00:00:00
So, I was a uh the CEO of an educational organization at that time. We were working in about 300 schools at that
00:00:05
point in India. And the government of Delhi came to us and said, "We really want um
00:00:10
want to work with you, want to collaborate, partner with you, but we want you to get to 20,000 schools almost
00:00:15
overnight." And um well, I tried for four four or five times to actually just shut it down
00:00:21
and sort of not get into it. It felt too crazy, too um almost mystical trying to achieve.
00:00:28
But, they were just being so persistent. At one point, they said, "Look, you
00:00:30
know, either go big or go home. We'll we'll stop, you know, the partnership
00:00:34
altogether if you don't scale in the way we need. We need you to really be um
00:00:38
working with every child in our system." And to be fair, you know, going back to
00:00:42
boards, our board was really great about that. They said, "Look, this is the
00:00:44
story where this is the reality we're in. We're not sure we can how to get there exactly, but we trust
00:00:49
that you'll be able to find your way through." Our job as a board is let's meet every
00:00:53
quarter as we do now, but let's focus on less about current metrics because they
00:00:57
were close to irrelevant now. As you go on this new journey, let's look at the the direction you're
00:01:02
going in. What do we need to to to know as you go along that you're on track
00:01:06
towards that new direction? So, our staff able to lead um in a much more leveraged way cuz they work with people
00:01:12
already in the system and get them to more of the day-to-day work of our approach. We really getting senior-level
00:01:18
buy-in from the very top of government so we could get the right culture changes into the
00:01:22
system, for example. So, it was a kind of yes, we're very much we're there to
00:01:26
support you, but we want to show see that you're really on track you're not
00:01:29
deluding yourselves this can be done. >> [music]