Tony Chow

Ikigai is roughly the reason you get up in the morning. Specifically, it has been defined as the intersection of what you're good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. This is my North Star and understanding how these factors change over time provides the basis for making major decisions.

Teams that are passionate about achieving the organization's mission have clearly aligned motivations to help them persevere through difficult times and to ascend Maslow's hierarchy of needs through the meaning of their work.

I believe a leader's job is to enable others around them to succeed. This means that:

1. I strive to practice empathy to understand and relate to my colleagues' situations
2. I understand that we are not robots so we have thoughts and feelings about our work. I practice active listening and regularly meet one-on-one with team members to hear them out.
3. I value a culture of trust and transparency
4. I help eliminate barriers to others' success
5. I take an interest in others' professional and personal development and help them achieve their goals
6. I encourage others to take on new challenges to develop their career
7. I do not give commands to my team. Instead, I create consensus by explaining our objectives and guiding trusted direct reports with planning and executing through their teams.
8. I value diverse opinions and loathe groupthink. Feedback is seriously considered, incorporated when possible, and rationale provided when not possible.
9. We succeed and fail as a team. Outcomes are based on my ability to enable the team to do a great job. When we suceed, we'll celebrate together. If we fail, that's on me and we'll pivot by doing a post-mortem to understand what happened and what can be done better next time.

Data provides the building blocks of major decisions.

For example, at One Acre Fund, we were considering a trial of mobile money payments to enable Ugandan farmers to make loan repayments from their phone and we needed to determine where to conduct the trial. An initiative like this is a complex undertaking because it is a fundamental shift in the program's strategy and operations and has many moving parts.

Using the balance scorecard framework to evaluate the capacity and needs of internal and external stakeholders helped us to identify both the pilot program locations and hone in on the key factors to success. Later in the project, the wide band of uncertainty around program growth was a major barrier to making a meaningful NPV analysis so Monte Carlo simulation was used to provide probabilistic estimates. All of this analysis was made possible by pulling in internal data from disparate sources.

The success of a product increases with the organization's knowledge of their customer. Team members should regularly spend time on the frontline and interact with customers to understand their wants and needs.

At a minimum, most organizations will know the basic demographics but that's probably not the best they can do. Beyond that, can we segment customers to create differentiated products and services? Suppose a cookstove manufacturer uses cost-plus pricing, can they better achieve their goals through value-based pricing or evaluating price elasticity? Going beyond the basics is a key driver for social enterprises to maximize both impact and sustainability.

My background in technology and finance has ingrained into me that the world is constantly moving forward. Competitors are always improving and the market is always evolving so standing still is a recipe for failure.

Innovation doesn't necessarily mean coming up with a breakthrough product but empowering your team to challenge the status quo, scanning the horizon and responding the emerging threats and opportunities, and having the courage and conviction to say yes to meaningful change.