Dr. Erik Simanis
Director, Market Creation Strategies
Johnson School of Management, Cornell University
January 2011
It has been my fortune to work closely with Patrick Donohue on several occasions over the past six years. In 2005, Patrick was a member of a project team I led in Kenya on behalf of the consumer products company SC Johnson to establish a business serving rural and slum communities based on the company’s insect control and home care products. In 2006-2007, we worked as co-leads on a venture by the DuPont subsidiary Solae to devise and launch a business in India to bring the company’s soy protein isolate to under-nourished rural and slum communities. And in 2008-2009, I played a support role to Patrick, who was leading a new venture on behalf of Ascension Health in Flint, Michigan with the goal of launching a business that could serve the unmet health needs of Flint’s uninsured.
It is no coincidence, as the chronology above indicates, that Patrick has moved up quickly to assume a leadership role in highly-unstructured, high-pressure efforts demanding creativity and persistence, cultural adaptability, and decision- making under extreme complexity. It is a role in which he excels. The very nature of the projects above challenges one’s resiliency. Apart from working under demanding environmental conditions (e.g., sleeping on the floor of a tin-roofed structure in Kenyan and Indian slums during 100+ degree heat), each of the projects entailed disruptions of all shape and form: from the loss of a key field team member at a critical juncture during our concept ideation work, a “mini-revolt” in which husbands of our local women business partners in India refused to allow their wives to continue with the business, to a significant “client management challenge” resulting from mis-alignment with the corporate lead concerning the core methodology. Patrick always maintained his composure—as he would often say, “it’s part of the process.” And throughout it all, Patrick could always be counted on to maintain a sense of humor.
Many people care deeply about social change. But Patrick’s passion—for what he does, the places where he works, and the people he works for and with—is infective. In our work in Kenya and India, Patrick played an instrumental role in building very personal, sustaining connections between our team and the communities in which we worked. Our youth- group partners in the Kibera and Mathare slums of Nairobi and our women’s self-help group partners in the villages of Parvathagiri Mandal of India all gravitated toward Patrick. He has that effect because of an openness and humility that pervade his interpersonal style: people feel Patrick’s curiosity and genuine interest in their lives, their homes, their communities. It’s not put-on. And he looks for and finds the beauty in lives that, on first blush, appear defined only by despair. So his is a passion that builds the esteem and confidence of the other party and fosters a relationship of mutual care. I credit Patrick’s relationship-building efforts with our community partners in Kenya and India to the tremendous level of commitment and dedication that they themselves brought to the venture—a contribution without which we could never have progressed as far and as fast as we did. 
It is this same style of interpersonal engagement that Patrick brought to team interactions, and which I believe makes him such an effective leader. He listens, and, more importantly, he hears—and it’s the latter that earns him the respect of his teammates and colleagues, even when his ultimate position or decision may be contrary. It’s a tacit skill. His body language and his tone communicate that he is listening from a position of non-judgment; you feel his genuine interest to understand and appreciate your stance. The effect in all of the project teams was to create a culture of sharing and open voicing of opinions—the proverbial “creative tension” that makes the most of a team’s diversity. His interpersonal engagement skills are complemented by an equally developed capability for being self-critical. He looks for the gaps in his own ideas and continually challenges his own assumptions; in our years of working together, I have never seen Patrick fall prey to the “not invented here” syndrome. Consistent with that, he has a very high level of intellectual curiosity—he is always on the search for new perspectives, hungry for new ideas. It is this quality about Patrick that allows me to say with conviction that he will continue to grow and mature in his abilities as a leader and entrepreneur.
A critical entrepreneurship skill that I have seen Patrick develop over the past five years (and one of the skills I myself have learned from working with him) is that of “asking the right question.” In our early work together in Kenya, this skill set was under-developed: the uniqueness of the business concept was central (though, to be fair to Patrick, in Kenya we were implementing a unique innovation approach adapted from tools and techniques developed in participatory development methodologies). It was in India where I noted a distinct shift in his thinking: during the business ideation phase, it was his ability to distill the market and business challenge into one simple question—how do we inspire homemakers to change their daily cooking habits to integrate soy protein?—that led to a powerful and strategically- sound business concept. The sophistication of his “framing ability” had developed further in the Flint project: during ideation and business developed, he anchored and focused the field team by continually having them make explicit the “theory of change” that underlay their ideas. It is this framing ability that I believe will not only serve The Hoop Fund in driving towards a sustainable business model, but also in attracting early-stage funding, as it is the same skill which underpins the ability to crystallize and communicate a vision in a manner that inspires and convinces.