My latest book review. Pardon me if it's a bit too "philanthropy" focused, but I enjoyed this book.
Changing the world is a lot like writing a novel: many people say
they want to, but only a few actually accomplish their goal, and fewer
still succeed in creating something that gets noticed.
In
Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works, business strategist Roger L. Martin and Sally R. Osberg, president and CEO of the
Skoll Foundation,
provide an overview of the burgeoning field of social entrepreneurship
and share the stories of several social entrepreneurs who have changed —
and are changing — the world for the better. And, like the
entrepreneurs they highlight — nearly all of whom have been recognized
by the Skoll Foundation for their efforts — Martin and Osberg mostly
succeed in their objectives, providing a definitional framework for the
field, explaining the joys and challenges of the work, and finding
compelling examples of people who have overcome those challenges.
Martin and Osberg define social entrepreneurship as direct
action aimed at transforming, rather than incrementally improving, an
existing system; in the process, a new equilibrium is created. Moreover,
social entrepreneurs work in "ways that do not fit neatly into the
traditional modes of government and business." Whereas businesses are
constrained by a need to earn profits, and government-led change efforts
are designed to provide services to citizens rather than cultivate new
customers, social entrepreneurs are able to "[negotiate] these
constraints. The creative combination of elements from both poles...is
what enables [them] to build models designed for a particular context."
Through their work at the Skoll Foundation and the
Skoll World Forum,
Osberg and Martin have observed that transformative change involves
four key stages: first, the social entrepreneur must understand the
system she is trying to change; then, she must envision a future in
which that system has been changed, build a model for achieving the
change, and, finally, scale a solution.
It is not enough, for
example, to be repulsed by a tradition such as foot binding or female
genital cutting that has been standard practice in certain societies for
centuries. Rather, the social entrepreneur "sets out to make sense of
the problematic equilibrium itself: how did it come to be and why does
it persist?" To do that, Martin and Osberg write, the social
entrepreneur must "navigate three powerful tensions" with respect to the
world they wish to change: abhorrence and appreciation; expertise and
apprenticeship; and experimentation and commitment.
Take the case of Molly Melching, the much-honored founder and executive director of
Tostan,
a nongovernmental organization headquartered in Dakar, Senegal.
Melching, who arrived in Senegal in 1974 as a young academic and, after
her program was canceled, found work as a translator for various
development agencies, soon fell in love with the country and its people
and almost immediately "began heading out from the urban familiarity of
Dakar, with its French enclaves of cafes and bookstores, into rural
villages." There, she saw signs of failed development and ineffective
educational initiatives almost everywhere. "There was little
appreciation [within the development community] of the reasons
indigenous communities operated as they did," write Martin and Osberg,
"[or] why the unhappy equilibriums that prevailed in Africa persevered
even in the face of new incentives." After a few years, Melching "came
to believe that a different approach was necessary if change was to
happen sustainably in Senegal." Continuing her travels, she "sought to
engage ever more deeply with communities…learn[ing] from and build[ing]
relationships with village elders and young people, to explore community
networks, and to shape her knowledge of how the society was
structured." In the process, she became intimately familiar with the
established equilibrium that prevailed in rural communities — and
eventually realized she could do something to change it. After learning
and helping teach rural children in their native Wolof language,
Melching founded Tostan as a vehicle to scale a community empowerment
program and start a conversation about human rights and women's health
issues.
Of course, some problems defy simple solutions, and what
works in one cultural milieu may not work elsewhere. Indeed, it is not
uncommon for a social entrepreneur to come up with an innovative
solution to a problem only to discover that the particulars of the local
context make it impossible to scale beyond the initial group of
individuals he had hoped to help. Given that reality, Martin and Osberg
seem to suggest that real, lasting social change is largely the result
of leadership — the hallmarks of which include humility and the ability
to think outside the box.
It was the latter, for example, that enabled Bart Weetjens, founder of
APOPO
(Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development), a registered
Belgian nongovernmental organization, to reduce the costs of detecting
and disabling land mines. For much of the second half of the twentieth
century, dogs had been used to sniff out mines in post-conflict
countries, at a cost of $300 to $1,000 per mine. Meanwhile, training a
single mine-sniffing dog can cost upward of $40,000. Weetjens, who kept
small rodents like rats and hamsters as pets when he was young,
recognized that the animals might be both intelligent enough and small
enough to do the job for a fraction of the cost. The result of his
epiphany? APOPO's army of rats has cleared nearly seventy thousand mines
and more than twenty-five million square meters of land since 2004, and
along the way Weetjens learned that they could also be trained to sniff
out tuberculosis in human tissue samples.
If the book has a
shortcoming, it can be blamed on the relative immaturity of the social
entrepreneurship field and the lack of a research base detailing the
impact of such endeavors. By the authors' own admission, the book is a
step, but only a step, down the long road to a cleaner, safer, more
sustainable world. It also raises, for this reader at least, as many
questions as it answers. For example, as the first generation of social
entrepreneurs passes from the scene, who and what will keep their
organizations, many of them founder-led, from fading away? And what of
the millennial generation, which seems long on good intentions but
lacking in resources and, at times, resolve? Perhaps Martin and Osberg
will answer those and other questions in their next book. In the
meantime,
Getting Beyond Better is both a good read and an
excellent illustration of the real potential of social entrepreneurship
to change the world. That's something we should all embrace in these
uncertain times.
