Naji Gehchan: Welcome to SpreadLove in Organizations, the healthcare leadership podcast where we explore leadership with purpose.
Naji Gehchan: I’m Naji, your host, joined today by Hala Hanna, Executive Director of MIT Solve, an initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a marketplace for social impact innovation.
Prior to MIT Solve, Hala was a member of the leadership team at the World Economic Forum, where she was Director of Strategy and Impact. She served as Chief of Staff to the Managing Director, shaping the forum’s global engagement. In her prior role as Program Lead for the Middle East and North Africa, she created economic discussions at Davos and regional summits, managing relationships with business leaders.
During that time, she also set up a public-private initiative for employment with the largest business employers in the region, based on findings from a study she co-led, training 100,000 youth. The work has since been replicated globally.
Hala brings two decades of experience in international development, global leadership, and strategic partnerships. Her earlier career was spent at the World Bank and the United Nations, advising senior officials on public sector reform, aid effectiveness, and donor engagement in several countries.
An advocate for women in leadership, Hala has held advisory roles with UN Women She Innovates and the UN Global Innovation Coalition for Change.
Hala holds a Master in Public Policy from Harvard and a Master in International Development from American University. She’s also a graduate of the Global Leadership Program at the World Economic Forum.
I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here to hear directly from her. Hala, it’s great to see you again and have you with me today.
Hala Hanna: It’s so great to be here, Naji. Thank you for having me.
Naji Gehchan: I always love to start with the story behind the leader. Can you share with us the personal journey that led you to building inclusive, sustainable solutions that improve lives today around the world?
Hala Hanna: Naji, I don’t think it would be fair to start with myself before asking you what your story is, because I think there are a lot of shared commonalities.
Naji Gehchan: We can go on. I actually shared my story on the podcast after a very long time, with some of my friends pushing me to share it. I’m sure we have a lot of commonalities, from our upbringing in Lebanon, to war, to generally wanting to help people live better lives.
So I’m eager to hear yours, and then I’ll bring in my commonalities with you.
Hala Hanna: I don’t know if you remember those days during the Lebanese Civil War, when we were both born, when we would have what I thought back then were vacations. We would take a car and travel around the country, go to the village of my grandparents, then to my aunt’s outside the city.
From my perspective, it was all games: playing with your cousins, running in the middle of the night to the basement of a building, sharing food and music. We would invent games and have fun with so little.
Of course, what I did not fully understand back then was that we were running to the basement because it was a safe spot in the building. I didn’t have to go to school because my school could be bombed, and there was a time when students actually did get stuck in my school.
We weren’t exactly traveling. We were internally displaced, basically running in search of safety, while my father, who was a doctor, stayed behind to provide for us.
I’m sure that’s a familiar story for you. This is what it means to grow up during the Lebanese Civil War, and that’s a reality that is unfortunately shared with so many others around the world.
So when I look at the statistics and where most of these millions of children end up, the first thought is: How did I make it out from the basement of that building in a war zone, missing school, to being here with you today?
I think it comes down to two things.
The first one is quite universal: children’s superpower, which is that children are resilient. They have an incredible ability to interpret reality on their own terms. It’s not about embellishing things. It’s just that there is an inner strength that children have and a possibility to bounce back.
So any effort to give those children a second chance is a worthwhile effort.
The second most important reason why I made it out is that I got lucky. I want to hear your story about how you got lucky.
I had parents who were incredible parents. They didn’t want to leave Lebanon. They thought that the fear of growing up without roots and a country to belong to was worse than the fear of the bombs, and they refused to surrender to violence.
Above all, it was that belief that the love and family they were able to provide was enough to make up for that chaos.
Looking back, I certainly agree.
When I think of every parent of those tens of millions of children who are growing up in those conditions, and how few get as lucky, I think this is the impetus for the work that I do.
I also came to the United States and, relatively recently, became an American citizen. It’s another story of luck: Where are you born? What chances do you get? What opportunities are available to you to reinvent yourself?
There’s just way too much that is left to chance, and the stakes are too high.
I think our children deserve more than just luck. Our entrepreneurs deserve more than just luck. That’s why I believe in our Solvers so much. Solvers are the social entrepreneurs we work with at Solve.
Naji Gehchan: I’d love to hear more about Solve.
When you talk about luck, it’s funny because I’ve always said something similar: that I got lucky. At some point, someone asked me, “I’m not sure it’s pure luck.”
You can challenge whether luck is universal. Is it whether you grasp the opportunity at the last moment? Do you rise to the occasion?
I’d love to get your thoughts on this because it really made me reflect.
And you brought up something that, for me, is really the name of this podcast. You talked about love and how your parents were caring, loving, and protecting you, but not to a level where you didn’t understand what was going on.
When I reflect on my childhood, mine is obviously very similar to yours. I never actually told my story because I never wanted anyone to feel sorry for what I lived through. I actually had an amazing childhood, which might sound very strange for a childhood lived during war.
I’d love to hear your thinking about those concepts because I’m sure they shaped who you are as a leader today.
Hala Hanna: What a good question.
I think it’s never only one or the other. It’s such a mix of things.
Fundamentally, I think if we don’t realize how much of it is utter chance, we’re deluding ourselves a little bit.
Naji Gehchan: It’s your humility, Hala. I can’t get over that.
Hala Hanna: I was never the smartest kid in the room, but once I got to do what I loved, I was definitely the hardest working.
When someone gave me an opportunity, I grasped it with both hands and didn’t let go until I felt I had made the most of it.
But the fact that I met those people, that they believed in me, that they saw something that made them want to give me a hand and push me up—that’s luck.
Then you take lemons and make lemonade. That’s also a great skill.
I feel that we grew up in a soup of the right ingredients.
Naji Gehchan: I think there’s one piece of humility and this continuous imposter feeling that we have as MITers.
But there’s also this other piece: the encounters.
I’ve always said that life is about encounters. As you were speaking, I was thinking about even how we met and how you meet other people, and suddenly it opens up other opportunities or people who are willing to help you.
I’m thinking about mentorship, sponsorship, and how you can help others and give back.
All those moments along the way are encounters that end up making you who you are and how you grow.
And Solve is somehow where you guys do this, connecting all those things together for social impact.
So tell us more about MIT Solve.
Hala Hanna: I do want to go back to what you were saying about not wanting people to feel sorry for you.
I think it’s only when I understood that we aren’t what happens to us; we are what we become out of it, that I accepted it fully.
I am where I am, and I might as well give a voice to those who are still in refugee camps today and who are still internally displaced today.
So let me tell you about MIT Solve.
At MIT Solve, we believe that to achieve a more sustainable and equitable future for all, we really need new voices and new solutions.
Very simply, our mission is to find and scale the best solutions.
Solve is an initiative of MIT, and the thinking behind it was: How do we recognize that there are problem-solvers who share the DNA of MIT students—people who want to use knowledge to improve the state of the world—and give them what they don’t get?
How do we level the playing field and connect them with the right people and the right funding to help them reach new heights?
Naji Gehchan: You’ve been doing this for a while. I remember I joined the first session you led during COVID virtually, and it keeps scaling.
You look across more than 600 innovators today that you’ve supported. When you think about all those innovators, what really distinguishes the solutions that truly scale and get to impact from those that remain promising but get stuck?
Is there a trend where you see those who really go and change the world versus those who don’t?
Hala Hanna: We have supported more than 600 innovators, and more than 360 have gone through our program. Those 360 have reached more than 380 million lives.
More importantly, we have a 94% five-year survival rate among our selections. In this sector, that’s remarkable. For comparison, Y Combinator’s five-year survival rate is around 70%.
Naji Gehchan: Wow.
Hala Hanna: Of course, surviving is not the same as scaling, so maybe I can answer both questions.
I think it’s about who we select, how we support them, and what that support unlocks.
We select based on proximity. Eighty-five percent of our solutions have founders who have lived experience with the problem. I think it brings more grit in the face of the downs.
You’ve got to keep going.
So it’s who we select, and it’s how we support them.
Network effects are a big one. Each connection is potentially game-changing.
I remember in our early days, one of our 2019 Solvers, LifeBank, was founded by Temie. She met Merck for Mothers at a Solve event, and that turned into a $5 million partnership, which was life-changing for an organization at that stage.
It’s also about supporting those entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship is lonely. When the problems are personal and close to home, it can be even more draining because it’s your community and your people. You always want to do more. You never feel like you’ve done enough.
Creating a community of peers, mentorship, coaching, and leadership coaching is always helpful.
And then there’s what the program unlocks. The support program and the stamp of approval that MIT can give create a powerful signaling mechanism.
It’s really a vetted pipeline. The selection helps de-risk investment.
Our for-profit Solvers have collectively raised more than $1.1 billion, so there is real economic value being created, way beyond what we honestly would have thought it would be.
Naji Gehchan: How long has Solve been ongoing?
Hala Hanna: This year is going to be our 10th year.
We’re having a big celebration, a birthday party, on September 22nd in New York City alongside Climate Week and the United Nations General Assembly, like we do every year. This time it’s going to be a big celebration.
Naji Gehchan: That’s awesome. Congratulations.
You said you wanted people who have experienced the problem because it brings grit and they really want to solve it.
Are there any other traits or leadership skills you look for in the selection process?
Hala Hanna: We get to know the innovators quite a bit, but when we’re doing the selection, we’re selecting based on potential for impact, sustainability, scalability, and human-centered design.
In addition to proximity, having people who are deeply values-aligned, who really put humans first, matters quite a bit.
Technology is always a critical enabling factor in ensuring that we close equity gaps at the speed that we need.
Going back to your question about scale, that would be the answer there: technology and partnerships.
It might sound trite and overly used, but it’s true that our biggest stories of scale are the ones where our entrepreneurs find the right partnership or a smart model that allows them to go from tens of thousands to multiple millions.
Naji Gehchan: When you’re talking about Solve and all those entrepreneurs, but also in your past experiences at the UN, World Bank, and World Economic Forum, you’ve worked in places where you’re trying to make change at a larger scale—countries, institutions, populations—and where it’s hard.
Even in the corporate world, the larger the organization, usually the harder it is to change.
What have these experiences taught you about how real change actually happens?
Hala Hanna: You’re coming with the easy questions.
One of the reasons I ended up at MIT Solve is because I felt like change was not happening fast enough.
At the World Bank, I was quite junior, so I was seeing just a sliver of the pie, and that sliver didn’t feel relevant enough.
I was responsible for measuring governance and helping the public sector make better designs for public sector reform.
I couldn’t see the connection between collecting survey data in a healthcare system at the last mile in Morocco and improving the situation of someone having a heart attack outside a rural clinic who couldn’t get care because there weren’t enough beds.
I just wanted things to move. Things were not moving fast enough from my naive perspective.
Then at the World Economic Forum, it was really about the art of convening and leadership at a very high level. I think it taught me quite a few things about leadership.
The first one is that leaders are human. You could be in charge of entire parts of an organization, and people aren’t always perfect. That gave me the confidence to reach for more. If others are in these positions and I can see that they’re not necessarily making the right choices, then why not me?
The other lesson was how much good leadership can make a difference.
You sit in some of those rooms and meet people who have an extraordinary ability to bring people together. Kofi Annan, for example, was one of those figures. He was such a humble person.
For me, leadership is about being humble. It is about listening. It is about people. It’s about meeting people where they are.
It’s about love.
I think, Naji, to go back to the name of your podcast, leadership is about loving others and understanding their needs so deeply that you can actually negotiate with them and bring everybody to the right table at the right moment.
It matters enormously when it’s the right leadership and the right leader.
Naji Gehchan: You’ve worked across public, private, and civil society organizations, and you’ve navigated all those environments.
We hear a lot about the need to work across sectors, but it’s still very hard to make it work.
My next question was around how to build trust across those sectors, because sometimes trust isn’t there.
What type of leadership skills do you think we’ll need as we look ahead at the challenges we’re facing—from climate and health to economic transformation?
These changes can bring extremely positive things, but these are tools. How can we build trust as leaders for good?
That’s essentially what you do at Solve, so I’m interested in your perspective on how you’ve done that.
Hala Hanna: I think this is where leaders who are from the community and who are designing with the community matter a whole lot.
Before something goes to massive scale, it’s going to start on a smaller scale. I think this is where we see our job: finding those kinds of leaders and their solutions.
When you talk about the challenges ahead and technology, technology alone is not neutral. It has the biases of whoever created it.
Technology alone is not going to fix the equity gaps that we have.
It is a critical enabling factor in updating the systems that we need to address the challenges ahead. But it’s too important to leave it to technologists alone. We really have to get in there, be in the details, and be in the room where decisions are made.
I think those innovators who are doing that kind of work are really the solution.
I’m thinking of Build Nepal, an organization based in Nepal that is creating carbon-neutral building blocks and houses that cost less than a smartphone and can be built quite quickly.
There have been several deadly earthquakes in Nepal, and the buildings built by Build Nepal were among those that remained standing.
Now, because people saw that, they’re being contracted to build structures that were damaged during the earthquake.
That’s a story of scale and partnership.
And there’s no better trust-building than showing that your product actually works.
Naji Gehchan: That’s so true.
I’m going to give you a word, and I’d love your first reaction to it.
The first one is leadership.
Hala Hanna: Love.
Naji Gehchan: Tell me more about that.
This is actually how we ended up recording this episode, with some of your comments about love and leadership.
Hala Hanna: It’s funny. I think I know what you’re talking about.
We do two flagship events a year, and every time I find myself really moved at the end of the event. I’m on stage thanking everybody, and when it comes to thanking my team, I can’t stop myself from tearing up and saying, “I love you.”
I can feel how uncomfortable people are and how weird it is. My team is squirming and people are giggling nervously.
But I really can’t help it.
I had an amazing leadership professor, Giampiero Petriglieri, who was my teacher during my fellowship at the World Economic Forum. It was one of the most life-changing experiences.
He said that leadership is an expression of love because it’s an expression of who we care about and what we care about.
When you look at the people we work with day in and day out, how can you not care about them?
They’re giving us what’s most precious, which is their time and their talent, to achieve incredible things together—to change lives and reach 380 million people in 10 years.
That’s incredible.
My appreciation for my team is immense. I’m so lucky to have an incredible team. They’re incredible human beings. Everybody is kind, driven, and values-aligned.
I think that allows us to go so much faster, and it builds trust too.
Being values-aligned brings a lot of trust.
Naji Gehchan: It’s funny you say this because when I started talking about love in the corporate world and in large organizations, it came from this realization that trust is just a word.
Everyone says, “Of course, the team needs to trust one another.”
But what is behind that? Why would people trust one another?
It took me back to my upbringing and also to when I was in the Lebanese Red Cross, in moments of war.
Beyond trust, there is actually love.
I genuinely loved my teams in the ambulance. I knew they had my back, literally, if I were injured or died, and the same was true for them.
That’s why we trusted one another.
It’s not just, “I like you. I trust you.”
There’s this profound human connection that makes trust possible.
This is where my concept of love and discipline started: trying to understand why we say we trust one another in the corporate world, but then at the first issue we start pointing fingers rather than actually trusting one another, caring for one another, and trying to figure it out.
It’s certainly another commonality between you and me.
Hala Hanna: I love that.
At the individual level, I think Brené Brown has a beautiful way of putting it.
She describes trust as a jar. Every time your friends do something that’s good for your well-being—small gestures like lending you a pencil in class—those moments of “I see you, I care for you” fill the jar.
If you have a jar that’s full and someone does something that removes some of that trust, the jar won’t be empty. It will still be quite full.
You can work from there.
That’s at the individual level.
At the team and organizational level, I do think there are certain processes and structures that you can put in place that increase trust.
One of them is how you treat information. Who has access to what?
At Solve, everyone has access to everything. It’s all on Google Drive. It’s all on Salesforce. There’s no holding information back.
Information is not power.
How you do the work also matters.
Naji Gehchan: The second one is women in leadership.
Hala Hanna: Do the best.
Naji Gehchan: No doubt.
Hala Hanna: No, I don’t want to romanticize it either. I’m sure we haven’t succeeded completely.
The day we have women in leadership who are just as imperfect as men in leadership, we’ll have equality.
Naji Gehchan: I love the spin.
Hala Hanna: Give us mediocrity. We’ll take it.
Naji Gehchan: The third one is power.
Hala Hanna: Responsibility.
Naji Gehchan: And the last one is Spread Love in Organizations.
Hala Hanna: Yes. Every day.
Naji Gehchan: Any final word of wisdom for leaders around the world?
Hala Hanna: What would be yours? Do you have one that you go back to, something you rely on?
Naji Gehchan: I was not expecting that. I’m asking the questions today. We can flip the table the next time.
Hala Hanna: Maybe we just end where we started.
You’re not what happens to you. You’re what you become out of it.
I’m pretty sure that, as we live longer, we’ll have episodes where people hurt us or situations hurt us.
What we do with those experiences, and keeping our heart open, allows us to keep showing up in ways that, looking back, I think would make us proud of ourselves—of how we showed up for each other.
Naji Gehchan: I love it.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on my commitment, or whatever you want to call it. Some call it an objective. I don’t usually like to do it, but I feel like it’s good to reflect around this time of year.
I’ve always thought about love and discipline as my leadership philosophy.
But the other two pieces I’m adding this year are: less noise and more impact.
I’m feeling that’s going to be crucial as we navigate all these incredible changes and innovations, but also the ups and downs we’re going through as humans and as communities.
We need to make sure we’re focusing on what matters most versus what is most urgent or what simply keeps us busy.
So that’s what I’m thinking for this year. I’ll let you know if I actually deliver on it.
Hala Hanna: I like it.
How are you putting it into place? What are some of the ways you get to that?
Naji Gehchan: It’s in the small things.
I have an incredible team, and we talk about love and discipline quite a bit.
It’s all about how disciplined you are in your focus and making sure you’re really spending your time on what’s going to bring the most impact for patients.
I’m in healthcare. We develop drugs. We can spend hours and hours debating with one another or trying to figure out what’s happening in the environment.
But at the end of the day, the most important question is: Would a patient really care? Can I bring it to them faster?
What can I do to reduce all the noise around us and make sure we’re working on the most impactful thing, which is developing this drug and bringing it to market?
It’s in small things. It’s in meetings. It’s in what you put your time into.
I love what you said about leadership—that people are giving us the most precious thing, which is their time.
That relates directly to this. How much time are you spending on one thing versus another?
At a personal level too, it’s making sure I’m spending time with my daughters. We talked about our kids before we started the show. With my spouse. With my parents.
How am I spending my time?
It’s about reducing the things that don’t matter as much and focusing on the things that matter for us to have an impact and do what we want to do in this life.
Hala Hanna: It’s so interesting that you say this.
When you’re talking about discipline, distinguishing noise from impact, and doing it all with love, I find myself thinking about how important it is for a leader to create space for the big questions and also to say, “Okay, now we’re going this way.”
You have to create the space for reflection, but you also have to help people move forward.
Naji Gehchan: As I’ve been reflecting on all these pieces, it literally took me back to those moments you described at the beginning of our conversation.
You were in a car, driving away from bombs. Just imagine that noise, and how you managed to lessen it and not hear it and still thrive.
You talked about music and dancing as if you were going somewhere positive while you were literally escaping.
It brought me to this moment of thinking about these pieces and realizing that we can do it as humans. We can create great things.
Hala Hanna: Yes, we can. Absolutely.
Naji Gehchan: Thank you so much, Hala. It’s been great to have you with me today. Thanks so much for this great discussion.
Hala Hanna: What a fun conversation. Seriously, thank you, Naji, for having me. You made me think. I’m going to go back and be like, “Oh, I wish I said that.”
Naji Gehchan: It was great. Thanks for being with me.
Hala Hanna: Thank you. Thanks for taking the time.
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show! For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to Spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time.
Follow us on LinkedIn and connect with us on spreadloveio.com. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and feedback. Most importantly, spread love in your organizations and spread the word around you to inspire others and amplify this movement, our world so desperately needs