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"Finding the Next Social Entrepreneur"

An Interview with Bill Drayton,
Founder of Ashoka

(First published in The Stanford Daily, 2/8/2005)

Bill Drayton is probably the best-known name in social entrepreneurship. He has a vision and an organization that is shaping the future of the “citizen sector” and social entrepreneurship. Drayton founded Ashoka to find, fund, and support the world’s leading social innovators. From child-abuse hotlines in India, to care for AIDS patients in South Africa, Ashoka has helped fund important social organizations around the world. With Tony Wang from Solutions Magazine, we interviewed Drayton about Ashoka, social entrepreneurship, and how students can get involved.

Bill Drayton: Before we begin, I’d like to make a small editorial suggestion. If you were to never use the words “nonprofit” or “non-government,” that would be a great contribution. You just cannot define the sector that is half the world’s operations by it not being something else. It is not helpful.

We suggest using the words “citizen sector” and “citizen organizations,” because citizens are the key driving elements. Also, the more the citizen sector grows, the more people can actually be citizens. It is an empowering movement.

The Daily: Ashoka finds the most extraordinary social entrepreneurs, nationally and internationally, and then gives them funding and assistance to pursue their projects. The best social entrepreneurs have taken innovative ideas and turned the ideas into effective organizations in their communities. How did you come up with the idea for Ashoka?

Drayton: It’s embarrassingly logical. What is the most powerful lever you can imagine? A big idea, but only if it is in the hands of really outstanding entrepreneurs—you need both. The third element you need is the institution. It starts with the person and the idea, and then grows to the institution. All three are intertwined.

What Ashoka tries to do is help launch the best ideas, entrepreneurs, and institutions we can find anywhere in the world. We have to believe that the combination of the idea and person is, more likely than not, going to change the pattern in that field—health, environment, human rights, whatever—at least on the continental scale. That’s an unusual idea and person, but they certainly exist. They are actually very easy to identify once you know what you are looking for. And there’s just nothing more powerful.

The Daily: Among other things, Ashoka helps promote innovation in the “citizen sector.” When you began Ashoka, did you feel as if there was a lack of innovation in citizen organizations?

Drayton: What we felt when we began Ashoka was that the wave of innovation was just beginning.

In the past, of course, there were outstanding individual social entrepreneurs, such as Florence Nightingale, Maria Montessori, the anti-slavery leagues, and etc. But around 1980, we could see a wave of social entrepreneurs coming up, and the citizen sector as a whole was making the move to becoming entrepreneurial and competitive.

We could see, in Asia and elsewhere, a new generation of people who were in their thirties, by and large, who were not the independence generation. Rather, they were the children of the independence generation who saw that the government could do better. We could just see that coming.

Although Ashoka was an idea that was actually created when I was an undergraduate, the right moment to begin the project was around 1980. It’s extraordinary that the ensuing two and a half decades has been the transformation of the Southern half of the world. That was the moment when ideas and people were taking off.

The Daily: Where do you see the future of social entrepreneurship going?

Drayton: Well, we have now reached a moment where there are, in four areas of the world, at least several million citizen groups: modern, entrepreneurial, competitive citizen groups. We have second and third generation sophisticated citizen groups, big ones in many cases. We also have a level of competition that is intense – there are a million citizen groups in Brazil, more than a million 501(c)(3)’s in the US. In any metro area, in any sector, there is competition. This is a remarkable moment, when the field has reached maturity in some sense, but is still very plastic.

I think the next five years we are going to see the social entrepreneurship field crystallize, and the only question is how smart is that crystallization going to be. Are we going to crystallize as a globally-integrated field? The problems we face are increasingly global. Even in implementation, if you don’t have economies of scale, certainly in thinking the problems through and working together, there are huge economies of scale.

We think it is very important for this field to be the first one that is operationally integrated globally. All the legal structures, national jealousies, and other things are cutting against us. It is an important job to get that one right.

Second, it was an accident that the two halves of society’s operations split. Business became entrepreneurial and competitive three centuries ago, and the citizen sector didn’t. But now we have the same architecture, and we are closing the productivity gap. (My guess is we’re cutting it in half every 10-12 years.) So now the potential for reintegration is there—and that’s a huge productivity deal for the citizen sector, for business, and for the ultimate consumer as your client.

Are we going to integrate? Or are we going to continue inertially on the path to division? Again, the results are not at all clear.

The Daily: What kind of integration are you envisioning? Do you think civil organizations should focus mainly on international integration?

Drayton: No, at all levels. As you can probably deduce, I think we should move towards reintegration between businesses and civil organizations as fast as possible. We actually have fourteen business-social bridge programs.

What is happening there is not only that everyone wins, but that the competitive dynamic is going to change, which we will fan by making this as visible as possible. It is going to make not only business competitors but also citizen organization competitors say, “We want one of those.” As a result you have business and society not talking to one another because its “nice,” but because they both really want it. And that’s when people really learn.

The Daily: Why do you think the next five years, in particular, will be critical for the citizen sector development? What development do you hope to see in that time?

Drayton: Why five years? Because we’ve now reached a certain level: there are so many groups, and so many things going on, that we simply need understandable patterns of behavior. Institutions are going to evolve to support whatever patterns emerge.

I think right now we have one of the rare instances where we can really impact the long-term architecture of half of society—for generations going forward. Once this architecture crystallizes, we will have thousands of cross-cutting synergies. We will, in effect, have an organism. And then it will be very hard to change any single piece, because it will be connected to 15 other pieces, and none of them want to change. So for the immediate five years, that is the challenge.

Our ultimate goal is to make ‘everyone a changemaker.’ This is sort of Ashoka’s private articulation to ourselves of what we are about, and this is something that we’ve only really been able to articulate well in the last year or so.

Every leading social entrepreneur is a role model. If Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, can do this, then I can do this. If Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank can market something to the world, well I can market this idea to the world.

I think there is an even more important process that goes on. Take any local community: when a major pattern-change entrepreneur comes up with an idea and markets it successfully, what happens at the local level?

First, the existing arrangements get challenged, and will probably have to change. The sentiment that “things don’t change” is weakened. That is like plowing the field.
The other part is the entrepreneur’s idea, which he/she is trying to make as user-friendly as possible since his/her goal is to get as many people to take it and run with it as possible. The entrepreneur, in effect, provides seeds.

The result is that in community after community, each entrepreneur is encouraging someone, or several people, to become local changemakers. They in turn become role models for their family and neighbors and so on. The more of them there are, the more the institutions become user-friendly, and the easier it is for the next generation of social entrepreneurs.

As our field has grown, and wired itself together, not only is their an increase in the number of social entrepreneurs, but in the amount of major pattern change as well. The social entrepreneurs are wired together, and suddenly ideas from Bangladesh travel to Brazil and upset local communities. So the rate of plowing and seeding has just been accelerated exponentially. And that leads to everyone being a ‘changemaker.’ Instead of people being objects, people become actors.

The Daily: Many students, if not most, want to be ‘changemakers’ in society, in one way or another. But it’s not clear how to get involved, since there’s no career path for “social entrepreneurs.” How can students become changemakers?

Drayton: The fact that it’s not clear is both a problem and a huge opportunity. If you go into law, there is way oversupply relative to demand. In this area, it is the other way around. This is by far the fastest growing sector, this is where you’ll have a big impact, and this is where the energy in society is and will be for a long time. This is where the real opportunities are to make a mark, because there is so much catching up to do. There are no glass ceilings if you start your own thing. If you go to a dinner party now, people are much more interested if you say you are a social entrepreneur than an investment banker.

Furthermore, salaries relative to business have stabilized and are beginning to gain ground. So those students that are early in seeing it will gain a huge market advantage.
Second, now we’re so big that we need every type of student, not just entrepreneurs. We need professionals, we need managers, we need graphic artists, etc.

The Daily: Even if there are many opportunities, it’s not easy to find them. It’s obvious where to look for a job in investment banking—but where do you look for a job being a social entrepreneur?

Drayton: If there are 1.1 million 501(c)(3)’s in the US at the moment, surely you can find one with a job opening.

The biggest barrier that anyone at any age has is the “stuffed shirt syndrome.” Everyone tells you “you can’t.” For anything that is new, that is what they are going to say.

The psychology is perfectly obvious: they didn’t, and therefore they don’t want you to. It’s going to make them feel bad; it’s a missed opportunity. So what do you think a law partner, who has spent thirty years sitting around in a law firm being bored to death, is going to say when you say you are going to do something exciting? There is going to be a little twinge in his heart, and he will puff up and say, “No you can’t do it. That’s unwise, young man.”

The biggest problem is getting beyond the “you can’t” syndrome. The moment you figure that out, anyone who cannot see problems around himself is completely and utterly blind. Any problem is sitting there as an invitation for you to use your God-given creativity and all the things you have learned in school to solve that problem. Of course you can do it. There is nothing brilliant about these things.

It’s just giving yourself permission and then being persistent. Persistent in seeing the problem or opportunity, and persistent in thinking about it until you have come up with some interesting ideas that might change the pattern. Then you have to be persistent and keep refining them.

It’s not about having an idea and then implementing it—that is one of those wild academic monstrosities. It is an everyday process for years: the world is changing, the idea is moving into different stages, and you are learning more. So of course the idea has to change! It’s a constant iterative, creative process. All you have to do is have confidence that when a problem comes, of course you can solve it.

It's really a mindset, not anything in the objective world, that is the problem. It is all the stuffed shirts and the whole pattern of how youth is lived, even in our society. The adults are in charge of everything. They plan the extracurriculars, the sports, the work, and you are told all the time that you are sort of incompetent. Don’t bother us, don’t take initiative.

There’s a small percentage of elite that do take the initiative, and who become the so-called natural leaders. But it should be 50-60%, not 2% or 3%. It’s the stuffed shirt syndrome, and how we treat young people—those two things are the biggest barriers.

At the risk of stealing some sneaker company’s slogan, you have to “just do it.” And you learn through the process. You learn a lot. You help people open windows, and the next time you do it it’ll be easier.

Wow, great interview. How can I read them all?

All the interviews with outstanding social entrepreneurs and articles have been collected into a report on social innovation. It is available below for easy reading, printing, and sharing.

The Story of Social Innovation:
Interviews with Social Entrepreneurs