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 DRAYTONOrganizations must shift away from repetitive-function hierarchies with rules and enforcement and walls.
More Bill Drayton Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.
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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.
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We need to teach empathy as we do literacy.
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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.
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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.
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To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.
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The social entrepreneurs are governments’ best friends.
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We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another.
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Everyone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!
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The most critical variable [to becoming a change-maker] is one’s willingness to give oneself permission.
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The first – the most obvious test of a true social entrepreneur – is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea.
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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.
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Anyone who cannot see problems around him or herself is utterly blind. All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.
BILL DRAYTON