Stanford SEED

 

SEED transformation program

The Seed Transformation Program (STP) is a year long program in which high potential leaders are challenged to assess their company’s vision, redefine their strategies, and make ambitious changes towards exponential growth. The program convenes company leaders from different industries and regions to participate in intensive learning sessions. Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty and industry experts lead hands-on, practical learning exercises on topics that include leadership, marketing, design thinking, strategy, accounting, finance, and more.

This program saw companies from all over India applying for the transformation program. 1,746 companies to be exact. Last Forest was one amongst the final 57 companies to be selected! In the introduction, there were sessions that allowed us to look at our resources, where we are strongest as an organization, our competitive advantage, our customer segments – who are our customers and what are we servicing them, how we are solving their problem. Our organizational structure – how we are equipped as a team, our values and their propositions. As part of the Stanford SEED program, the first in-company workshop involving the leadership team of Last Forest took place. We were joined by Sirish, our SEED facilitator for the program.

The team was completely immersed in a workshop that led us to create a mission statement that will be the driving force for us in the coming years. The team had to dissect and analyse every single aspect of the organization to see where we stand and how we can improve and go forward to transform ourselves.

Our mission statement:

“Pioneering sustainable living choices by connecting communities and markets.”

There was a follow up session a few days later where the team had to identify the main deficiencies that needed improvement, and the core strengths that we can build on going forward. This ended with a team dinner which was much needed after the intensive workshop. Safe to say, the team will have a lot of sleepless nights pondering and ever excited about this transformation in the coming months! The following immersion weeks saw a thorough dissection of operations of our honey section, that generates more than half of our revenue. This exercise allowed the company to re-evaluate and check every single aspect that goes into bringing out a finished product – one bottle of honey.

The last of the in-house workshops as part of the Stanford Seed program during a packed start to the month. The session’s focus was exploring market opportunity for our products – primarily, honey. The themes that were covered focussed on identifying our customer segments and developing a growth strategy that we could use to achieve or redefine goals that we had come up with when the workshops began. The Stanford Seed program ended with the last of the workshops in Chennai. The final workshop covered how we could put together and execute all the work we had done in the last nine months, contributing mainly to people and their performance. The process that the team learned during the transformation program now allows us to look forward to a challenging and fruitful transformation in the coming months, keeping track of the process as we move along!