Image by John Ritter

Professors Geoff Jones and Tarun Khanna had been toiling away from their respective HBS offices for many years, each of them interested in emerging markets but expressed through different disciplines: Jones, a historian, was studying how the world was changed by multinationals, while Khanna was studying emerging markets in the 1990s through applied math and the analytical social sciences. It was Nitin Nohria, before his tenure as Dean, who noticed the overlap and suggested they put their heads together. “When we met, we discovered that we were saying the same thing,” Khanna says.

Their shared interest developed into the Creating Emerging Markets project, which launched in 2012 and includes a catalog of interviews with leaders from all over the developing world who have built enterprises that have helped move society forward. Captured on video and recorded by members of the faculty from every unit across the School, the interviews are a resource to teach business leadership in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as at HBS. Here, Jones and Khanna discuss what makes these leaders so effective and what the West might learn from their mindset.

You’ve amassed 182 interviews with leaders all over the world. Where did this project come from?

Geoff Jones: Actually, a Chilean shipping entrepreneur sat right here in my office and after hearing me go on about how history matters for policymakers, he said, “Why isn’t anybody studying history in Chile, where we keep repeating the same mistakes?” It got me thinking about how, if a country’s archives are closed and public information is unavailable, you can’t learn from anything. So I did a pilot, in which we interviewed 20 top business leaders in Argentina and Chile, and it turned out that very important people would talk in extended interviews—and talk quite openly, too.

When Nitin Nohria became Dean, I launched the idea that one of the most important things we could do is expand the pilot throughout the global south. At that stage, luckily, Tarun became involved. These interviews, which are hours long, spread from two Latin American countries to Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. We moved them onto video. Many more faculty became involved, and it expanded exponentially.

We interview people who’ve had three decades of business experience, so they’re in a mood to reflect on what they’ve done and willing to talk about their failures—which is different from somebody in their 20s or 30s. We also use the criterion of impact: They may not have built the biggest company in the world, but they are founders who have shifted the needle in impactful ways.

Tarun Khanna: And they’re keen to give back. The vast majority of them are seen as statesmen and stateswomen who have contributed to the building blocks of their particular society, both commercial successes and significant not-for-profit entrepreneurs.

I did a year in the MBA program as part of the business economics PhD, and I remember thinking how few mentions there were of emerging markets. I also remember thinking that the logic behind what the faculty was teaching us was eminently sensible. “Thou shalt create value. Thou shalt respect society. Thou shalt motivate managers.” Who’s going to argue with any of those? But on Monday morning, when the rubber meets the road in Jakarta or Bogota, the way that we were being taught to do things was not going to work there.

Jones: Business schools in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa all use the same US-generated cases, so a key part of this is that it’s a public-goods project that expands the repertoire accessible to faculty and students, for meaningful entrepreneurship-at-scale. Some business cultures are quite secretive, for one reason or another, so it can be a nightmare to find out how people have become very successful. The interviews put it on record and can be used by anybody with internet access.

These interviews are intended to resonate outside the US, but are there lessons that run in the reverse direction? What can we learn from emerging markets?

Jones: I would say that the West is increasingly looking the way emerging markets used to look, with a considerable degree of instability, a variety of populists, and an incredible degree of unpredictability. That wasn’t true 30 years ago, when everything was secure and predictable in the United States, and Latin America was all over the place. But the West is moving in exactly such a risky, unpredictable direction—and here is a bunch of people who built successful businesses and were highly impactful in just those kinds of institutional conditions.

Khanna: There’s another reason it’s relevant, too. We’ve been studying markets where there has been a lack of reliable information. It’s unclear what the rules of the road are, unclear who’s going to enforce whatever minimum of societal norms have come into being. And those are precisely the conditions that the AI revolution has created—or the revolution that will be triggered in the decades to come by genome sequencing, or by the fact that space is now increasingly accessible.

In some sense, the information intermediaries that we have taken for granted in the more stable period of the US economy—technology is upending all that in a good way and creating opportunities. But as we know, revolutions may be good on average, but they’re not good for everybody. As it is, we are rightly concerned about inequality, and those concerns would be exacerbated. That is exactly what you saw in Africa and various developing countries in Latin America for such a long time. The entire world is becoming emerging market-like in some ways, technologically and geopolitically and intranationally. This becomes even more salient.

Jones: You could learn a lot, too, about the responsibility of business to society. In the United States, we have numerous criticisms of overpaid chief executives and those sorts of things; but in these interviews, we found a lot of leaders who are very sincerely interested in the welfare of their societies, who out of genuine concern do a lot of things—investing in education or pioneering new methods of treating people medically at far lower costs. Many of them have this vision that business isn’t just an island, but that it has some sort of wider responsibility for societies. And some of these people have been really transformational in what they’ve achieved in commercially viable ways.

Khanna: One example is the heart surgeon Devi Shetty who started building Narayana Health, a chain of hospitals in India that are now the lowest-cost tertiary care centers in the world, with comparable quality to our hospitals here. They treat hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of very poor people in a commercially viable enterprise that’s publicly listed.

Jones: In contrast to the US health care system.

Khanna: Yes, and there are plenty of other instances where that’s happened. One of the things that stands out from these interviews is that the leaders seem to pay as much attention to shaping the insides of their companies as they do to shaping the institutional context within which the companies operate. That’s because everything is a work in progress. You really can’t throw your hands up and say, “I’ll wait for the government to do it,” because the state isn’t going to do it. Or the state doesn’t know how to do it, or doesn’t have the capacity to do it, even before you get into problems of corruption and so forth.

So these entrepreneurs roll up their sleeves, and the heart surgeon Shetty is a great example. He wants to operate as quickly as possible to save lives, but in order to do that, he knows that he has to have huge-scale economies to drive down unit costs. But he can’t just hope that people will come to him, because poor people are prevented from coming. In other words, the scale doesn’t manifest unless he finds a way to reach them through information, so he has to create a satellite capability to inform people. There’s no insurance market, so he has to figure out a rudimentary insurance system. There’s no physical transport, so he has to physically bring the patients there. There’s no technical help, so he has to build nursing colleges. He’s got to go into the context and shape it, in order to do his thing. That’s the mindset.

Jones: We started with the most accessible stories and are now exploring all sorts of countries that have interesting stories to tell. Like Nepal and Uruguay, for example—which people in the US know next to nothing about. There’s huge potential for increasing the diversity and complexity of our stories and reaching people who are just not picked up by the media, such as indigenous people in Latin America or Dalits in India.

Khanna: The whole point of this exercise is to give much broader examples than we have historically been using in education. And going back to what Geoff has said: It’s a public good.

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