the black community. And I realized something. На right thing to do.

It was going to be damn good business. Aurora went public with her idea immediately. Activating her influential social media following. I tagged a bunch of the retailers that I wanted to come to the table and have a conversation. Guys.

This was not a calling out. This was a calling in. This was an opportunity. The next morning was a Sunday, and I woke up to a flurry of inbound messages. I stayed up that night overnight with my web designer so that we could launch a petition on Monday at noon.

By Tuesday, that same petition had almost a hundred thousand signatures. By Wednesday, I registered to become a nonprofit. By Thursday, CNN and the New York Times were calling. And by day ten, Sephora. became the first major corporation to commit to the fifteen percent bud. Right then and there, they had become an ally. In the days and weeks that followed, my message was simple. We are all Guilty.

But ultimately, it's the system that we've created that is to blame. This is our unique opportunity to start rebuilding parts of that system. Together. And in true ally sh. What kind of impact can allyship produce when addressing an unsolvable problem?

Aurora shared some stat. Since launching the fifteen percent pledge, we've placed over six hundred and twenty black-owned brands onto the shelves of our pledge takers. And let me tell you It's working. In partnership with the twenty-nine major corporations that have committed to the 15% pledge, we are now in the process of allocating over 10 billion dollars a year to black entrepreneurs.

Ten Billion. Dollars. We partnered with everyone from McKinsey to Google to Yelp to American Vogue. To help harness their unique skills as allies to actually propel black businesses forward.

I've learned a lot over the past few years. About what it means to be an ally. I've learned that allieship takes action. I've learned that it takes radical accountability. All you need to do.

is start asking questions. Starting with. How can I Be an ally. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position.

The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creativeplaning dot com slash masters of scale.

Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey there, it's Jill Slessinger. I'm launching a new show. It's called Money Moves, and your money is going to move. We're gonna help you make better financial decisions. We're gonna call out the BS you're finding all over social media. We're gonna give you actionable guidance to make your financial life clearer, less stressful. We're gonna answer your financial questions and take the mystery out of your financial life.

Follow and listen to Money Moves with Jill Schlesinger wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back to the unsolvable problem. Four кіс то ім брайсвор да не з невердан. Before the break, we heard from Bjarke Ingalls about finding your why And Aurora James about identifying your allies.

Now we hear from two more intrepid leaders. Who are having an impact in the face of insurmountable challenges. Let's jump to it. Number three.

Compound your contributions. Katherine Finney is an American author, researcher, investor, and business woman. She's the founder of Genius Guild, a twenty million dollar venture fund that invests in black entrepreneurs. Building scale businesses that serve black communities and beyond. In addressing big challenges

Catherine isn't expecting overnight success. But she's seen how small consistent gains. Can lead to outsized results over time. To make her impact really carry. She knows she needs to compound her contributions.

The analogy she uses Is the butterfly effect. So we all know the Ray Bradbury story. the butterfly effect where you have travelers, they go back in time, someone's stupid, they step off the trail, crush a butterfly, completely changes the world. That little small act changes everything.

And so what if we had a butterfly effect of winning? Where a really small act it may seem very small to you. creates this ripple effect of winning. In which Other people start to do well.

great things start to come out of it. The butterfly effect can create a ripple, Catherine says. But it's keeping that ripple moving over time that generates impact. She learned the importance of staying power, she says. Through the example set by her father.

My father Grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and wanted to be a surgeon and wasn't encouraged to do so. He was a young black man in the Midwest at that time. And so he found himself in a little trouble, went to Vietnam, and came back and did with everyone who lived in Milwaukee did, which was work at the brewery. And

For those of you who come from factory towns, you know how important the factories are. And in the early 1980s, it completely shut down and devastated Milwaukee. He found himself at a workforce development course. Someone Taught Displaced factory workers in 1980 Milwaukee.

The foundational computing language of C Plus Plus, and my father took the course. got an internship at IBM at age thirty-six, and then arrived at Microsoft in 1990s. And why that matters is between the years of nineteen eighty six and nineteen ninety-six, Microsoft stock 100x. And one of the big ways they compensated is through stock options. And as a result, by the year two thousand, Microsoft had created ten thousand millionaires, and one of those millionaires was my father, the high school dropout turn rock star software engineer. Katherine witnessed firsthand the power of compounding contributions.

Her father's advancement in his own career served as the catalyst to propelled the growth of his family's legacy. And subsequent generations. And Catherine took that spark and built on it. By allowing her father's contributions To multiply out.

to an even larger demographic. When my father passed, there was over a thousand people at his funeral, and we created a foundation in his honor. And we took that money and the largest check we wrote. was to a young Upstart nonprofit called Black Girls Code. that allow Black Girls Co to do their first summer of coding.

And so that's The example of what I'm saying about the sort of butterfly effect of winning. Catherine found her wise. To elevate underserved communities, whatever the challenges. And she displayed allyship in supporting these communities.

That in turn attracted and created other allies. Catherine's contributions went beyond her own individual efforts. Planting seeds that will grow over time. Everybody can win. And that's the Lens in which we invest at genius skill.

We look for companies that are not just creating value. for themselves or for me as their investor, but also is creating value in their communities and they're not mutually exclusive. I think we have this belief that if someone's creating community value, it's not gonna be great business. I think it's excellent business, and we're proving that with the exceptional companies we're investing in. And so I want to encourage you all. Today, to think of what is the small thing you can do.

To create Your own butterfly effect of winning. Catherine's journey shows how when you know your why and you harness the support of true allies. You can compound your contributions. to create a positive, lasting ripple effect.

Number four. Be bigger than the problem. Our final lesson comes from Scott Harrison, founder and CEO of the non profit. Charity water.

In his earlier years Scott was a successful club promoter in New York City. Fully immersed in the business of self interest. It was only when he flipped the script on his career that he managed to not only discover his why. But put his why into action.

In an incredibly momentous and purposeful way. When I was twenty eight years old, I was a nightclub promoter for ten years in Manhattan. My job was to get people drunk for a living. convinced them to slip past the velvet rope and sip on a twenty five dollar cocktail or a thousand dollar bottle of champagne. And after ten years of this of hard partying, of drinking and drugging.

I hated This guy who I'd become Terribly disastrously emotionally spiritually bankrupt. So I had a moment, I quit everything, I sold everything I owned and said, I'm gonna have a different life. And I went to post war Liberia, West Africa. When I was there, I saw

People drinking dirty water for the first time. Water that came from swamps. And from ponds and from rivers. I was on a medical mission and here I was with these doctors. Trying to make people well.

And I learned a billion people didn't have the most basic need for health. They didn't have clean water. I learned millions of people were dying every year from bad water, more than all the violence and war in the world. Water impacted women and girls who almost always bore the burden, walking millions and millions of hours. Every year just for unsafe water.

Impacted food security, it impacted education. Scott had unearthed his deep seated why. He wanted to solve the clean water dilemma for people across the globe. But soon He had to face some harsh realities.

The big issues of the world. Are labeled as such for a reason. I thought this was gonna be very simple. Okay, I was gonna go out there, I was just gonna raise money. I was gonna bring in drilling rigs.

I would drill ten thousand dollar wells. I'd make dirty water clean. And I get the whole world clean water. I'll do this very quickly. About five years in when we were getting people clean water, we were hitting our groove of global well drilling domination.

We came across a new problem. And this was a problem people didn't want to talk about. It was a problem so complex nobody seemed to know how to solve it. And the problem was broken wells. Broken wells.

Scott and his team had made incredible progress. They were building new wells. Helping people in need. But meanwhile Existing wells were failing, going offline.

Whatever gains were being achieved. There was an underlying systemic lapse. As Scott learned, when you're out to solve big problems, You inevitably hit Big roadblocks.

I learned as I did more research, a billion people around the world live in rural communities and rely on fragile water systems. It was a Huge amount of people. Now let me talk about a fragile water system. When a well breaks, it's typically not that complicated to fix.

It's most often the pipe that's bringing water up cracks. So you take the well head off. You get the whole community together and It takes About twelve people.

of PBC pipe up very carefully and then you find the crack or the leak. You identify it, you cut the pipe, and you patch it back together. Now this is how A couple billion people around the world are keeping their water systems.

working and to their credit most of them do an amazing job at it. You can also see how the system can fail. And it fails a lot. Because sometimes a major repair is needed or the tools aren't available.

In a rural setting. The data we uncovered We're really shocking. In Africa alone, twenty five percent of the projects are broken right now. Twive

Most people. We're just ignoring this problem. This was a problem. That we were going to have

To solve. Before you can solve a problem. You have to get a firm grasp on the actual scope of the issue at hand. Sometimes the deeper you dig The bigger the hole you find yourself in.

Which for many business leaders can be the reason to abandon ship. But for Scott and his team at Charity Water It was an incentive to forge ahead. Because they knew that the problem they were out to solve. was far more important than their own frustrations.

They had to overlook their desire to throw in the towel. And we thought well listen if you could monitor the temperature of your home from across an ocean Why couldn't we monitor the performance of a well? Now to create a device like this would cost millions of dollars and We were a scrappy nonprofit.

I mean we had an R D budget of exactly zero. Zero dollars. That's just how nonprofits work. But Finally I got a meeting. to pitch this idea to Google and they awarded us a five million dollar cash grant to try to go build

A water sensor. For the developing world. Scott and his team had unlocked the power of allyship. By petitioning Google to commit financial and technological aid to the cause. But it turned out their challenges were only beginning.

Water flowing through A well is not like water flowing through a pipe. It's terribly chaotic. It's really difficult to measure. So we would need to create capacitance sensors. Like the ones on your iPhone that measure the differential between the easy. Air and water.

We'd need to take a hundred and sixty readings per second, which was forty one million bits. per day. And then the engineers said, well all that's gonna use way too much battery power. And they're gonna have to figure out how to reliably transmit this from anywhere in the world. So go find a SIM card. With roaming agreements with every country in the world. And did I mention we wanted to make this for two hundred dollars?

And spend a penny a week in transmission costs. What could Scott and his team do in the face of these unsolvable hurdles? They reminded themselves that their problems. paled in comparison to those without access to clean water. And they kept plugging away.

Couple years later, we had our first Censor we were ready to test in the field. And we felt so good about this. We made three thousand of them. So we install them in Ethiopia. And then we can't connect them to the local servers, so we can't get any data out.

So We're like, okay, well, what are we gonna do about this? We now have installed 3,000 sensors. We can't connect. We found out mobile roaming for the entire country was broken. I realize this is gonna sound hard to believe. But we send down. A network engineer named Andy.

And after three weeks of trouble shooting, he fixed Roaming. For the country. All of a sudden three thousand censors start chirping and cell phones everywhere in the country start buzzing. So we're monitoring in one instant over a billion liters of annual flow.

from our sensors just in this pilot and we solve mobile roaming for a country of a hundred million people. As a byproduct of this. It was very, very exciting. You heard that right. In seeking to solve an issue with well sensors, Scott and his team compounded their contribution by solving the region's mobile roaming issue.

Вені фокус он фиксінсол проблем. You never know how impactful your solutions might be. This is the magic of meaningful entrepreneurship. Charity Water now had a sensor that worked. And the effect it's had on clean water availability continues to grow.

We've installed eight thousand of these. We currently Are monitoring the largest data set in the history of the world. When it comes to Rural water supply. Mainly because no one ever bothered to do this before.

And now when a well breaks, we can dispatch Get out of. He's a technician, so think of him like Apple Care or Best Buy's Geek Squad for Wells. He jumps on, he's got his tools.

And he can turn up and he can fix. Oh well. We have a a lot of work to do ahead. We're gonna have to find the funding to scale from pilot. And take this around the world, we're gonna have to.

Get governments to Except the reality of failed projects. But It's exciting because if this works we can help keep Clean water flowing for the people out there.

who really need our help. So We just want to make sure that a well like this Never breaks down. From a twenty dollar corroded pipe. So

I don't know, maybe uh there's a a broken wells version in your company or your organization. What we learned through this new adventure is that it is far better. To uncover your own problems. And to try to just face them. And not ignore him, not sweep him under the rug.

But to tackle them And thereby You get all these other unintended consequences sometimes of solving other problems. In adjacency. Fifteen years ago, uh a friend of mine sent me this picture from outside of Manhattan, Delhi.

Do not be afraid. Of work that has no end. It's from an ancient rabbinic text and This is really how I've come to see this journey now sixteen years in.

If you are trying to solve big problems. The work will never end. And that idea really used to scare me. And now. I've embraced it.

Thank you for joining us on this exploration of unsolvable problems and the key lessons learned by leaders. We're working tirelessly to solve them. The biggest issues can't be remedied with a single step. Or a single podcast episode. But hopefully we can all be inspired to join in the good fight.

And make a difference in our world at a deeper level of scale. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Hey, listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

I hope to see you there. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian, your host and masters of scales editor at LAR. Our executive producers are June Cohen, Darren Triff, and Chris McLeod. Our chief content officer and interim president is Lori Hoffman. Our producers are Chris Gautier, Masha Makutonina, Adam Skuse, Alex Morris, and Tucker Legerski. Our music director is Ryan Holiday.

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