In this Masters of Scale episode — featuring a cameo by Abby Falik — host Reid Hoffman explores the power of community in an interview Chobani Founder & CEO, Hamdi Ulukaya. Your local community can be the power behind an epic scale story — because smart community investment always maximizes returns.
Listen to the Podcast Episode
Partial Transcript:
HOFFMAN: The central role that business and economic activity plays in building community is often overlooked. But it is something I am a big believer in. And this story is a prime example of how business helps build integration, understanding, and prosperity. It shows that bridging gaps between communities can bring new perspectives and experiences together.
This is something that Abby Falik has immense experience in. Abby is the founder of Global Citizen Year, a non-profit that organizes eight-month immersive experiences overseas for promising future leaders.
ABBY FALIK: Our fellows are not development workers. They are there as apprentices, supporting a local project in education, climate, public health, and economic mobility. And what that means is that they are humbling themselves by being challenged to see themselves and the world through a completely new lens.
HOFFMAN: This radical exposure to different lived experiences gives the fellows the awareness and insight to make positive change in their own communities.
FALIK: It’s about teaching them to understand what community they’re a part of and how to be an impactful and appropriate contributor to community work wherever they find themselves.
Many of our students come back with a sense that the most appropriate place to start having an impact is closer to home in their own communities. Whether that’s running for a local school board, whether it’s starting an enterprise, making sure that kids in their community have internet access.
So it’s that shift from confidence to humility, from knowing the answers to carrying the questions, from managing through brute force to sort of a more organic and community-centered way of leading; and frankly from just managing from our heads to a sort of integrated head and heart, which I think is what the world needs most, and we don’t have enough of yet.
HOFFMAN: I love the way Abby lays this out: what every community needs most is a shift from just managing with our heads to an integrated head and heart.
