Holding Opposing Values in Tension: Stories from 2021 Acumen India Spring Cohort

Unheard Stories of Moral Practices is a five-part series showcasing the hard-edged skills, challenges, and values practiced by the 2021 Acumen India Fellows from the Spring Cohort.

In an interdependent world, there is rarely a one-size-fits-all solution. Solutions that sustain, require leaders who are willing to step back from either-or solutions and recognize the many possibilities available to them.

Impact Vs Profit by Maneet Gohil, CEO of Lal10:

My grandfather, Bhagwandas, worked in our ancestral leather footwear manufacturing unit along with other artisans that he employed. These units are classified under the definition of MSME (Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises). He had struggled to earn the basic necessities and a sustainable income. However, he managed to educate his five children — my father being one of them. As a child, I used to visit Amalner, my grandfather’s town, and have been intrigued by the beautiful slippers made by his own hands.

When my grandfather passed away, I visited Amalner for a short break. My grandmother took me to the shop where he had spent his entire life fabricating footwear. The life of Bhagwandas flashed through my eyes. India has over 1.19 million such micro-units like my grandfathers who in turn employ over 200 million artisans. The creative manufacturing sector in itself is the largest employment generating sector in the rural part of India after agriculture. I realized that there were millions of people like Bhagwandas who would be struggling across our country. A few months later, I left my job to travel across India to understand the lives of artisans and craftspeople. I met more than 6,000 micro units across 18 states and began to grasp the complexity of challenges they encountered every day. My journey motivated me to launch Lal10 — lantern in Hindi — with the hope of illuminating new beginnings and providing every household with a sustainable income.

With stellar execution, clear focus, and a lot of hard work, my co-founders and I grew Lal10 by leaps and bounds. Our vision was rooted in shared values and a fierce drive from within to create a lasting impact across the country. We worked tirelessly to pitch our products to buyers and onboard investors who aligned with our values and were as voracious as we were to see both impact and profit.

We realized that we would need both impact and growth-focused capital to raise Lal10. The traditional investors possessed the growth capital to scale our business multifold while the social investors had the heart of impact. Impact investors helped us create a strong focus on creating metrics that can drive value/ stickiness for our seller ecosystem (supply) while the growth-focused investors helped us create a better understanding of scale and sustainability with the buyers (demand). With an audacious vision to deepen the impact and scale the business — we took on the challenge of balancing the head and the heart.

Over the years, we realized how important it was to have an equilibrium between impact and profit. We have had a strong focus on impact and financial metrics which we have learned from both sides of the capital. By marrying both, we understood that without a strong impact the company would not be able to create a self-sustaining ecosystem for the artisans. But without growth, the impact is marginal and we would not be able to create enough value for so many Bhagwandas across the country. Today, Lal10 stands on the fine balance as a wholesale marketplace that connects artisan units in creative manufacturing to retail customers across the globe. Truly an Alibaba for Indian MSMEs.

Scaling Wide Vs Scaling Deep by Angana Prasad, Executive Director at Project KHEL:

When we started work in 2012, Sports-for-Development was a novel concept in Uttar Pradesh. We had a clear vision to adapt and expand our work based on the needs of a community. What started as an organization in 2012 is now just one of five different programs we run — the remaining four are interventions that our children need.

Being child-centric is among our core values. We design our sessions based on the needs of the children. Our facilitators are familiar with the stories/lives of each child, which informs how we drive and measure impact. Our curriculum is an ever-evolving product designed by individuals who have spent extensive time in the field implementing sessions and activities. Additionally, every member of our organization is required to spend time traveling to centers to engage with children and their activities.

By 2016, our work began to capture attention. In 2017, an organization expressed interest in merging with us. The organization was much larger than us, which meant merging into their existing identity. The partnership would allow access to more funds, larger networks, better reach, good salaries, and of course the opportunity to rapidly scale our impact overnight. However, our carefully designed curriculum and the way we chose to lead our organization were at risk of being lost within the merger.

I am someone who believes in scaling deep over scaling wide because of my passion to work with children directly and designing interventions based on my experiences from the field. The merger would mean scaling wide with little clarity on the depth of interventions.

At the same time, we may impact fewer children in Uttar Pradesh if we choose not to scale wide.

Holding on to this tension, I decided to participate in the meetings with the senior leaders of this larger organization to understand what this merger truly meant. It was difficult to hold back my personal biases and to listen objectively, but I knew it was necessary.

I had given up my 20s to build this organization and chose these children over family and friends who had a limited understanding of my work. Project KHEL was part of my identity, even when I introduced myself in a personal capacity. One thing became clear at this meeting — Project KHEL would cease to exist after the merger.

I rejected the idea of the merger and asked myself how Angana could be Angana without Project KHEL? I soon realized my identity crisis was clouding my judgment. Over the next couple of days, I resisted these thoughts and asked objective questions to understand how this merger might benefit our children.

In the second meeting, I acknowledged that this merger would help us expand our work, but it would also likely stifle the individualized attention and time we were able to give to each child.

What else would this merger mean? The possibility of working in silos within our own organization, minimal first-hand experiences working directly with children, higher salaries for strategic roles compared to facilitators who are our important grassroots leaders, and lastly, a model where Project KHEL’s impact will be measured loosely based on the numbers reached rather than numbers impacted.

Many sleepless nights ensued, holding on to the conflict between scaling deep and scaling wide, keeping my children at the center of my very objective thoughts, I decided to vote against the merger.

Scaling wide vs scaling deep, simply explained is the tight-roped struggle between quantity and quality that many development entrepreneurs face. I had to separate from myself and look at the bigger picture, the dream and the vision Project KHEL has for the people we serve. This merger may not be the only way to scale wide and compromising the foundational values of the organization isn’t an equitable partnership.

The experiences of Acumen Fellows such as Angana deepen our understanding of how to navigate tensions that many entrepreneurs encounter but often remain unspoken. Join our Fellows, and the Acumen community in understanding and practicing the hard-edged skills to hold opposing values in tension, to create systems that create ripples of change.

Register for the Path of Moral Leadership course with Acumen Founder and CEO, Jacqueline Novogratz to learn the hard-edged skills necessary to build a better world. To know more about our 2021 Spring cohort, and their work, head over to their bios.