We recently sat down with Alex Counts, President and CEO of Grameen Foundation. If "Grameen" sounds familiar to you, that’s because it is (or, at least, should be). Grameen Bank was started by Muhammad Yunus, the oft-credited forefather of micro-finance. In fact, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his founding of the bank. Because of Yunus and many others – including Alex – who helped him along the way, people who live in poverty now have access to money (or, credit) to start their own businesses. They also now have access to the hope it grants.

Alex loves what he does. He’s curiously both measured and impassioned when he talks about it. We asked Alex what drove him to go into this line of work.

His Path

At age 20, Alex’s life path was taking shape. As a junior at Cornell University, he took to heart some advice from a college mentor: “all problems have a solution… that solution just isn’t getting to all problems.” Alex was on a mission – to scale solutions globally, so that they reached localized problems. So, he wrote a letter to Muhammad Yunus to better understand Grameen Bank. Really, he wanted to understand if he could play a role in scaling Yunus’ approach to poverty reduction. He wanted to see firsthand whether Grameen’s impact was possible in countries other than Bangledesh.

His Fulbright scholarship, post graduation, took him to Bangladesh for six of his first nine years out of college. He worked closely with Muhammad Yunus for many years (In Alex’s office hangs a framed picture of Yunus and a post-grad version of himself sitting at a table in conversation with others. The photo smacks of collaboration and impact). In 1997, Prof. Yunus funded Grameen Foundation – with $6,000 (interest from prize money Yunnus had previously won). Convinced of micro-credit’s global potential, Alex now had a platform of his own – as head of Grameen Foundation – to scale an impactful solution to poverty reduction. In the process, he became a full-fledged social entrepreneur.

Key Lessons

Today, Alex Counts is a force in the non-profit world. The risks he took to become a social entrepreneur have paid dividends. We can learn a lot from his path, its uncertainty, and his ultimate success.

The work of a social entrepreneur is truly noble. But how difficult it must be to start your own (non-profit) business if you can’t promise returns to investors… or even yourself (in the traditional sense of “returns” anyway). How did Alex do it?

He talked to people. Lots of people… for funding. The more he talked, the more he was rejected. But the more he also stumbled upon others willing to pony up. His persistence paid off. As he put it, “The more you talk to people, the more you get of both” (‘no’s AND ‘yes’s).

He also took a leap of faith. When he and Yunus started Grameen Foundation, they didn’t know how they were going to get the necessary funding and resources to launch and sustain it. They simply believed that if they started it, then the money and people would follow. That's exactly what happened.

A steadfast belief in their work sustained them. That belief, and the passion that it stirred within them, breathed constant life into their idea and their work.

When asked where that faith, that confidence, came from, Alex again quotes a mentor who once told him, “Even if you play and lose, you’re still in paradise.” In stark contrast to the people whom Grameen Foundation helps, Alex was lucky at birth to have been born where he was (as are most of us who read (or write) blogs).

Grameen Foundation had setbacks, but Alex looked at the silver lining of every dark cloud that came his way. The organization learned. It improved. In short, Alex used the Foundation's failures as “springboard(s) to achievement.” (How many times have we seen this theme of ‘failure as springboard’ emerge? Hint: every time).

One exchange from our conversation, seemed to capture Alex's formula for success. That is, if you “work hard,” use the “gifts” you’re lucky enough to have, and do it all with “ethics,” then “it’s only a matter of time” before your work starts yielding results (“beyond what [you] could have [ever] imagined”). Alex added: Only two things get in the way of this. Either, you’re doing something you’re not good at. Or, you’re not doing what you love.

Listen to the interview when we post it in full. You’ll find out:

* What Alex wanted to be when he grew up (and why)

* What Alex does to unwind and detach from his work’s stress

* Who he credits with granting him the freedom to pursue his true calling

We recently sat down with Dominic Barton, the Worldwide Managing Director of consulting firm McKinsey & Company (that’s the firm’s de facto title for CEO). We spoke to him on topics ranging from the 2010 World Economic Forum to what he does first thing every morning to his personal experiences with success and failure.

We'll publish the complete interview soon. In meantime, we wanted to highlight some things from the conversation that we found particularly striking.

It boils down to one question: How did a small-town Canadian farm boy grow up to lead the world's most influential consulting firm?

There’s a “special sauce” to Dominic’s success. And while we don’t have the complete recipe (nobody does), we did uncover a few key ingredients. First, let’s set the context – Where did Dominic come from?

Growing Up
Dominic was one of only six people in his high school (of 200 students) to attend college. Early on, almost as if by natural selection, he was part of an elite group. It was a small group of driven individuals who “helped push each other.”

There was also that one teacher who saw potential in Dominic and told him so. She was one of what would become many mentors in Dominic’s life. She convinced him to join the debate team, where Dominic honed his communication and analytical skills. It was also his first real opportunity travel, exposing him to different people and places – it really “opened up [his] aperture.”

He must have done something right because he eventually received a coveted Rhodes Scholarship, which “made a big difference in terms of where [he] went to university (and) the path [he] took.” He attributes some of it to luck. But he also believes “you can make your own luck.” With characteristic Canadian humility, he quickly added, “[It’s] a strange thing to say.”

While he didn’t say much more on making your own luck, there seems to be a common belief, among the luminaries we speak with, that luck can be made. As Oprah put it, luck is simply “preparation meeting opportunity.” What Oprah’s quote does not include though is an important pre-requisite: knowing what you want. Having a clear sense of what you want allows you to prepare with focus and recognize an opportunity when it arises.

Dominic’s father, a clergyman, was influential in clarifying for Dominic what he wanted to do (or not do, in this particular case). Dominic considers his father to be one of his most important mentors and “the smartest person” he’d ever met. But Dominic didn’t want to be like him – a man offering brilliant perspective on the sidelines. No, Dominic wanted “to get stuff done, not talk about what other people [were] doing.” Something in Dominic’s DNA, ironically, rejected his father’s approach to life. Dominic, unlike his father, wanted to “get into the arena.”

He is very much there now; and he likes it. It wasn’t a linear path, and there have been bumps along the way. How he’s dealt with those bumps is particularly telling. Whether innate or nurtured, he’s demonstrated particular characteristics that have largely contributed to his success.

These characteristics become clear when we ask him how he found his way to Asia more than a decade ago – in retrospect, a defining moment in Dominic’s career (many consider his Asian experience to be chief among the reasons he was elected to the top post of McKinsey in 2009).

Defining Moment
In the late 90’s, Dominic was a partner in McKinsey’s Toronto office and was doing well, but he was in a rut (albeit “a comfortable rut,” as he acknowledges). He thought his growth had reached a plateau. He felt the need “to change it up and push it.” An opportunity came up in Korea – the office there was in desperate need of partners and it was a real chance to build something, do something new.

Sounds like nothing special really, but here’s what’s telling about Dominic and sets him apart.

His mentors told him not to do it! They “thought it was a stupid idea.” They said, “You’re going to kill your career.” “It’s a difficult place.” “Why are you doing this?” “Why would you ever want to think about (this)?”

That only made Dominic “more excited” to go.

Dominic told himself, “I’m going to go. I’m going to be tested like I’ve never been tested. I’ll learn some things. And if it doesn’t work out at McKinsey, I can live with that. But I know I’m going to grow.”

If not for this move, Dominic would not be running McKinsey & Company today.

Key Lessons
Here we have a few key ingredients to Dominic’s success. In addition to personal drive and a passion to grow, on clear display is Dominic’s strong gut feel, comfort with the unknown, and acceptance of potential failure. It sounds trite on the surface. But upon deeper inspection, it’s not.

Dominic needed not only a strong gut feel, but also one that he could consciously tap into and trust. In this case, he knew, or rather he felt, that he needed a change. The Korea opportunity spoke to him louder than any of his mentors – and he listened.

He needed not just a comfort with the unknown, but to be OK with not having all the answers before acting. That is, he couldn’t quite put his finger on why he had to go, but that didn’t stop him from going.

Finally, he needed not just an acceptance of potential failure, but a certain faith that things would work out, even if Korea didn’t. That is, he was OK with the possibility of things not ultimately panning out at McKinsey – he had accepted the potential negative consequences of his decision.

Where did these characteristics come from? What gave him the strength to make such a jump, in the face of strong discouragement, with no apparent upside?

In going against his mentors, Dominic said, “I’ve always had mentors. They’ve been extremely important to me even before McKinsey…. (But) just because you get advice (doesn’t mean) you … have to listen to it.”

He said that two things, in particular, made him more comfortable with the entire situation.

First, he referenced advice that he received from a mentor in the Indonesia office, who told him, “There’s a sixth muscle we all have, and that’s instinct. We don’t play it up enough, but it’s actually a very important piece of our thinking arsenal. ‘What’s your feel? What’s your visceral reaction to something?’”

Dominic continued, “He would literally try to train me on this. He’d say, ‘I don’t want you doing an analysis. I want you to go away and think about this and come back with what’s your feeling about this.’”

Dominic’s initial reaction was “What the hell is this?” He seriously questioned whether clients would appreciate his “feeling” on an issue. He thought clients would look at him and say, “You don’t get it.”

Imitating his mentor, Dominic went on, “‘What’s your feeling? It’s going to be very important, as you get more senior – you’re not going to have time to analyze everything. You’re going to have to have an instinct towards it.’”

Dominic makes clear, “Instinct is something I (started to) consciously (think) about.”

That was the first thing.

“The second one was failure.” Dominic started talking about his experience with failure at McKinsey and how it actually helped him – as a person and as an executive. “It took me three times before I was elected a partner at McKinsey. And it was a very painful process.... I hadn’t experienced a lot of failure. I had worked hard and you know, if you work hard, you do well. Here I was. I was working hard and I was rejected…. ‘You’ve got some serious issues you’ve got to deal with.’ One of them was very painful. It was ‘We’re not sure about your problem solving skills’…. That’s like telling an astronomer they [sic] can’t do math… it was a bit of a slap in the head.

“I got angry. I thought it was unfair.”

But the whole experience had a profound effect on Dominic. In his words, “It gave me the strength to say ‘You know what? I’m not going to define myself by someone else’s standards… or by what other people think.’”

Dominic started seeking value internally rather than externally. He’d ask himself, “What do I want to accomplish in my life, if not in the world?” Then he’d convince himself, “That’s what I should focus on…. There’s going to be times where it works and there’s going to be times when it doesn’t. But I’m going to be comfortable with that.”

The more we talked to Dominic, the more we realized it’s not just his knowledge of Asia that helped him get elected to McKinsey's highest post, but also his zen-like knowledge from there.

Listen to the interview in full (when we post it soon) to find more about Dominic, including:
*How he handles bad luck
*What he looks for when recruiting new talent
*What he thinks is just as good as five hours of sleep

We recently spoke with Bill George, widely known for his classic book on leadership, True North: Discover your Authentic Leadership. He's also a Harvard Business School Professor and the former, storied CEO of Medtronics, the world’s largest medical technology company (think pacemaker). You can see him at the World Economic Forum in late January as a panelist on leadership.

1. “If you['ve] got enough self confidence in who you are and what you believe in, you ought not to be scared to talk to anybody.”

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