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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

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
We need to teach empathy as we do literacy.
BILL DRAYTON

Empathy Literacy Needs
The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.
BILL DRAYTON

Entrepreneur Jobs Way
In an increasingly connected world it is less likely that a few people ‘manage’ everyone else.
BILL DRAYTON

Opportunity Organization Team
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
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 not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.
BILL DRAYTON

Diving Fishing Teacher
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
What is our job as entrepreneurs if not to change things that are crazy?
BILL DRAYTON

Crazy Entrepreneur Jobs
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.
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
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
An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.
BILL DRAYTON

Change Entrepreneur Pattern
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
Organizations must shift away from repetitive-function hierarchies with rules and enforcement and walls.
BILL DRAYTON

Organization Team Wall
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

Anyone Problems Resources Skills Solutions
We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another.
BILL DRAYTON

Opportunity Thinking Zero
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 child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact
BILL DRAYTON

Children Empathy Impact
The social entrepreneurs are governments’ best friends.
BILL DRAYTON

Entrepreneur Government Social
It’s the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there’s nothing more powerful. That’s just as true [for] education and human rights as it is for hotel or steels.
BILL DRAYTON

Business Education Good Powerful Rights
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
Everyone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!
BILL DRAYTON

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

Empathy Skills Understanding

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

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

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