Entrepreneur for Society

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Duration: 52 minutes and 22 seconds

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Posted by: fsosa on Oct 14, 2006

Bill Drayton shares his story of building a global entrepreneurial organization, and a movement with unstoppable momentum. As a life-long social entrepreneur, and the architect of the field of social entrepreneurship, he offers incomparable guidance on how to create widespread social change -using new visions, strategies, tools, and determination.

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Bill Drayton is the founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public.
Ashoka works at the forefront of the rapidly growing field of social entrepreneurship
it supports the work of entrepreneurs worldwide who solve social problems
in far reaching, pattern-changing ways.
our job is not to give people fish, it’s not to teach them how to fish,
it’s to build a new and better fishing industry
From modest beginnings in the early 1980’s, Ashoka has grown into a community of more than 1700 Fellows,
supported by 400 staff members, partners and volunteers in over sixty countries.
88% of the people we elect at the end of five years have had other institutions copy their ideas
59% have achieved national policy impact, and on average they’re serving 174,00 people
Bill Drayton has been a social entrepreneur all his life.
He shares his story to provide insights into what it takes to create widespread, social change.
The Early Years
Both my parents gave themselves the freedom to do something quite unusual
My mother left Australia she perceived the fringe of the world to come to the center of the world, New York City.
She arrived as a cellist in the midst of the depression, which is completely impractical
And my Dad, nineteen decided oh, I’m gonna be an explorer
I think that sort of self-liberation is something that I just acquired from my parents
and then more broadly from the family as a whole
Growing up in the center of Manhattan is just a magical gift.
The moment as a child you’re allowed to cross the street then this whole city opens up.
And every subway stop is a different country frequently a different continent,
and New York is as diverse, as tolerant, as open-minded, and very much as energetic as any place in the world.
I went to a school, that along with my parents allowed me to start things.
little newspapers, and a bigger newspaper, and that required me to go and get ads and be wandering around
and my parents may have worried; and they did worry, I discovered after the fact,
but the man running the school said, this is, you know your son can do this and this is important for him
I loved history and geography, that is the earliest roots of Ashoka;
I became interested in Asia as a result.
I went to a large and tolerant high school that encouraged students to develop in their own path.
And so I continued creating things
The one that came the biggest was the Asia Society which ultimately had about a third of the student body
as paid up members, we had one or two events a week
Ultimately the school responded by starting to teach Asian history.
I also was involved in the Civil Rights Movement in modest ways, but really important ways for me.
Very hard for anyone who didn’t live through that period to know how powerful,
and how magical the Civil Rights Movement was.
You could just see the hinge of history changing in front of you, turning in front of your eyes.
I organized a group of friends and we picketed the local Woolworth store
I was offended by their reaction.
Wrote off to various senators.
Senator Humphrey called up and that had a very beneficial effect.
Several things began to weave together during this period,
at least very consciously in my mind.
The Civil Rights Movement in India absolutely tied together
because our Civil Rights Movement was the Gandhian movement
I think that Gandhi is by far the most important person in the last century
and his influence will go on for many centuries into the future.
As the industrial revolution was gaining momentum,
the world was changing and the opportunity is for everyone to use Ashoka’s core phrase:
to become to be a change maker.
That requires us all, in this new world,
to exercise individual judgement, individual responsibility
about how we deal with other similar societies
we have to put ourserlves in other people's shoes
and understand the impact of our possible actions.
And then make good individual judgements that we have to make.
You can't empathize if you think other people are different from you, different species, non equal
you can't be a good person, an effective person in society, withough good empathetic ethics.
Gandhi understood that all you had to do to cause change now
was to get people to recognize the conflict between their behavior and the force of truth.
That's why he described his work as a truth force.
A force of truth
You, you bring to the surface and you dramatize the falseness in the current situation.
And then people make a judgment, the society makes a judgment.
And ultimately it is that truth force that has caused all the empires to collapse.
That became the new modus operandi of the last century.
Gandhi understood it; and he translated, this very profound deep change in society, into the new most powerful,
Only really powerful, way of causing change; the new politics, the new change process.
Once you understand that that’s what Gandhi did,
it is not just the liberation of the Indians, that’s a very important contribution.
But he set in motion the modern politics of change.
Harvard College and India
Harvard was a remarkable mix, an extremely rich time intellectually
but it was also a very rich time in terms of direct experience and thinking about that experience.
I was involved in the early stages of the Northern student movement.
We were asked for example to help the Baltimore Civic Interest group
bring equality to the eastern shore of Maryland.
I and others would organize buses every weekend.
Some very unpleasant experiences there because this was not a welcome phenomenon.
Some young men trying to drive us off the roadway and we would have to dive into the ditch.
You could see the fear and the anger on the one hand,
and then at the end of the day, go back to one of the African-American churches,
there would be this wonderful cookout dinner
and you hold hands with the people next to you in a circle and sing We Shall Overcome.
Those are images; both types, that are with you for the rest of your life.
Now, that was a very active involvement.
In between, was the Ashoka Table. We would invite the Arch Bishop, the local Commissioner of Sanitation, Mayor Daley
whomever would come for an off the record dinner.
Sometimes there would be bigger meetings for broader audiences as well
but there was always a 20 or 25 person private dinner with this visiting person.
So now, why did you do that and what are the economics of this?
Incredibly, wonderful, steady flow of understanding of how the real world works.
Then I had another great privilege when I was in college,
I finally got to go to India
and I was able to meet many of the leading Gandhians who had been with Gandhi
you know Vinoba Bhave was one of the leading Gandhians in India he collected land voluntarily given,
larger than the state of New Jersey by the time I was there to redistribute to the poor
people giving their lives to this work.
And you go out and negotiate with the village elders for them to give the entire village.
And the laws are written in such a way, because of the Gandhian influence, that if they agreed then that would happen.
All because this extraordinary force had arrived.
And I learned so many important things from that trip and then subsequent time in India.
I think by far, the most important actually is: What’s really important in life?
It’s whether or not you love and respect others, and they love and respect you.
Above a very minimum level of physical well being that is what counts.
So that summer in India in many ways was really important.
It was a spur, a very powerful spur to the launching of Ashoka.
The statistics of 100 to one difference in per capita income suddenly took on a different meaning.
Because these were your friends.
So I came back with the question that any healthy person would,
but certainly someone with entrepreneurial temperament.
What are you going to do about closing the North-South gap.
How can you speed up this wonderful magical democratization process?
The inevitable second part of that question is:
What is the most highly leveraged way that you can help close the North-South gap,
speed up the development, or change process?
And that’s where the Ashoka idea comes from, its embarrassingly logical.
What is the most important ingredient in the change process, any change process?
It’s a big new idea, pattern change idea. But only, only if it’s in the hands of a really first-class entrepreneur.
Oxford University and Yale Law School
At Oxford I tried to learn economics,
which mercifully was in English and a policy discipline,
whereas in this country it had become a mathematical thing and I don’t think in mathematical terms.
Oxford was very important intellectually in many ways.
A very rich community of scholars, of students.
It also has a marvelously relaxed schedule.
So 8 weeks on, six weeks off, etc. Lots of opportunity for travel.
And so I was able to explore the Berber Arab interface in Morocco, spend time in central Europe, etc
So the travel part again constantly feeding back and forth. It was a very, very rich dimension of those years.
Yale Law School was about much more than just the law.
An opportunity to create one thing after another.
And by far the most interesting, ultimately, was Yale Legislative Services,
Which I started at the cusp of late ’67 the beginning of ’68.
And ultimately, over a third of the student body were actively involved.
A wonderful opportunity to bring together a real need.
Legislatures facing major, really difficult problems, without much staff, very little staff;
and students who want to make a contribution,
who also aspire to having a career in major public service.
But neither side knows how to deal with one another.
And we provided the bridge between so that that worked.
Mckinsey & Company
After law school I was faced with the question, should I do law?
Which seemed implausible to me, after a very brief exposure.
I decided to go to McKinsey and company.
And I chose McKinsey because of all the consulting firms,
all the other opportunities for a really good apprenticeship,
it was the one whose culture was absolutely focused on causing major change.
But I learned so much at McKinsey.
I learned about industries, skills, analytical techniques.
How you understand what’s going on at the emotional level as vs just the intellectual level
on a meeting or a larger pattern of interactions with an institution.
I think the most important thing I learned,
was something that is so basic but not articulated often,
and that is that no institution can be healthy, sustaining, effective, unless it is absolutely ethical.
And I believe that the reason that McKinsey has emerged,
as the dominant, best firm in the management-consulting field,
is that it is built around that idea.
I had a very early experience in my first six months with the firm.
I was working for New York City helping them design a whole set of new taxes.
One of them was tar/nicotine tax, which varied the tax by the level of tar/nicotine.
That’s what forced the tobacco companies in the next six months
once it was enacted, to come up with Pall Mall Milds, Marlboro Lights etc.
In the second week I was designing this thing, the cigarette industry heard about it.
They called a meeting in city hall, they lied.
I very politely pointed out that their people had said something else.
The meeting ended in some acrimony.
I was just sitting down in my office and in came this big man,
decades older than me with authority written all over him,
and he said: Are you Drayton?
Yes, what do you think this is? A Nader office?
and I went to see the partner I was working for having detected there was some difficulty.
Two weeks later I was invited to a lunch at the Raquet Club
where they had an executive vice president of a major tobacco company
and this man Marvin Bauer, whom I innocently never heard of before
I had some anxiety whether I was gonna be served up for hor d'ourves or dessert.
And Marvin turned to him and said, we serve 40% if the top 500 companies in this country.
And no one has ever raised a question about our professionalism.
You have a question about that; and therefore, we cannot serve you,
and we will not serve you going forward.
Marvin knew that this was the core of the institution.
That’s why it could attract real good people.
That’s why it could do really good work.
That’s why it could have trusting relationships.
That’s why people could be honest with one another inside the firm.
And you cannot come away from those sorts of experiences,
without understanding how absolutely central truth, ethical behavior, is.
And of course, that fits completely with Gandhi’s insight about how the world works.
And how you cause change and importance of truth,
the truth force in his phrase. So all these pieces fit together.
You were learning about management, but it was the same thing as the rest of the world.
My five years at McKinsey also gave me an opportunity to look at the green revolution
in three different districts in India
for a month each to take leave and teach at Stanford Law School and then at the Kennedy School,
After which President Carter, then Jimmy Carter, Governor Carter called and invited me to join his effort.
And then had this unbelievable opportunity to move to the EPA the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
As Assistant Administrator I had responsibility for policy, and budget, and management, audit.
By the mid ‘70s it had become obvious that there were thousands of chemicals,
man made substances, metals in the air, and the water
Up to that point, regulation was you write a rule -command; and then you enforce it – compliance.
We added an in-between step, counter proposal.
so start with all the regulations, we don’t undo that,
it's politically impossible to do that anyway
But now we allow a company to come up with a counter proposal.
If they can figure a smarter way of doing it, great,
as long as the results are the same, and then you enforce that.
At that point we called it the bubble.
It’s still referred to as emissions trading, so let me give you a mental image of why the bubble.
And that will explain the core mechanism.
In any one factory they may have a hundred different processes that give off the same pollutant.
Hydrocarbons, for example. Each process has a different set of regulations,
written by a different group of people at a different time,
and no one has coordinated this – it’s just the way the process has worked.
Now in fact, when you look at it,
it turns out very commonly that removing one pound of the same pollutant
can vary in terms of costs by 100 to one.
If you can substitute. You can drop a hundred dollar cost for a two dollar cost.
You are a lot better off, so you save billions of dollars to get the same results.
And more important, much more important,
Now every plant manager, every engineer, has got an incentive to innovate in pollution control.
The same principle applies at the global level.
So you can imagine the whole globe is within the bubble.
If you’re talking about climate change or the ozone layer,
It really doesn’t matter where the chemicals are coming from.
And so if it costs less to control a ton of a pollutant in India than it does here,
you can work out a trade. So a power plant here
can invest in the planting and maintenance of the forest there
which absorbs the climate change pollutants that are given off by the power plant here.
This is a win-win situation for the people in India, for the people for the U.S.
Paid for by fees because people are saving billions and billions of dollars doing this.
You can certainly pay for this.
Now that very simple concept is now at the core of the Kyoto agreement.
Of changes going on in Europe and here, and in fields beyond the environment.
Ashoka: Laying the Groundwork
The development of Ashoka is very typical of the development of any major entrepreneurial venture.
The idea of course, dates back at least to the time I was undergraduate.
There was the challenge that came very sharp once I had been in India,
You must close this North/South gap
You must speed up development, democracy in the world.
So there were many things that were very clear
but something was missing, and that was the historical moment wasn’t ripe,
and also in our personal lives it wasn’t ripe.
We needed to go through our apprenticeship.
I had to spend time at McKinsey learning how the world works,
learning the key skills of how you cause change.
Then as I was at EPA we sensed the historical moment was coming.
You could hear the hinge creaking.
And what we were seeing very personally was that our friends,
my friends in India, and elsewhere, were starting to be social entrepreneurs.
What was happening was that the post independence generation in Asia was coming of professional age.
They were now in their thirties. Their parents thought getting control of the government,
take over those instruments, that was the focus.
The next generation grew in an environment with these overpowering government institutions
and some of them felt they could do better.
And so you could see the beginning of a very significant wave of social entrepreneurs
who were having a very difficult time
no word to describe the field, no support institutions,
a lot of doubt ranging from their families to the government
Then we asked, well how do we intervene?
Where can you intervene which will have the biggest possible impact with very modest resources,
all we could imagine available to us at the time?
And that is the moment when a person and an idea have finished their apprenticeship.
And they know, the person the entrepreneur knows,
that they have an idea that is the next big generic step for their field.
Then all you want to do is go full time and run with this idea.
Seize the historical moment; but, Who are you? What is this idea?
It doesn’t fit any of the existing patterns because they were set up to serve the old idea.
At that point, a little bit makes all the difference.
Very little money so you can look your family in the eye and say:
I know it’s crazy to leave my tenured job in a nice safe institution.
You’ve gotta be able to look them in the eye and say:
You know I am gonna do this. And we give you the financial ability to do that, if you need it.
But beyond that, you now are a part of a family of your peers.
And your uncle can see that these people that are very respected in your society and internationally,
think your work is important, believe in you.
The early years of Ashoka, as for almost all our fellows, raising money was a nightmare.
No funding from any institutional foundation for our first six years.
Basically the Klingenstein, Lipton and Golden families, that was it.
I was working part time at McKinsey, commuting to New York,
Ashoka was going, and it was a very crazy time
and that overload is what made the McArthur sudden phone call in November of 1984, you know miraculous!
MacArthur Foundation had chosen me to be one of its Fellows which gave me five years’ income.
And also very importantly, for people who could not understand what Ashoka was about
gave me a sort of vaguely reputable category to fit into. It was a very key liberating moment.
I was able to go on leave from McKinsey, which I’m still technically on leave.
Ashoka: The Launch
Even while I was still at EPA, we started traveling to India, Indonesia, Venezuela
three very different countries, in terms of size and culture.
Say, will this idea work, how- always the key word for entrepreneurs
how do we find these remarkable leading social entrepreneurs
before they have proven themselves.
If we couldn’t find a system that would do that reliably all across the world, this thing wouldn’t work.
We talked to, we counted it up at one point about 340 people in three countries,
over our collective vacations. And out of that came an important idea that if we built a community of fellowship
that solved most of the problems.
Leading social entrepreneurs are the role models to whom the next generation comes.
They also can tell the difference just in their stomach, they can tell the difference
between someone who has what it takes to really change the pattern
who has got that and who doesn’t
We sensed already that the historical moment was there,
and we had reached a level of comfort that we could solve these problems,
That was the time, the classic take off moment for the social entrepreneur
that Ashoka looks for when we’re looking for fellows.
Idea, big idea, in the hands of an entrepreneur, at a ripe historical moment.
And so we started. We launched Ashoka.
To begin with only India, and over the first five years only India and Indonesia.
And we went very slowly and carefully; but we made mistakes, which we had to fix.
Simple things such as staff.
We had a very good person, 26 energetic, she simply couldn’t see around corners,
because she didn’t have the life experience, and some people wouldn’t listen to her.
So we shifted to representatives that are typically in the 40s.
Very different
One of the first lessons we learned in India had to do with the criteria.
We learned that it is a mistake, for us, to assume, that the person we’re looking at as a potential Ashoka fellow
will do with an idea what we would do.
It’s gotta be what they would do.
We learned, when we analyzed this
that about 40% of our early failures came from that over-enthusiasm.
And we’ve learned to discipline ourselves and make sure that it’s the person’s idea.
But also that the person is committed to; their life is committed to, changing the whole society.
One of the first fellows in India who is now actually a board member with Ashoka, Gloria de Souza
She has had a very profound impact on how children grow up in that country.
She was a teacher in one school in Bombay.
She had struggled to figure out how to break, what everyone criticizes
the rote memorization, the deadening process that was so common in Indian education
and she after many years she figured out how to make it work in her class.
Then over five years with a lot of trial and error, she made it work in one school.
And now she is ready to roll this thing out.
And she saw it changed the whole Bombay municipal corporation, and ultimately the country.
She was horrified that 70 percent of the children in Bombay’s ambition was to emigrate.
As a patriotic Indian, she was saying, I’ve got to change this
so these children grow up to be real citizens that solve problems, and are able to do that.
So we could see someone who had a large vision, a continental-scale vision
had an important idea; had been through her apprenticeship, had shown her toughness.
She didn’t know how she was going to deal with the Bombay Municipal Corporation;
she didn’t know a lot of this
But we could see that she would know how to do that. And, she has.
Some sixteen million children are learning with her materials;
the central government in the Union Territories has announced that her methods are to apply
UNICEF has pushed her ideas in Sikkem;
she’s into the tribal schools; a really big impact.
Now she didn’t invent modern education
the importance of what she did is she figured out how to make it practical and attractive for the teachers,
the administrators, the parents, and the kids,
in an environment where none of the them had this experience.
That’s a classic entrepreneurial intervention.
Something is wrong in the human system that was blocking a change that many people saw was needed
And she went and she fixed that.
Ashoka: Global Expansion
In June of 1986 after we’d done all this trial and error at a very small scale.
The board said, we’ve got it; not perfectly but enough, time to really spread globally.
The biggest country, the core of South America, the generals had just retreated,
gone back to their barracks around 1980
Five years later was the perfect time to enter the country.
People had enough time to dust themselves off,
and realize that it was possible now to bring change without being thrown in jail.
To organize this whole process was beginning to bubble
a new wave of social entrepreneurs was coming up
and we came in at just the right time to help that wave take off
1980 Brazil had 5000 citizen groups, by the year 2000 a million
This is a country transformed and we were able to contribute to that change
and Brazil in turn has been able to contribute to Ashoka in so many ways
and to the field it’s been a proving ground of many innovations
And so in the next four and a half years, roughly, we grew the organization 750%,
went to most of the continents, it was a very intense, wonderful period,
I was traveling six or seven months a year
because we didn’t have, you go to a new country what is the social entrepreneur nothing was there.
When the wall came down in 1989, central Europe suddenly was freed,
it was like Brazil in 1980, a talented population, with a gigantic mess.
A backlog of problems unaddressed now able to address them.
People able to be free, to think.
And so we came in, and we had this again wonderful experience of finding this wave of social entrepreneurs.
Coming up, addressing these problems, and in this case having been cut off from the rest of the world.
So not only could we help them get started and find one another across countries,
and within subject matters within the region,
but also Brazilian fellows could experience talking to central European fellows.
Remember, many people in Brazil had experienced a right wing military dictatorship.
And the fact that the social entrepreneurs in both countries could talk to one another
and discover that it doesn’t matter who’s a right wing or a left wing,
they are both bad and both destructive, both made it impossible to solve problems
and for people in our field to be free to do what we do, to see problems and go and solve them.
So it was a very powerful addition to the fellowship.
Ashoka has had a very careful strategy about where we have started the program, what sequence.
We elect very few people relative to the total population.
One per ten million is our average per year.
To get to a critical mass of fellows in a country, you have to have a big country.
And we want to get to a critical mass of 50 or 60 minimum by the end of three years.
it is learned that if you don’t reach that level
you don’t have that enough in the big subject matter areas
or the big metro area for the fellowship really to begin to start functioning
So we have started with a big country at the core of every continent
and then built out to the smaller countries around it.
India and then Bangladesh, Nepal. Brazil and then Uruguay, Argentina.
By the beginning of the 90s, we and the field were entering a new period.
The whole field was reaching a much more mature point,
we began to have fellows not in two countries but in many countries,
with a very significant portion of the world’s population.
We were beginning to have not a handful of fellows but hundreds.
This year we have been operating on a 20 million dollar budget
and it has to now grow very rapidly for the next couple years.
There are two big things that cause that growth,
one we’re adding China,
we’ve still got western Europe, and other parts of the world, mainly Africa still to fill in.
More important, the second dimension of our work has a professional association,
providing services along the later part of the life cycle,
us entrepreneuring together to cause major social changes
where we pool our insights and then actively go after them,
And with this very rich tapestry of programs that we have developed now
coming together, that’s what Ashoka is today.
Every fellow’s fifth year we do an evaluation;
97 percent are continuing with the work,
88 percent have had other institutions they don’t control copy the idea,
59 percent have achieved national policy impact,
and on average they are serving 174 thousand people.
We also have nominators, we have the business entrepreneurs who are committed,
we have the volunteers all across the world,
and the chapters helping us with references the whole body of people,
this is an amazing community.
A Lifelong Partnership
This is a partnership over the full whole period of professional contribution.
The friendship of peers, the mutual help, that’s permanent, always valuable, very valuable.
As you get further along in the process and you’ve got a model that works,
then you’ve gotta market it.
And so we have a strategic partnership with Hill & Knowlton that helps us there.
because the whole field is weak in that area.
Then you hit the next stage, the marketing takes hold.
Then you’re running a big organization that’s growing fast
and there’s a big movement out beyond and you have management problems.
Well, if there’s one thing that our field is deficient in, it’s management skills
cause we haven’t had the three centuries that business had to build up,
the language, the ways of thinking, you don’t have business schools, none of that.
And so we have evolved a very practical way of working
with McKinsey and company as a wonderful strategic partner,
in bringing the best knowledge that business has built up over the centuries
to the top most powerful social entrepreneurs when they’re ready.
This, and the reason this works, is it’s very valuable for both sides.
When you work for the top social entrepreneurs you have a dream client if you’re a consultant.
You and the firm are learning about whole sectors of society
you didn’t know about before, consumer protection, housing.
And all that enriches the rest of your practice,
so both sides benefit and we’ve learned how to do this.
Mosaics: Entrepreneuring Together
In 1990 was the first meeting of a mosaic group which took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Only nine fellows, but each with a very different idea from different countries across Asia.
About how society can do a better job of helping all young people grow up.
This is in effect, us doing together what we do individually, this is group entrepreneurship.
You take the best ideas that will change a field, that each fellow has developed.
And by now, these fellows have developed ideas that are having a big impact.
But they’re partial, they’re one idea, one delivery system serving one set of clients.
When you put them together you see maybe five, six principles,
a dozen delivery systems and many more clients.
And when you see that as a whole, you’ll see major new ways that you can do your job better
us together looking at what we’ve learned,
jointly pulling out the most powerful principles,
and then together actively going and trying to flip the whole system.
Well, that’s an example of the second-generation activity that the field is now able to do,
that Ashoka has spent 12 years learning how to do.
And we have several things now ready to roll at the marketing stage.
How all kids can grow up better
new markets for business, major new revenue sources for citizen groups.
There’s so many of these opportunities that we are in a unique position to see,
and to market, and to drive home and cause change.
Building the Field
We’re doing three things:
One, we’re helping the best ideas in entrepreneurs get started,
Their ideas, their institutions across their whole life history.
Second, we are helping us as a community come together.
So we can individually help one another, so we can be much more than the sum of the parts.
Through the mosaics, for example
And then third, we’re helping the whole field.
How can this field come together in the smartest possible way?
So that we will have the biggest possible and most beneficial impact as a field going for generations.
Our job is not to give people fish, is not to teach them how to fish,
Is to build a new and better fishing industry.
And so, all the way throughout our history, we have encouraged other people to come in.
We don't want to be the only venture firm for social entrepreneurs
We have helped over eighty different groups.
And they have their own emphasis and what not.
But we are increasingly getting more and more institutions coming into the field
which is exactly what we want
We are serving this historical force, that's Ashoka's central purpose.
This is a moment of absolutely historically profound change.
Our job is to see it, to help with the most leverage, it in the most intelligent way as possible.
So we have to be completely listening to, understanding .
What is this history? Where is it going?
And that's what every entrepreneur does
You are constantly saying; alright we have gotten this far
Where are the opportunities? Where are the barriers?
How do we fix the barriers? How do we move down this path?
Each of these experiments is our developing,
the core methodology for our field,
this is how we entrepreneur together.
The Future
In any entrepreneurial institution, there’s always the question,
what happens if the entrepreneur is run over by a truck?
I do not want to be run over by a truck,
but we now are a community of so many good entrepreneurs
that I think we’re past that danger zone.
I have a number of colleagues, just remarkable colleagues, who could take over tomorrow.
I hope I would be missed somewhat
and I hope I would be able to make really a big contributions as all of us do,
but I think Ashoka is past that danger point.
What sort of a role will I play going forward?
I have other ideas that fit beautifully with Ashoka.
Youth Venture is a spin-off of the Learning Initiative.
I think it’s the civil rights movement for young people,
I think it’s incredibly important, the idea is very simple.
We want as much as possible every young person to know
that if they have an idea, and they’re willing to create a team,
and they run that team and they leave a lasting impact,
we are with them, to help make them succeed.
Any young person who has had that experience
knows that they are powerful, they are empowered to go and do anything.
They know that they have just led.
Not in a simulation or a game, but the real thing.
They have changed their world
they have put in place a tutoring surface
a dance academy with peer counseling, sports that weren't there before,
radio, it doesn't matter.
Their idea, their team, their impact.
They are going to try it again and again,
they are getting better they are getting stronger
What we’re building up to is a change in the whole dynamic,
the whole understanding of what the youth years are about.
Instead of saying oh we are adults in charge of everything
the class room, the extra curricular, the sports, the work place.
Say, you take initiative just like the rest of us.
We know from the work of the fellows that this has a huge impact.
If we can go from two or three percent of the population
that are natural leaders to fifty or sixty percent in the next generation,
what a difference that‘ll make in the lives of those people and in the health of society.
Everyone a Changemaker
The two founders of E-Bay, Pierre Omidiyar and the first president Jeff Skoll
are both entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur members with Ashoka.
They have helped us in many different ways.
The most important thing that Pierre has done for us
is challenge us to get beyond what we used to define as our ultimate goal,
how do we help the entrepreneurial competitive citizen sector emerge.
Is there something deeper than that?
You gotta keep pushing.
And we now articulate that as everyone a change maker.
And, this is analogous, he has a similar concept of a universal economic democracy
is what E-Bay makes possible.
What does it mean?
Historically two or three percent of the worlds people controlled everything.
In the last century we created the wealth
because of the industrial revolution, to allow everyone to be a player
but that isn’t the way things work yet.
The entrepreneurs, the social entrepreneurs
are the cutting edge of a transformation leading to everyone a change maker.
They’re their role models, they’re citizens who take an interest,
who care about their neighbors, who organize and who cause big change.
No one annointed them, they did it.
They can do it, you can do it.
At a second level they’re key.
Think about it at the local level every time a social entrepreneur comes up with a new idea,
it upsets the way things are done
it also upsets the idea that things are the way they are
at the same time the entrepreneur is giving you a seed
that they are trying to make as friendly as possible.
so anyone in any community can take this idea and run with it
So the entrepreneur is not only a role model they’re plowing the earth,
they’re breaking up the existing system and they’re giving seeds that invite people to run.
That leads to thousand and thousands of local change makers.
With each new entrepreneur, you have another plowing and seeding.
As our field moves from being only local to national and gets wired together globally.
The frequency with which new plowing and seedings hit every local community increases faster and faster.
Ideas from Bangladesh travel to Brazil and the U.S.
It didn’t happen ten years ago, now it does.
As that goes on you have this absolutely magical multiplication of everyone becoming change makers
and more and more local role models as well as the major social entrepreneur role models.
When you have a world where only a few percent are actors, and everyone else is acted upon,
the potential for the problems to multiply faster than the solutions is with us.
When everyone is a change maker, when they are empowered
they can see a problem and it’s an opportunity, not a problem.
Then we’re all like white blood cells coursing through society except better, you know.
We not only destroy things that are problems,
we can build and multiply things.
Now this is very powerful.