Brian Kenny: What do actors Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Sean Connery, and Kevin Costner have in common? Aside from impressive Hollywood careers, they have all played the same character in a major motion picture. Robin Hood. The courageous archer who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, the original superhero. The story of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves is timeless. Ballads and poems of his daring deeds date back to the 13th century, and the story has been replicated on the silver screen 38 times since 1908. Historians differ on just how accurate the folklore is, but they agree that there was a man living in York in 1226 whose belongings were confiscated by the authorities, leaving him to turn to a life of an outlaw. He went by the alias Rabunhod. True or not, the legend of Robin Hood fighting for humanity in an unjust world can still bring out the best in us.
Brian Kenny: Today, we'll hear from Professor Susanna Gallani about her case entitled, Can the Robin Hood Army Grow with Zero Financial Resources? I'm your host, Brian Kenny, and you're listening to Cold Call, recorded live in Klarman Hall Studio at Harvard Business School. Susanna Gallani's research focuses on issues related to the design and effectiveness of monetary and non-monetary incentives. And Neel Ghose, who's also with us in the studio today, is the protagonist in this case, and he's the founder of The Robin Hood Army. He's also a 2018 graduate of Harvard Business School. Is that right?
Neel Ghose: 2019, actually.
Brian Kenny: 2019, wow. So, a very recent graduate.
Neel Ghose: Just about.
Brian Kenny: And here with one of his former professors, Susanna. Welcome both.
Susanna Gallani: Thank you.
Neel Ghose: Thanks for having us.
Brian Kenny: It's a real treat to have the protagonist in the room with us. We get to do that every so often and we love it because in addition to hearing what inspired Professor Gallani to write this case, we want to hear what your experience has been living it. So I think we'll have a really rich discussion today. Why don't we get started? Susanna, I'm going to ask you to start us off by telling us how does the case begin? Who's the protagonist? He's here. And what's on his mind?
Susanna Gallani: The case is situated at the end of 2018, and Neel Ghose, the founder and protagonist of the case has a lot to be proud of at the time of the case because in only four years the organization who started with a handful of friends going out one night to help others, expanded to over 100 cities in four continents, having served millions of meals to less fortunate people, and having put over 700 kids into school, into public schools. So, he has a lot to be happy about. But again, as it is characteristic of his leadership style, he's not content. He's not done. He's thinking about the future, and the particular conundrum that he's facing is that the organization is growing very, very fast. It has become complex and distributed globally to a point where their current, at the time of the case, management tools may not suffice anymore in the future, in particular. So far the organization has leveraged on volunteers that give a few hours of their time every week, and serve in various capacities, and do whatever it takes to fulfill the mission of the organization. But now, there's a lot of them in many different places in the world. So, the idea is are we going to need some full-time resources to help the coordination and the further growth of the Robin Hood Army? Now, in order to have the full-time employees, for lack of a better term, the problem is whether or not you should be compensating them. Finding people that have the ability to give their entire time, their entire working week to an organization without being compensated could be a problem, could be challenging. And this is exactly the problem that Neel is facing because compensating them would break one of the three fundamental rules of the Robin Hood Army, and in particular what they call the golden rule, which is: no money. This organization operates without any financial resource whatsoever.
Brian Kenny: That's pretty astonishing. And this relates directly to your research. I mentioned it quickly in your introduction, but tell me more about why you chose to write this case and how it relates back to what you think about as a researcher.
Susanna Gallani: Well, above and beyond being fascinated by the story, which I think is-
Brian Kenny: Pretty cool story.
Susanna Gallani: It's a pretty cool story. I felt this was a very clean setting to show how we can motivate and attract and retain workers. Again, using the term very broadly, very loosely, without having to compensate them. That doesn't mean that every organization in the world should get rid of compensation or pay. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that this provides us an opportunity to highlight other mechanisms that motivate people, and make them do their best work. For me, this was an exciting experiment because there is no money so there is no question about whether the motive of the people that are operating at the Robin Hood Army is clouded by compensation or limited by compensation. We have many settings that have been documented and researched where actually, monetary compensation can hamper certain activities. So this, for me, was a very clean setting to bring up these other mechanisms that organizations often either take for granted or don't leverage enough.
Brian Kenny: Neel, let me turn to you for a second. I'm curious. Actually, a couple of things. One is I would just love for you to describe in your words what the Robin Hood Army is and what it does. And I'd love to hear what inspired this idea for you.
Neel Ghose: The Robin Hood Army's a simple concept. Volunteers in their free time collect surplus food from restaurants and communities, and give it to the less fortunate. Every single person does this in their free time. So we have doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, retired citizens. And the golden rule, as we mentioned, is there's no money involved. I think food is the first way we interact with people, but it's not a distribution platform, so to speak. The idea is when you're giving the meal, how do you get to know people, how do you understand their problems, and then figure out how you can give an actionable solution. So, the way we think about it, food is the first step.
Brian Kenny: Okay.
Neel Ghose: In terms of how this happened, it was super random. I used to work for a food tech company and my role was basically setting up our international markets. I used to spend nine to 12 months in each market, launching our team and our product. This was 2014, and I was living in Portugal, in Lisbon, and we were doing a lot of marketing partnerships, and we came across this organization called ReFood. What they do is super fascinating. They did what we do, which is collect excess food from restaurants and give it to the less fortunate. Honestly, until then, I've never done anything altruistic or seriously altruistic in my life. So it's not too late to start. I was just struck by how simple the model was, so when I came back home, I got in touch with a couple of my close friends and we decided to get started. Something similar.
Brian Kenny: Okay, and home for you is?
Neel Ghose: Home for me is India.
Brian Kenny: Okay.
Neel Ghose: At that point, my base was Delhi, so to keep coming back to Delhi three months.
Brian Kenny: What were you hoping to achieve when you first started to do this? Did you have these kind of grand aspirations for it, or were you really just thinking like, hyper local kind of thing?
Neel Ghose: Honestly, we hadn't put a lot of thought into it. I think when we just saw the model, I spent some time with the founder and the team just understanding how it happens. This just makes sense in a community which is plagued by hunger, and thousands of people suffer from it. So we just thought that, why don't we just take the idea and roll with it? And I never really thought through what the five year or the three year, or the one year plan is. From day zero, it was just about execution, and in a weird way that it still is just about execution.
Brian Kenny: How significant is the scope of the hunger problem in India?
Neel Ghose: I'd say not just in India, across the world. It's very significant. There are 800 million people who suffer from hunger, which is probably one out of every nine people in the world, and in India that's probably one fourth of the world's hungry live in India alone. What's even more disturbing is that when you crunch the numbers, 3,000 children under the age of five die every day of hunger in the country. And the almost stupid thing is that 40% of the food which we produce gets wasted and thrown away. So, the two fundamental problems in society, and one solves for the other. So, we're just basically trying to go deeper and make a difference through that.
Brian Kenny: We've done previous Cold Call episodes about food, hunger issues in the United States. The scope of the problem is huge here too, and the amount of waste is probably even greater than the number you just mentioned. So it's definitely not an India problem. It's a worldwide problem. Was there a moment as you saw things starting to come together, where you thought to yourself, "This might be something big? We might be able to really do something significant here?"
Neel Ghose: We had a moment of truth in our first drive itself or the first food drive. This was in Delhi, and it was South Delhi so it was not even some suburbs or some corners in your rural India, where we set out to give food and we had food for 150 people or 150 meals. And honestly, at that point we were not sure whether we'd find 150 people. But when we went out looking for them, we realized they were in the thousands. I think that's when it dawned on each one of us that solving a couple of hundred people once a week might feel good to the conscience, but it's not really going to create any difference to the problem we're taking on. And that's when I think we also started thinking about it less as just a charitable institution or just as altruism, but more in terms of if we need to make an impact, we have to think about this as we would think about a startup. How do we think about in metrics? How do we have a strategy? What are our goals? How do we delegate responsibility? So I think very early on, we realized that if we have to create even a slight difference to this, we just have to be very measured and strategic, and think about it as a regular corporate organization.
Brian Kenny: Were you doing a day job at the same time that you were doing this?
Neel Ghose: Yes. We always put down the Robin Hood Army on the side. So, I was working in Zomato, the food tech company. Then after that, I came to grad school. So the Robin Hood Army's always been a side project.
Brian Kenny: I'm just curious, from your origin to where you are today, what are we talking about in terms of growth?
Neel Ghose: Sure. I think our first drive, that was August, 2014. There were five of us and we served 150 people in Delhi. Currently, we are in 140 cities.
Brian Kenny: Wow.
Neel Ghose: We have 40,000 active Robins.
Brian Kenny: That's amazing.
Neel Ghose: We've served 23.2 million people to date.
Brian Kenny: Boy, those are big numbers. Susanna, I want to turn back to you because the heart of the case is really about how do you manage this kind of rapid growth. How do you continue to help your army, in this case stay motivated when there's no compensation involved? Is this kind of growth normal? I guess is the first question. That seems like huge growth over a very short period of time.
Susanna Gallani: Well, for volunteer organizations, I don't think it's typical. I'm not saying that there aren't other organizations that are as proactive and engaged but this is certainly something that is not the common pattern that you would see in an organization based on volunteer time. We are always a little bit self-conscious in asking people to do more. There could be some biases that we have when we deal with volunteer time like we're imposing on them. But one of the things that I noticed in this particular organization is that there is an incredible sense of purpose. People are really waiting to do more and trying to figure out how they can do more, which sometimes is also a problem because there is a lot of delegation. And I know that in my conversations with Neel while we were working on the case, he brought up many examples in which he was faced with decisions that were ... Whether or not they would support an idea that seemed a good idea, and it was well-intended and would do good in the world, but might turn itself into a distraction and divert energy and resources and time from their core mission. So, to your question about how do you grow, how do you manage an organization like this? It is difficult. One thing that you need to have is a strong sense of purpose. I think that is the main motor of this type of organization. Keep in mind that these people self-select into this organization.
Brian Kenny: Right.
Susanna Gallani: And they're not doing it to bring food on their own table. They're doing it to bring food on other people's tables, so you don't have the problem of confounding motives. They are not there for the money. There is no money involved, but they're there to do good. So you need to make sure that that motivation stays strong. I guess the problem is that you have to be careful not to shut down that motivation, not to give them reason to lose faith in the organization. So you always need to reinforce that sense of purpose, which is the reason why they joined in the first place. The other thing that you need to do, and I think that that is something that I know keeps Neel awake at night because he's told me a bunch of examples about this, is how do you balance this delegation with the core values? Maintaining strong core values, very clear, very defined, but at the same time allowing people freedom to think for themselves, and come up with new ideas. The Robin Hood Academy, for example, that was an example that developed from one chapter that said we could do this. And they started teaching children that were not in school, although they were at school age. So that took roots and it became a bigger thing, and it felt it was very compatible with the overall mission of the Robin Hood Army. But there are tons of other ideas like this that were not considered to be as critical to the mission, and might have been put to the side, at least for now. So, I think you have to balance. That is the challenge. If you're good at balancing the entrepreneurialism of your local people on the ground and letting them do their thing, but at the same time keep this strong core values and sense of purpose. I think that that's the critical point of the mission.
Neel Ghose: And building on the purpose point, I think it's almost that people think of it as a family and not an organization. That stems deeply from the fact that no one's making any money. So for them, it's not a global nonprofit which is being led by someone based out of Boston or Cambridge. For them, it's their own family and this is their own way of giving back.
Brian Kenny: There's something pure about it.
Neel Ghose: Exactly, exactly. I do think that's almost one of the most critical parts of our growth. Your big rule is don't take money, but again, try to figure out how to make a difference to people's lives. People get very creative and very innovative, and they come up with some fascinating initiatives, which is the whole idea of the Robin Hood Army.
Brian Kenny: Now, armies have officers. I'm wondering, how do you structure the Robin Hood Army? Are there generals and colonels, for lack of a better word?
Neel Ghose: We have something called one team, which means everyone is a Robin first. We try to keep it as decentralized as possible, but we do have teams to enable that decentralization. The folks I work with directly, the way I would probably structure them is there's a growth and expansion team. There's a social media and partnerships team, and there's a tech and data team. Sounds very much like a Silicon Valley startup. So let's say the growth and expansion team, they are seasoned Robins who've gone through the system, who built up cities and chapters themselves. And now they spend most of their time on Zoom or Skype calls, constantly talking to people from different parts of the world. A.) inspiring them with the vision, and B.) gauging are they the right people to set up Robin Hood Army. And then C.) actually helping them build it. Then there's the social media and partnerships team which makes sure that we constantly have a new stream of Robins coming in. So at this point, we have around 8,000 to 10,000 people signing up every month, but it's our social media team, which is putting out the story for everyone to see so that people get inspired and come, and actually join us. And then there's the newest team, which is tech and data. I think the more numbers we're handling we just realized that we can't keep working out of Google docs. We have a specific data team which is constantly looking at metrics. We look at things like retention and churn, and a bunch of other things to see: what are the inflection points, which can actually help us serve many more people.
Brian Kenny: I was going to ask about systems. You've got 40,000 members in your army. I mean, that's larger than most firms, frankly. And firms have a very difficult time, even building community among their employees with all of the latest tools and technology that they have to do that. How do you guys face that challenge of building a sense of community, and reminding people that they are all part of the same army with the same mission?
Neel Ghose: That's a good question. I think we use the free tools you have on social media to bring both the message…
Brian Kenny: Free stuff. That’s…
Neel Ghose: Absolutely. So if I can show you my phone right now, I probably am on 150 different WhatsApp groups.
Brian Kenny: Wow.
Neel Ghose: And then we have one central WhatsApp group called the Boiler, which is basically the city heads of all the chapters across the world. So if anything's happening, let's say in Uganda, they put it up there and then 140 other cities will get to know that. In a weird way, we almost gamify it, so we constantly have things like leader boards of which city's serving how many meals, how many kids are going to school. And we make those leader boards public so it's not just on the boiler, but also on social media, on our website. And then people get motivated to actually do more when they see their fellow Robins in a different part of the world stepping up. So, I think that's something which is always on my mind because as cute as WhatsApp and Facebook and Google docs are, we still have to be very serious in terms of how do we really handle scale going forward. And I think the whole point is like it's shifting from being just a passion to being a passion and a responsibility. So, we have to be very mindful about the fact that what's probably taken us here might not necessarily take us to the next level.
Brian Kenny: Susanna, case goes into the supply chain elements of this because obviously the army relies on the goodwill of restaurants and other food providers. I'm curious about what the incentive is for them. In your experience, have you looked at this kind of supply chain issue that's requiring on both incentives that are financial in nature and not?
Susanna Gallani: It's definitely an interesting aspect of the whole organization. Without the suppliers, they couldn't operate. The way I see it is that for the suppliers, and by that we mean the restaurants or the other providers of services, there's really not a lot of downside. The way that the Robin Hood Army operates with their partners, they make things super easy for them because they go and collect the food from the restaurant. They go and ask the radio station, the local radio station for free time. So, they bring their business to them and not the other way around. And in exchange for that, they provide a significant upside for those that are motivated to be part of this initiative, which is contributing to the mission of the Robin Hood Army. They are very good at visibility so they all wear these green shirts with their logos, and it's becoming an iconic movement whereby if you're a restaurant and you have the sticker of the Robin Hood Army on your door, people start recognizing you. It's free advertising for a good cause. That's a win-win, right? You get an upside for the business and you do good for the world. So that, I think is something that they did really well in terms of joining these two purposes together. There's no trade-off. It’s just positive.
Brian Kenny: Right, right.
Susanna Gallani: It's just positive.
Brian Kenny: In your research and writing the case, do you think that this could be as successful if there was more ... Because it feels like it's moving to a place where it needs more centralization, more boiler room activity perhaps. Does that detract from the hyper local nature, and the ability for people to feel agile and entrepreneurial in the various cities?
Susanna Gallani: I think that if it becomes too centralized, it's going to be a problem. The heart of the Robin Hood Army is they're individual people, the ideas they have. And the fact that has been very clear to me in learning from Neel about how they set this organization up. They want people to respond to the local problems. There's not an off-the-shelf way to do things. Certainly, they provide help. So if you want to know how you're supposed to set up a Robin Hood Army chapter, you have all the support in the world. But it's support, it's not mandating. The idea is every community knows their needs, and the people that are from that chapter live in that community, and they can respond appropriately with the model of service that best fits that local community.
Brian Kenny: Right.
Susanna Gallani: So, I think that the hyper local model is very important. Centralizing too much, first of all, it wouldn't be possible. They are way too distributed around the world to have every problem solved at the central level. The one aspect, however, that I do believe is important to keep centralized is this definition of the mission. When you have so many thoughts and so many heads, and so many good hearts that want to take the mission forward, there needs to be some boundaries about what the mission is. You can't do everything. You have to focus on certain things, and I think that's important to keep at the core level. I know that Neel and his peers spend a lot of time reinforcing this message about what it is and what it isn't that we do at the Robin Hood Army.
Brian Kenny: Neel, how much of a presence are you as the founder and the leader of this organization? Do you have an opportunity to speak to the members of the Robin Hood Army on a regular basis? Do you have, I don't know, town hall meetings or something like that?
Neel Ghose: I think it's changed over the years, my presence. I think at this point what we try to do is in the beginning of every year, we plan ahead. So we tie up with a local hotel in Delhi, and they give us conference rooms and stuff in the beginning of the year.
Brian Kenny: Again, no financial transaction happening.
Neel Ghose: No financials. No. They give us lunch too for that matter. So a lot of our city heads across the world fly down to Delhi. Again, that's completely on their expense. In fact, we're actually thinking of now maybe tying up with an airline for that. And, we basically plan ahead. We have a two day meet where we decide, okay, what are our learnings, what our mistakes and what are our big goals which we plan to achieve. So I think in terms of visibility, that's one touch point I have with all the city heads. I make it a point that whenever I'm in India, I go and visit different cities and do drives with them because the best way to understand impact on the ground or even what the culture of a city, is not in a closed meeting but actually going out and doing drives with them. And honestly, some of our best ideas have come through that. So I think between me and Aarushi Batra who is my co-founder, we try to visit Robin Hood cities as often as we can, and learn from the ground as to what's happening. But in terms of a touchpoint, I think I'm quite proud to say that if I was not going to be in the Robin Hood Army from tomorrow, I don't think much would change.
Brian Kenny: Wow. It would still carry on.
Neel Ghose: Absolutely.
Brian Kenny: What are some of the obstacles that you've faced along the way? You're learning as you go, right?
Neel Ghose: I think the number one of obstacle which always plays on my mind is time. Right? And with the full-time job or even with grad school, all of us probably put in 15 to 20 hours a week. And we're all working in different schedules and different time zones, so coordination is not always the easiest. All of us, and I speak for all of us, we'd love to do the seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And sometimes we just think about the opportunity cost like if we did that, imagine how much more impact would happen. So I think time is probably the biggest challenge we have. But I think on the flip side of that, that's all. We're very lucky to have very strong support communities around us like when I was here, my professors and just generally, the Harvard community, or even my workplace, and a lot of office places. They give us the flexibility to do what we love, and when that pressure's taken off from your head, you just go out and do what you have to. So I think time is something which we wish we all had more of, but because of our zero funds policy, we also don't know the way around that.
Brian Kenny: Susanna, I'm just curious, do you think this is sustainable to have an organization continue to scale but continue to operate, sticking to this no resources approach? It seems really hard to me.
Susanna Gallani: It does. Doesn't it?
Brian Kenny: But it seems to be working so that that's a real-
Susanna Gallani: Exactly. I was going to say exactly that. In theory, it would be very difficult to do it, but they are living proof that it's possible. And I always think about the one example when they went to the equivalent of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,” they actually won money, but they donated it to a different organization, not to break the golden rule. At the end of the day, if you think about what they're doing, it's very simple and they can do it without financial support because they have, and they have demonstrated that this is possible. It's working, and it's working not just in India, it's working in many countries in the world. The question is how do you keep the motivation of doing this? Will, at some point, people want to be compensated for giving their time? That's a challenge that we don't have an answer for at the moment. We'll see what the future holds for this organization. But so far, because of the strong values and the self-selection of people into the organization, it seems to be working, so more power to them.
Brian Kenny: In your research, do people feel more satisfaction about the things that they do that aren't related to compensation?
Susanna Gallani: It depends on the things. For example, in this particular case, there's a lot of research that shows that paying people to do good in the world might actually drive them away from that particular activity because they don't want to do it for money. They want to do it because it's the right thing to do. So for certain activities, compensation can, in technical terms we say it crowds out the intrinsic motivation of doing certain things. This is a very clear example where people are spending their time doing good things because they want to. In fact, when they were debating this idea of whether we should start paying full- time employees, the reaction of the Robins was, well, that will spoil the whole purpose. That will spoil the culture because we're not here to be compensated. We're here to help others. Now, if we expand this to other organizations, this leads us to a more complicated problem, which is what should we be paying people to do, and what can we expect them to do regardless? Third leg of the triangle there would be, what are we putting at risk by paying people? So, that balance is very challenging, and I don't think that we have a definitive answer about this. But definitely, it's something that organizations should keep in mind. Paying people to do certain activities changes the nature of that exchange.
Brian Kenny: Right.
Susanna Gallani: And it makes it transactional. There are certain things that are okay to be transactional and they should be transactional, but other activities may not.
Brian Kenny: Neel, I'm curious. As your role has evolved within the organization, I'm going to guess it's moved you further away from the people that you were helping in the first place where you were going out, and actually finding people to serve meals to. Has that changed the way that you feel about what you're doing? Does it feel more like a job to you now?
Neel Ghose: I think I do need to keep going back to drives to focus on why we're really doing this. So no matter how macro and strategic the role might evolve to be, you need to keep focusing on basics because that's what motivates you the most. And to the previous question, what professor Gallani was talking about, I think motivation comes from the fact that if the work you're doing is mission driven, you don't need to figure out how to motivate your team. That's a natural thing. In terms of letting go, that's been happening a lot, and I think in a good way. I used to feel this pressure of being much more hands on earlier, and leading from the front. It's pretty clear in my head that the things which my role entails is number one clarity, making sure everyone knows what they need to do, and getting a buy-in into that. Number two is making myself dispensable so that even if I am not there a day later, nothing changes. I think the third thing is actually thinking through the next phase of growth. That whole combination of making yourself replaceable as a leader is a very important part. Not just in my role, but every role in the Robin Hood Army for this to be successful and sustainable.
Brian Kenny: Susanna, I can tell just from a short time I've spent with Neel that he won't answer this question because he'd be too humble to. But will you tell me what makes him a good leader and why he's able to, basically fresh out of Harvard Business School, lead an organization of this scale and scope?
Susanna Gallani: Yes. The characteristics that I have noticed in his leadership style, and not just as leader of the Robin Hood Army. Remember, I had him in class.
Brian Kenny: I know.
Susanna Gallani: So, I've seen how he interacts with others, and I think that there are a couple of things that really stand out. I mean I could probably spend a long time talking about his leadership skills, but the defining characteristics, the first one that comes to mind is intentionality. He does everything with a purpose. It's not just killing time, ever. I don't think that he ever kills time.
Neel Ghose: No, that's not true.
Susanna Gallani: Well, I haven't had the opportunity to see that. But when he talks about the Robin Hood Army, it's all about how do we make it better? This idea of being one percent done, which is their motto, that they're all is one percent done, I think it's a reflection of how he leads. Like this is not enough, we're not there. Never being content, not unhappy though. At the same time being very proud of the accomplishments, but knowing that this is just a step for the next phase. That's one thing. The other thing that I noticed is that he's a sponge for learning. I have seen him apply a concept that he has learned here, and really seeking new learning opportunities to then convert them into the Robin Hood Army. This is great from an educational institution when you see that people come here to learn content and skills, and then they actually implement. And I think that Neel does that relentlessly. He leads maybe from the front because he has the idea and the drive, but he gives credit where credit is due, and he empowers others to be better than him if they can. He's the first person to be happy if somebody does a job better than he could. And that, I think is a very distinct characteristic of a leader.
Brian Kenny: Now that we've got him…
Neel Ghose: Thank you.
Brian Kenny: ...blushing fully on the other end of the table. So you've discussed this in class and I think you said that Neel was there. I don't want you to give away any state secrets or anything, but I'm curious of what the reaction was of the students, how they responded. And did they say anything that really surprised you?
Susanna Gallani: We taught this in executive education. It will be taught in the MBA in the spring, in second year course about social enterprise and innovation. So I haven't had the reaction of his fellow MBA students, although I have a little story about the students' reaction. First of all, the time we learned about this initiative, Neel is not the person that will go around bragging about what he's doing.
Brian Kenny: Right.
Susanna Gallani: It was in a small group lunch when I go around the room and say, "So, what do you do in your spare time? Why are you here?" He brought up this idea of the Robin Hood Army and what he was doing with it. And I remember half of the people at lunch had tears in their eyes. So that was the first time we learned about that. The other thing that he did was, you know how our students do their “Friendsgiving” celebration? So at Thanksgiving, they get together with their section, and the last time that they did that here on campus, after the dinner, they collected the excess food and went around Cambridge to serve their less fortunate fellow citizens.
Brian Kenny: How cool was that? That's pretty cool.
Susanna Gallani: So, that's like in practice, right? With respect to teaching, the executives that I taught this case to, there was a little bit of a split reaction. When I was asking them the crucial question of the case, should Neel break the golden rule and hire people? And you could see a bi-modal distribution of answers. There were certain people that were, "Absolutely not. That would completely ruin the spirit of the organization. He needs to find another way. If that's not going to fly, he needs to find another way." And then there were others that were like, "Well, maybe it's time for them to just pass the reins to an organization that has the means to take it further." So I thought it was very interesting how people reacted to this particular problem in very, very different ways.
Neel Ghose: That's really interesting. I think, if anything, a lot of the Robin Hood Army ideas or thought process have come from people who disagree with what we do. I don't think there's a right or wrong way. I don't think collecting money is a wrong thing at all. It's just: what is the most strategic way, and what will serve more people. I think based on that, we still need to keep hearing people who don't completely believe or see the model because from that, we basically know how to plan out the next five years, so to speak.
Brian Kenny: And like so many Harvard Business School cases, there is no single right answer.
Neel Ghose: Exactly, exactly.
Brian Kenny: There are multiple answers.
Neel Ghose: The one which was executed right, is the right answer.
Brian Kenny: There you go. Thank you both so much for joining me. What a great discussion, and it's a great organization. I hope that you continue to thrive.
Neel Ghose: Thanks so much for having us here. Thanks, professor.
Susanna Gallani: Thank you for having us.
Robin Passias: If you’d like to be part of the Robin Hood Army, or bring it to your city, contact them at robinhoodarmy.com
Brian Kenny: Thanks for listening to Cold Call. I want to let you know about the newest podcast from Harvard Business School, Climate Rising. It’s about what businesses can and should do to confront climate change. In each episode, host David Abel of the Boston Globe gleans insights from HBS faculty, business leaders, and policy makers who are pioneering new ways of doing business in the age of climate change. It’s produced by our Business & Environment Initiative and you can find it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. I’m Brian Kenny and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School, and part of the HBR Presents network.