Rising from the Ashes: Reflections on Resilient Leadership

<p>Meet Kwami Williams, co-founder and CEO of&nbsp;MoringaConnect, and Brian Lowery, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, to learn how one Ghanaian entrepreneur overcame fires, floods, theft, and COVID to build a more resilient and successful company.</p><p>Kwami’s path to co-founding a social agriculture venture in Ghana based on the native Moringa tree was anything but straightforward. As a Ghanaian-American MIT graduate in aerospace engineering, his first love was flight. But on a trip back to Ghana, after 10 years in the U.S., he decided to focus his life on improving the lives of the people in his home country and continent.</p><p>Five years into running the business, they were helping smallholder farmers plant Moringa trees and then adding value to the raw materials with a flagship consumer brand. Everything started to unravel in 2019, starting with a wildfire that burned over 15,000 trees, then a factory fire, floods, and a robbery. 2020 only added fuel to the fire with COVID.</p><p>Kwami knew he needed help to tackle these back-to-back crises, and chose honesty over pride.</p><p><em>“If I could give one piece of advice to an early-stage entrepreneur, I would tell them to build an amazing team of people who they could go to war with because the hard days, the bad days, the battles will come.”</em></p><p><em>“I just acknowledged the fact that I have no idea how to bounce back from this. So I just committed to vulnerability from the get-go. And I committed to communicating as much as possible from the get-go.”</em></p><p>Brian Lowery agrees that vulnerability is vital to both personal and professional growth. As a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he is an expert on the psychology of leadership and training future leaders like Kwami. According to Brian:</p><p><em>“The leader is not the person with the answers. The leader is the person who brings people together to help figure out what the best answers are around a range of issues.”</em></p><p>Kw