Interviews
The interviews in the Creating Emerging Markets archive form a permanent and unique resource held in Harvard Business School’s Baker Library. Many interview transcripts can be downloaded immediately in full, and all others are available upon request. Each interview page includes supporting resources about the interviewee and her or his business. If the interview is conducted in a local language, an English translation is provided. Many of the interviews are on video. These full-length video interviews are available to qualified researchers by contacting HBS archivist Rachel Wise. Harvard ID holders are able to access the full-length videos through the website.
We welcome feedback and suggestions for ways to improve the project.
- Ghana
Kwasi Abeasi
CEO, Africa Investconsult Ltd.
(Financial Services)
“You have to negotiate. And you have to go with a team that knows how to negotiate. Otherwise you’ll get a deal that looks good. Later on you find out it’s no good.”
- Bangladesh
Sir Fazle Hasan Abed
Founder and Chair, BRAC
(Microfinance, Development)
“I’ve never thought that you can do good only through nonprofit activities. You can do good also by doing business.”
- Argentina
Arturo Acevedo
President, Grupo Arcelor Mittal (Acindar)
(Steel and Mining)
“It is important to clearly define social responsibility. We have always upheld a very active and responsible policy in this field. We make mistakes, and a lot of things still need improving, but corporate social responsibility is a major corporate concept.”
- India
Anu Aga
Thermax Private, Ltd.
(Equipment Manufacturing)
“[As a leader], you don’t have to know everything In fact, one of the beliefs I have is [that] skills can be hired. The leader has to show wisdom—that cannot be hired.”
- Sri Lanka
Abbas Akbarally
Chairman, Akbar Brothers
(Tea; Diversified)
“The main thing is integrity, honesty; and once the banks know that you are not going to take their money and go to the casino, they will give you the money.”
- Turkey
Hamdi Akın
Founder and Chairman, Akfen Holding
(Construction, infrastructure)
“[W]e want these companies to last 100, 200, or even 300 years. We want them to survive in the long term. We don’t want them to just live and die with us.”
- Chile
Roberto de Andraca
Chair, Cap S.A.
(Steel)
“[I]n 1998–2000, when a severe steel price depression developed and 30% of steel companies went bankrupt. At the time we already ranked among the 20% lowest-cost steel companies.”
- Chile
Roberto Angelini Rossi
Chair, Empresas Copec S.A. and AntarChile S.A.
(Petroleum, Forestry, and Fishing)
“Businessmen are never allowed to say ‘I’m done.’ We can never sit down to see what happens. There is constant evolution ... we must provide orientation to our companies and keep on expanding and innovating.”
- Philippines
Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala
Ayala Corporation
(Real Estate, Infrastructure, Insurance, Banking)
“We wanted to be part and parcel of the development cycle of the country and to be relevant as an institution in a country which needed a lot of growth, a lot of development, and a lot of institutional support. [We wanted] to have an Ayala that was relevant to the national development agenda, but at the same time put capital to work and gave good return on investment.”
- Turkey
Gülsüm Azeri
Group President, Şişecam; CEO, OMV Petrol Ofisi
(Chemicals and glass; Petroleum)
“[B]eing an engineer always helped me. I went for R&D. If there wasn’t sufficient R&D, I formed it...”
- Pakistan
Seema Aziz
Founder, CARE Foundation; Managing Director, Sefam
(Education and Retail)
“I understood that an education [is] the only gift which no flood can take away, which becomes a part of a person and changes lives like nothing else can.”
- India
Shabana Azmi
Actress
(Cinema)
“Art can lead to a climate in which sensitivity allows change to occur, and with it inherently comes social responsibility.”
- Pakistan
Syed Babar Ali
Founder, Lahore University of Management Sciences
(Education; Government)
“I felt, having been in industry and business for a fair amount of time, that you could so much with management, but not enough unless you added value to what the country is producing.”
- Mexico
Alberto Baillères
CEO, Grupo Bal
(Diversified)
“One of the cornerstones of the group’s competitiveness, in comparison to our international competition, is our emphasis on human relations. We try very hard to be a family”
- India
Rahul Bajaj
Chair, Bajaj Group
(Diversified)
“We were in a socialist raj. You couldn’t make anything until you got an industrial license and you couldn’t make more than the license capacity.”
- Peru
Rosario Bazán
Co-Founder and General Manager, Danper Trujillo S.A.C.
(Canning, Agriculture)
“I take pride in the relationship among company workers and the fact that everyone—no matter what his or her job is—feels as important as a manager, in terms of his or her contribution to our organization.”
- Nigeria
Hakeem Belo-Osagie
Chair, United Bank for Africa (currently with Etisalat Nigeria)
(Financial services)
“The biggest challenge in Africa is that you constantly have to manage the government and the regulatory agencies. They play a far more pervasive role in Africa than they do in the United States.”
- Peru
Alberto Benavides
Founder and Chair, Compañía de Minas Buenaventura
(Mining)
“Don’t worry about environmental care costs. Be sure to take good care of the environment, just for its own sake, because God will return the favor with a bountiful reward.”
- India
Shyam Benegal
Filmmaker
(Cinema)
“I have always felt that the Indian countryside was never really represented properly on the Indian screen But if you really wanted to understand the Indian psyche, you needed to look at rural India.”
- India
Ela Bhatt
Founder and Former General Secretary, Self-Employed Women's Association
(Microfinance)
“I say that poverty is violence, and with the consent of the society... I would say that the basic needs and problems of the poor will not be solved by the government, any government. They will have to be solved by the people themselves.”
