The Journey from Academia to Impact | Neri Karra Sillaman | 599

Peter Winick.

Refugees often become necessity entrepreneurs in their new country. Over my career, I've also seen refugees who have become practicing thought leaders. There's an interesting connection there.

Why?

Well, maybe it's because an education is something you can always carry with you across a border. Even when you have to leave everything else behind. My guest today is Dr. Neri Kara-Suleiman. Her family fled Bulgaria for Türkiye, and they founded a leather goods business there. Neri worked in the family business, but she knew her path forward led through education. She's now an entrepreneurship expert at the University of Oxford, focusing on business longevity, in fashion. She runs a consulting business with the fashion industry, and she's the author of an award-winning book titled Fashion Entrepreneurship. I'm Bill Sherman. This is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin.

Welcome to the show, Neri.

Thank you, Bill. Very, very happy to be here.

So I want to talk with you today about your journey into thought leadership, and it begins in an unexpected direction in that I don't think you would say you planned ever as a young child to get into thought leadership. Can you give us a little glimpse into your childhood and how that both set the stage and made it unlikely at the same time?

That's quite a good question. So it is quite unlikely. I didn't set out to be in top leadership or to be a professor one day, but I was born in Bulgaria to Turkish ethnic minority. And that meant in— during 1980s, the communist Bulgarian government decided to carry out an ethnic assimilation process against Turkish ethnic minorities. Our names were changed. We were forbidden to practice our religion or just express our culture in any kind of way. This lasted until 1989, when the Bulgarian government forced us to leave the country. And with two suitcases to our name, my parents and my 9-year-old brother, we found ourselves escaping Bulgaria and at the border of Turkey. And among 360,000 other Bulgarians of Turkish ethnicity had to leave the country. And it was mayhem. I remember getting to the border after having walked for days from our town until the Turkish border. My father with the suitcases in his hands, just running and throwing them, and just these screams that will come from an animal, that's how I can describe it, and the confusion in my mother's eyes. We were set up to live in immigrant camps, in tents. And food was given to us. And I remember looking around me as an 11-year-old and thinking, if one day I will build a good life for myself and my family, I have to get a good education. And I really believe this is the reason I am sitting here today and talking to you, because it's the foundation of everything that I do. Everything that I've read, the education I got has allowed me to create the life I have today. And I believe I've, uh, dedicated my life to education. And even though later I would start a business and become an entrepreneur, I've always thought as an academic. So I believe my journey starts there.

Thank you for sharing that, Neri. And it's a powerful story and image of that 11-year-old child saying, "What do I need to do to get control of a world that seems like it has no control right now?" So you mentioned your role as an entrepreneur. You've also told us your story on immigrancy, right? And forced migrancy in this case. I know you have an interest and a deep interest in immigrant entrepreneurship. How did that come to be on the academic side? Right. Because it was lived experience. Let's cross the stream into now your research.

Absolutely. So When I graduated from University of Miami in 2.5 years, returned back to Turkey where my family was living and working in selling extra t-shirts, leather products. We started our own business. And when we started our own business, it very much employed our own family members, other immigrants. And few years later, I decided to pursue my PhD at University of Cambridge. When I started my PhD, originally it was going to be foreign direct investment. It was economics, nothing to do with entrepreneurship. However, because I was an immigrant building a business with immigrants, you could say that I was very intrigued by the concept of immigrant entrepreneurship. At the time, I didn't even know. I, I I'm 24 years old, uh, get and just got to Cambridge. I didn't even know such a concept existed. And this is what started the foundation of my PhD thesis. I went to my supervisor and I said, I'm very curious about this topic. And also the connection between international entrepreneurship and immigrant ethnic entrepreneurship. And I'm sorry, but I have to change my thesis. So this is how I started as a PhD student, really trying to understand how immigrants create businesses, how immigrants and why they create businesses, you know, the necessity entrepreneurship concept. Eventually I finished my PhD thesis, but in the meantime, I'm actually studying my own company. Because we are building this business with, with other ethnic entrepreneurs or immigrant entrepreneurs as ourselves. And I would get into the concept of homophilic ties, which was published in Journal of Business Venturing. And at university, of course, I teach strategy, but Now that I am in thought leadership, I work with Dori Clark and she encourages you to find your breakthrough idea, something that you are known for. So for me, I almost, I thought, who will want to know ethnic entrepreneurship, immigrant entrepreneurship? I really don't think that's going to be a topic that I can have impact with. And then I decided, okay, let me, let me go a little bit deeper into this. And I discovered that 55% of Fortune 500 companies are started by immigrants. 80% of unicorns are founded by immigrants or their children. This is a huge number. So that's, this was my aha moment because I look at the literature and almost everyone has looked at why immigrants start businesses. Mm-hmm. Nobody has looked at why immigrants create businesses that last. And I was just, for me, this was an eye-opening discovery. And from there I wrote a book proposal. It was accepted by Wiley. So I'm in the process of writing a book on business longevity and immigrant entrepreneurship.

So thank you. It's an interesting journey and you point out a couple times where you either found in your PhD studies a difference between your passion and where you thought you were going to research—FDI versus the immigrant entrepreneurship—and then finding that gap in the scholarship, finding that gap that leads to the aha, that allows you to ask the questions no one's focused on yet. And to be able to have passion and then the insight is a powerful combination because you're coming from a place of lived experience. You talked about, hey, when I was studying, I was using my own company as a laboratory, right? Yes, absolutely.

My thesis consists of 3 different articles. We are going back many years now. This is almost 20 years a while ago, but I use my company as a case study for including one of my papers talks about autoethnographic research where I study where the researchers studies his or her own company or background or culture. And again, everything is in my thesis was very much personal, and I think Even today, what I write about, and for those of us, for those who listen to us and are curious how they can find their breakthrough idea, it of course always comes from a personal experience, passion. And this is what I would say, not misled me, but when I was trying to figure out where can I make impact. I was thinking, I don't know if I want to, I don't know if people will want to read about immigrant entrepreneurship. And this was a mistake in some sense because I was thinking it has to come from a passion, from your lived experience, as you mentioned. And if I give one advice, it would be that to focus on what you know, focus on what you are passionate about.

Well, and I've said many times here that your audience for your ideas will never be more engaged than you are in the topic, right? And so if you find questions that cause you to say, why is that? Why do Immigrant-formed companies survive longer than average, or why are immigrant-founded or children of immigrant companies overrepresented in the Fortune 500 or in unicorns? That's a question that's intriguing and say, what can we learn from that? Yes. And really it deep question, and there are plenty of reasons and variables and possibilities and study design to try and figure out what's going on. But it's easy— what I like about what you've done there is you've taken complexity and drilled it down to a question that someone can listen and say, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Tell me more. And more importantly, what's going on? I don't have to have the same lived experiences you do as a migrant entrepreneur to, to say, what can I learn?

Right? Very true. So in fact, my book, the audience is not about, is not immigrant entrepreneurs. They are anyone. Years ago, again, when I was writing and researching on this topic, I had an idea to write a paper about build your own family. Because when I look at immigrant entrepreneurs, they build businesses based on homophilic ties, which is, you know, we have a shared experience, we have this shared history that binds us together. And makes us work towards a common goal. And I thought, how can anyone else copy and do the very same thing in their own company, in their own workforce? They don't have to be immigrants, but what are the principles that you can take from immigrants and apply them to your own company? And that's what the book is about.

And I think of that even from the perspective of a founder and trying to create a vision and an origin story for a startup company, whether you're selling that vision to investors or early employees coming aboard. They— you're trying to create that sense of we can do this.

Yes, very true. Now, another thing about, because of my research, I'm very intrigued by another topic, which is business longevity. When we were starting our own company, I always wanted to emulate what other businesses have done that are successful, that have stood the test of time. So another lived experience where Every entrepreneur, every startup— today I work with startups— every single person wants to create a successful business. Nobody starts a business saying, I want it to be successful for a little while.

3 years tops and I'm out.

Exactly. So even as a university student, I wanted to know what are the principles of success? What did they do correctly? They do right that I can emulate. I've always been fascinated by this topic, and I, of course, I've read a lot on it. However, there is one, uh, I don't know, it's not a gap, but there's one major, in my opinion, fault in this type of literature, because they will look at very large companies like Google or Amazon and so on, very large Procter Gamble, and distill the principles that have allowed them to become centennials, that have allowed them to become big, strong, long-lasting companies. However, as a smaller size startup that is today trying to manage in this highly complex external environment, business environment, those principles are not and do not apply to me. So this is a gap. I think this is a fault. I would say what I'm doing differently is that I am talking not only to businesses that have stood the test of time, but I'm simultaneously talking to startups to understand what is it that they are doing, what is it that they are being challenged with.

Well, and a couple of thoughts here. One, you talk about companies that have been around for a long time. There are smaller and mid-sized companies that have family often owned that are for centuries, if not longer, in Europe and Asia, right? In the, the US and North America, we don't have that deep sense of history. But it's not uncommon to find a company that, oh yeah, we've been around 400, 500 years, family owned. And their challenge is very different than what you would see with a P&G or a Unilever. And how do you handle the generational sort of translation cycle after cycle? If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe.

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I want to come to something that we've touched on but haven't explored, which is you view yourself as academic approaching entrepreneurship, or at least that's how I took that. But there's another thread of you practicing thought leadership, and you mentioned Doric Clark. So my question is, when did you start thinking about practicing thought leadership as a separate thread from academia or entrepreneurship, and how did that come to be?

I didn't set out to be thought leader, thought leadership, or do thought leadership. I, to be honest with you, I didn't even know this concept existed. I'm being very transparent and honest with you. However, when I was an academic, writing and researching. Um, you know, we have, we have to publish certain number of articles, certain number of books, just traditional professor role.

But often those are academics talking to other academics. Yeah, exactly.

Spot on. So this is where I just was. I became a professor. I was assistant and associate professor. And I didn't, I'm not, I don't want to say I didn't like it. I love teaching. I love being a professor, but I really believed and thought there is a disconnect between the research and the real world. It takes such a long time for a paper to come out and it's being read and evaluated by other professors. What is the impact of my research to executives, to people who are entrepreneurs? Uh, does it, does this work in real life? How is it that what I'm writing apply to someone who's, uh, doing business in Turkey, in London, or in Paris, wherever? So I was a professor here. At ESSEC, at the university in Paris. And again, the number of hours that you teach, the pressure that you have to publish, yet what is the impact of that publish— publication? I really started to ask these questions. And I became a mother, and this is, I would say, when I really started to ask the question of What do I want to do with my career? What impact do I want to make? And the answer was, I'm going to quit my job and write papers and articles that I believe are right, that I believe I want to convey to business owners and entrepreneurs. Uh, I started initially writing very much in fashion and luxury, uh, business and in this particular industry because that's my expertise as well about sustainable, creating a sustainable business, sustainable fashion. Again, that's my expertise for over 20 years. I worked and created a company that is B Corp certified. Sustainable, family-owned, where we employ more than 90% of women from disadvantaged backgrounds. So there was, I already had a lot of practical knowledge there. So that was one leg of my thought leadership, I would say. And another one was just, uh, writing about resilience to HBR and Fast Company. And just seeing the impact that my research and my writing makes. And that's, that's basically how my thought leadership evolved. And it wasn't— I don't want to say it was an accident. Of course it wasn't an accident, but it was just being invited to give two TEDx talks because they wanted to hear my views on create on sustainable fashion, being asked to write an article on resilient leadership, for example.

And so you talk about a journey which is an evolution, perhaps a bit of a stumble into, but one thing that I want to underline is the speed of the idea, the velocity of the idea. How do you take the insight from research and get it into the hands of people who can use it? And like you said, publishing a journal article, you could be 2, 3, 4 years going through reviewer comments. And though that nuance that's being debated isn't central to the insight that is going to be for the person who might apply it as an entrepreneur, right? It might be something in the literature review or a detail on methodology, you know, where they're like, no, just tell me what I should be thinking about and what the priority is. And so those are two very different audiences, often valuing different information. And so I think of the small business owner who says, what can you tell me in 5 minutes that I can apply today? That's an entirely different audience and how to simplify an idea and make it so powerful, compelling, and direct. So how do you reach that business owner? What skills from your toolbox have you used because the academic set, you know, and the academic persuasion, it's the way— how are you sharing your ideas and persuading?

For me, I always think of the— what can they apply immediately? That's always— and I think because I am myself, I consider myself not just an academic but also practitioner, an entrepreneur. So I always put myself in the shoes of the person who is going to be reading the article, whether the article I've written is for an entrepreneurship audience or, uh, an employee at a company. I put myself in the shoes of the person and always think about the practicality. This for me is number one. Uh, so that's how I'm able to reach, and of course Nowadays, you don't only have to be in these high-profile publications. You can write a blog, you can write something on LinkedIn and almost get an immediate feedback whether the audience or your, you know, target agrees with what you are saying or they can have a different view. So it's always incredibly helpful and I think The way everything is changing and the speed, the velocity you mentioned, it's remarkable.

Well, and even if we take that a step further, you can post something on social media, have a public discussion and actually a good conversation. Not all comments are good and thoughtful, but someone can say, hey, I see it this way, and you can have this discussion that helps sharpen both perspectives. And that is something where in traditional publication, you would have to wait months for— after you wrote the article before anyone else would see it. And so having this real-time feedback, I think, really brings a vitality to conversations.

I agree. And, you know, I want to make another point. I think both, you know, the traditional academic crowd and the traditional academic research fully has a— so, you know, the articles that we are writing, when they are for— whether they are for LinkedIn or for HBR or for Fast Company, they have a very strong research component to them. That's for sure. I think the difference is the speed at which you reach your target audience and focusing much more on the practical aspect rather than the research, you know, whether, how, which research did you advance. You see the audience is completely different. So when I write an article, I still publish, by the way, traditional research articles as well. You can get the academic out of me. It's in me. I still do it.

But even if you think about the format and structure of an academic article, okay, you'll have the abstract at top. But if you even compare an abstract to the first few sentences of a social media post, for example, you know, you expect your reader to actually read through the abstract, whereas in social media they may read a sentence or two and scroll past. And so you're trying to catch their attention and go, hey, this is— I'm speaking to you, this is worth your attention and time. And you're trying to catch the audience you're trying to catch in a very different way. So the attention span as well as the decision process of do I read this? Do I give this my time? Very different. Absolutely.

Very true.

So I want to look a little bit forward into the future with you, Neri. And you've been on a journey, quite literally. We started out with you in childhood at the start of this call. But my question is, where is your curiosity taking you next? What are you investigating and what has you excited?

I am incredibly excited about immigrant entrepreneurship and business longevity. I'm writing the book at the moment about this and The more I read, the more I write, the more I talk to and do my interviews, the more intrigued I am and excited I am. It's fascinating to me.

So can you give us an example of a what or a why that sparked that recently and had you say, that's amazing, I need to know more?

Oh, it's every day. It's not just— it's hard to give one, one example only, but I have been interviewing many people. At the moment, I'm still interviewing them. And as I'm coding the interviews, and I also do a lot of research and you read interviews from immigrant entrepreneurs who are the founders of Duolingo, Moderna, Google, WhatsApp, eBay. These are all founded by immigrants too, just to mention very few. And for me, it's just, I've distilled the principles of business longevity. However, at the same time, each time I hear someone talk to me about their own journey, I get very excited because of how it all seems to come together. That's, that's why. And some of these principles, of course, come from my research. Ever since I was a PhD student. So the cross-cultural competence, the cross-cultural bridging, the homophilic ties, and it's just the importance of vision and having all of this come together. Hernán López, the founder of Wondery, he was just talking about how at the same time I'm a little mindful to tell you my findings, but I will. She was talking about recognizing inflection points. And the very same thing is about part of adapting to cultural change, which I am investigating in my own research. And of course, as we know, it's Andrew Groth, who was a, who came to United States as a refugee, whose aunt who survived Auschwitz told him to leave Hungary. And he was able to escape first to Austria, then to United States. And I'm investigating his story, and his findings are very much prevalent in the book. But he talks about inflection points, and then Andrew Hernán, who possibly never met Andrew Grove, is talking about that and how he was able to how it guided him in creating Wandering. So all of this is, and having, being exposed to different cultures, the importance of that. So it all is coming together. And for me, it's just like putting a puzzle together. It's very exciting.

I can hear that excitement. And I look forward to seeing the book as it comes together. One thread that I also hear is the differences, and you may already be investigating this, between people who choose to emigrate and people who are displaced or forced migrancy as well, because the story you just gave as an example was much closer to forced migrancy of get out. Rather than— yeah. And so one of the beauties of a research topic and the one of the beauties of thought leadership is the deeper you go, the more questions there are to ask.

Very true. You are spot on.

So one last question for you, Mary, as we wrap up. I want to take you back to that moment the young 11-year-old girl standing there saying, I need a good education on that. Imagine you had the chance to give her some advice based on what you know now in your journey in academia, your journey in thought leadership. What advice would you give her?

The words that come to my mind is keep going and trust.

That's beautiful. I want to thank you very, very much for joining us today for a conversation of not only your research, but also your journey in thought leadership. Thank you, Neri.

Thank you, Bill. Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy. Or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.