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We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don’t fit the business paradigm.

Bill Drayton

The biggest problem is getting beyond the “you can’t” syndrome. The moment you figure that out, you’re on your way to flying.
BILL DRAYTON

Creative Flying Skills Syndrome
Organizations must shift away from repetitive-function hierarchies with rules and enforcement and walls.
BILL DRAYTON

Organization Team Wall
The first – the most obvious test of a true social entrepreneur – is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea.
BILL DRAYTON

Entrepreneur Ideas Tests
The one single factor that determines society’s success is the percentage of change-makers within it.
BILL DRAYTON

Determine Makers Percentages
What is the most powerful force in the world? And I think you would agree that is a big idea if it is in the hands of an entrepreneur who is actually going to make the idea not only happen, but spread all across society.
BILL DRAYTON

Big Idea Powerful Rights Thinking
What is the most powerful lever you can imagine? A big idea, but only if it’s in the hands of a truly outstanding entrepreneur. It starts with the person and the idea, and then grows to the institution. All three are intertwined.
BILL DRAYTON

Hands Ideas Powerful
Clearly, there’s some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What’s missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area.
BILL DRAYTON

Area Coming Industry Missing
And we understand that in business but we have need for entrepreneurship just as much in education, human rights, health, and the environment as we do in hotels and steel.
BILL DRAYTON

Education Entrepreneurship Hotels Human Rights Steels
When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return.
BILL DRAYTON

Either Most Profit Return Social Zero
Everyone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!
BILL DRAYTON

Finance Foundation Nonsense
Instead, we must migrate rapidly to becoming a global ‘team of teams’ that comes together in whatever combination necessary to add the greatest value to the changes underway.
BILL DRAYTON

Becoming Change Combination Global Together Underway
Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern.
BILL DRAYTON

Growing Health Pattern People Up
If everyone is a changemaker, there’s no way a problem can outrun a solution
BILL DRAYTON

Problem Way
Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker.
BILL DRAYTON

Imagine Makers World
Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it’s quite astonishing.
BILL DRAYTON

Enormous Financial Look Monolithic Profit
The new environment requires a shift in the organization of both institutions and societies, one of flexible teams of teams that come together around whatever change opportunities exist and then reform around the next.
BILL DRAYTON

Change Entrepreneur Exist Flexible Opportunities Requires

We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don’t fit the business paradigm.

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We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don’t fit the business paradigm.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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