“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.”

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.

If everyone is a changemaker, there’s no way a problem can outrun a solution

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.

Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker.

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.

Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world’s community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

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.

What is our job as entrepreneurs if not to change things that are crazy?

Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.

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.

There is nothing more powerful than a new idea in the hands of a social entrepreneur

Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.

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.

Listening is understanding. The skill of empathy is a must to be able to listen…One can listen better if one sees the whole.

In an increasingly connected world it is less likely that a few people ‘manage’ everyone else.

Animals play a big part in my life, on tour or at home.

We’ve always been trying to climb this ladder that leans so hard on our own idea of what our big songs are. We realized recently that we’re not a band with big songs.

And the biggest irony is you spend a lifetime finding someone to love and then die learning how to unlove them.

Working in the context of ultra-famous brands like Dior and Vuitton, creative spirits are always going to feel reined in. It’s important that they are free to develop ideas. And rather than detracting from the principal job, it reinforces it. I think of that money as venture capital. It’s not a big investment.

Modest fame is not to be despised by the highest characters. [Lat., Modestiae fama neque summis mortalibus spernenda est.]

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

The important thing is to believe in what you do. Have a big dream and take small steps.

The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.