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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

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
Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.
BILL DRAYTON

Organization Structural Successful Together Transformation Working
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
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 social entrepreneurs are governments’ best friends.
BILL DRAYTON

Entrepreneur Government Social
What is our job as entrepreneurs if not to change things that are crazy?
BILL DRAYTON

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

Determine Makers Percentages
If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?.
BILL DRAYTON

Advancement Affected Constitute Execution General Money
Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.
BILL DRAYTON

Ideas My Family Sides
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
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
Everyone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!
BILL DRAYTON

Finance Foundation Nonsense
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

Business Entrepreneur Ideas Paradigm Simple
To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.
BILL DRAYTON

Break Chain Everyone Mental
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bill Drayton Quotes