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Getting Beyond Better

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Getting Beyond Better

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Highlights

  • with an eye for disaster. It was only after the conversation was well under way, with a platform and partnerships to make it possible, and then successful on a global scale, that we saw the real potential of applying a third metric—well-being—to the traditional measures of wealth and power, to define our success as bringing wisdom, well-being, and wonder to the lives of all the communities we serve. (Location 104)
  • Carnegie felt that public libraries would help produce the informed citizenry on which democratic society—and, not coincidentally, the free enterprise system that had made him so wealthy—depends. (Location 151)
  • he created a system that could outlive the people who built it, carefully codifying the terms for his support before providing funds to a community. (Location 152)
  • Carnegie Formula, (Location 154)
  • What Carnegie achieved might today be called social entrepreneurship. The phenomenon isn’t new. (Location 167)
  • The entry point for our work has been the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. (Location 181)
  • The work of these women, men, and organizations, along with their challenges and successes, has served as a kind of developmental lab for clarifying what social entrepreneurship is and how it works. It serves as the basis and motivation for this book. (Location 183)
  • Reflective practitioners think in action; that is, they practice while reflecting mindfully on their actions, in order to continuously improve both their theories and their practices. (Location 186)
  • The first was between two types of actions: direct versus indirect. A direct action is one an actor takes personally in order to bring about a specific desired outcome. An indirect action is one in which the actor convinces another person or entity to take the specific action that brings about the desired outcome. The second distinction we made was between two types of outcomes: maintenance or incremental improvement of the current system versus transformation of the current system to a new, more optimal system. (Location 197)
  • social service providers, (Location 202)
  • social advocates, (Location 202)
  • social entrepreneurs (Location 203)
  • Social service providers, we argued in the article, take direct action in a given situation. But they leave the existing system in place while seeking to reduce its negative effects. (Location 207)
  • social advocates work indirectly, advocating for legislative changes that can transform the environment in question. (Location 214)
  • What makes them social advocates, rather than simply lobbyists, is their desire to transform a suboptimal societal status quo. The lobbyist, in contrast, seeks to bring about a particular benefit—also often through legislation—that accrues to a discrete agent and not to the socially disadvantaged or to society at large. (Location 221)
  • Social entrepreneurs, we argued in the article, can be contrasted with both social service providers and social advocates in that social entrepreneurs both take direct action and seek to transform the existing system. They seek to go beyond better, to bring about a transformed, stable new system that is fundamentally different than the world that preceded it. (Location 225)
  • •The identification of a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity—a group that lacks the financial means or political clout to effect transformational change on its own. (Location 234)
  • •The development, testing, refining, and scaling of an equilibrium-shifting solution, deploying a social value proposition that has the potential to challenge the stable state. (Location 236)
  • •The forging of a new stable equilibrium that unleashes new value for society, releases trapped potential, or alleviates suffering. In this new state, an ecosystem is created around the new equilibrium that sustains and grows it, extending the benefit across society. (Location 238)
  • Unlike social service providers, social entrepreneurs explicitly aim to permanently and systematically transform a miserable or unfair societal condition. Unlike social advocates, social entrepreneurs act directly, creating a product, service, or methodology that spurs the transformation of the status quo. (Location 240)
  • A system of actors can and often will produce a relatively stable equilibrium that is unpleasant and unproductive for some of those actors, typically for the most underprivileged and marginalized. (Location 254)
  • Social entrepreneurs seek to shift a stable but suboptimal equilibrium in a way that is neither entirely mandated nor entirely market-driven. (Location 315)
  • Third, there is a deeper connection between social entrepreneurship and social advocacy than we first conceived. (Location 328)
  • John W. Gardner (Location 364)
  • He was also the founder of multiple organizations including Independent Sector, which brings US nonprofit organizations and foundations together, and Common Cause, which works to safeguard the tenets of American democracy. (Location 367)
  • Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society— (Location 370)
  • Lord Michael Young, (Location 371)
  • School for Social Entrepreneurs (Location 374)
  • Bill Drayton, (Location 375)
  • Jeff Skoll, (Location 380)
  • Skoll World Forum (SWF), and the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, (Location 385)
  • Greg Dees. (Location 389)
  • United Kingdom—have (Location 406)
  • A new and superior equilibrium emerged—not all at once, but in fits and starts, because pervasive change is often bitterly contested—until an equally stable but superior state was produced. (Location 475)
  • Social transformation—by which we mean positive, fundamental, and lasting change to the prevailing conditions under which most members of a society live and work—is (Location 484)
  • Normal science looks a lot like our traditional slow-and-steady narrative. (Location 495)
  • The resulting revenue produced profits that enabled Edison’s enterprise to grow and thrive—in fact, it would go on to become one of the world’s largest and most successful businesses, General Electric Corporation. Today, GE consistently ranks among the twenty most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization. (Location 640)
  • “When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often, we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.”1 (Location 719)
  • The terms were strict but straightforward: “Loans were made to individuals but through small groups who in effect (if not explicitly) had joint liability; the loans were for business, not consumption; and collection was frequent, usually weekly. Interest charges were significant . . . but the rates were relatively low.”2 (Location 730)
  • Yunus’s Grameen Bank (Location 734)
  • The new model would ultimately spawn the microfinance industry, which has spread across the world and provided access to banking services and credit for hundreds of millions of poor customers. (Location 735)
  • Yunus realized he could collateralize the poor themselves by organizing them into guarantee-solidarity groups, in which members would back each other up, sharing the risk of individual default. (Location 742)
  • In business-led transformation, typically, the customer’s life is made better through a fundamentally new product or service offering. Individuals are enabled, satisfied, or entertained in some new way. (Location 777)
  • This means, since there is no mandate or fiat, that a business must design its offerings to be attractive to customers and meet their needs. (Location 781)
  • no demand that all customers be served or treated equally, (Location 783)
  • Businesses are constrained by the profit imperative and governments are constrained by the need for ubiquity of benefit. Social entrepreneurship negotiates these constraints. (Location 807)
  • “The role of Big Society Capital was that it should be a wholesaler of capital,” he explains. “The purpose was to create social investment firms that would fund frontline social organizations in the not-for-profit sector.” (Location 841)
  • “The balance sheet can have philanthropic capital at the bottom and then all the layers of capital sitting on top of that . . . It isn’t really that different, in a way, in terms of entrepreneurship. You’re backing entrepreneurs, giving them access to capital, except that their purpose is social.” (Location 845)
  • the sector must develop credible metrics that can be correlated with financial returns, largely for governments but by extension to society at large. (Location 847)
  • equilibrium change at scale, positioning his organization as an enabler for the broader sector. Big Society Capital takes direct action, providing funding to organizations that support frontline social service organizations and social entrepreneurs. It acts as an accelerator, helping to build the broad set of funding instruments and organizations that will scale and secure his innovative approach. (Location 867)
  • social finance, or what’s being more broadly framed as impact investing, is an innovation conceived by social entrepreneurs aiming to drive social transformation through equilibrium change. (Location 883)
  • “Scalability at the back end through technology, scalability at the front end through technology and process, and a business model that allowed multiple organizations to become enrolling agencies . . . There were more than a hundred thousand people in our ecosystem, but only three hundred people in the main organization,” (Location 942)
  • In order to intervene in an existing equilibrium, one must first recognize it for what it is: a condition established over time and held in place by members of the society who take its existence, and their role in perpetuating it, largely for granted. (Location 1022)
  • Social entrepreneurs must navigate three powerful tensions in understanding the world they wish to change: abhorrence and appreciation; expertise and apprenticeship; and experimentation and commitment. (Location 1042)
  • Those who most appreciate the current equilibrium, in other words, may be least likely to want to change it. Yet it is often those most deeply inside the system who can articulate its mechanisms—how and why it works as it does. (Location 1077)
  • Aid work was then and largely continues to be rooted in a powerful ideology that took shape in the wake of World War II. (Location 1100)
  • many NGOs operate with a similar mind-set: “We know what people need, we know how to deliver it, and we are here to give it to them.” (Location 1118)
  • It took an approach that said: a specific current equilibrium in Africa is unacceptable, and we will change it with technology from the outside. There was little appreciation of the reasons indigenous communities operated as they did, why the unhappy equilibriums that prevailed in Africa persevered even in the face of new incentives. (Location 1123)
  • To reach this in-depth understanding, Melching needed to toggle between seeking to understand the system—appreciating and considering its dynamics—and seeking to change it. (Location 1157)
  • Expertise in a specific domain can be vital for social entrepreneurs, helping them understand the system dynamics of a current equilibrium in a new way or to identify what is missing or misaligned in a social system. (Location 1171)
  • The most successful social entrepreneurs demonstrate a willingness to question assumptions and a resilience that prevents them from being devastated when those assumptions turn out be invalid. They know that the only way to really learn about the world, and certainly the best way to learn how to change it, is to test and experiment in that world. Again, though, an experimental mode must be balanced with another, opposing mode: deep commitment. The successful social entrepreneur does not flit from one approach to another, forever playing with new ideas. (Location 1204)
  • “A person’s family is not their village. The family includes one’s entire social network: their relatives in many surrounding villages, in all of the places they marry, even in far-off countries like France and the United States. If you want this work to continue, if you truly want to bring about widespread change, you must understand something: When it comes to important decisions, they must all be involved.” (Location 1275)
  • Counterintuitive as it may seem, it was her negotiation of expertise and apprenticeship—her many years of living within and learning the rules of an equilibrium she questioned—that prepared her to aim for and begin to achieve truly fundamental transformation. (Location 1306)

public: true

title: Getting Beyond Better longtitle: Getting Beyond Better author: Roger Martin, Sally Osberg, Arianna Huffington url: , source: kindle last_highlight: 2017-10-18 type: books tags:

Getting Beyond Better

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • with an eye for disaster. It was only after the conversation was well under way, with a platform and partnerships to make it possible, and then successful on a global scale, that we saw the real potential of applying a third metric—well-being—to the traditional measures of wealth and power, to define our success as bringing wisdom, well-being, and wonder to the lives of all the communities we serve. (Location 104)
  • Carnegie felt that public libraries would help produce the informed citizenry on which democratic society—and, not coincidentally, the free enterprise system that had made him so wealthy—depends. (Location 151)
  • he created a system that could outlive the people who built it, carefully codifying the terms for his support before providing funds to a community. (Location 152)
  • Carnegie Formula, (Location 154)
  • What Carnegie achieved might today be called social entrepreneurship. The phenomenon isn’t new. (Location 167)
  • The entry point for our work has been the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. (Location 181)
  • The work of these women, men, and organizations, along with their challenges and successes, has served as a kind of developmental lab for clarifying what social entrepreneurship is and how it works. It serves as the basis and motivation for this book. (Location 183)
  • Reflective practitioners think in action; that is, they practice while reflecting mindfully on their actions, in order to continuously improve both their theories and their practices. (Location 186)
  • The first was between two types of actions: direct versus indirect. A direct action is one an actor takes personally in order to bring about a specific desired outcome. An indirect action is one in which the actor convinces another person or entity to take the specific action that brings about the desired outcome. The second distinction we made was between two types of outcomes: maintenance or incremental improvement of the current system versus transformation of the current system to a new, more optimal system. (Location 197)
  • social service providers, (Location 202)
  • social advocates, (Location 202)
  • social entrepreneurs (Location 203)
  • Social service providers, we argued in the article, take direct action in a given situation. But they leave the existing system in place while seeking to reduce its negative effects. (Location 207)
  • social advocates work indirectly, advocating for legislative changes that can transform the environment in question. (Location 214)
  • What makes them social advocates, rather than simply lobbyists, is their desire to transform a suboptimal societal status quo. The lobbyist, in contrast, seeks to bring about a particular benefit—also often through legislation—that accrues to a discrete agent and not to the socially disadvantaged or to society at large. (Location 221)
  • Social entrepreneurs, we argued in the article, can be contrasted with both social service providers and social advocates in that social entrepreneurs both take direct action and seek to transform the existing system. They seek to go beyond better, to bring about a transformed, stable new system that is fundamentally different than the world that preceded it. (Location 225)
  • •The identification of a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity—a group that lacks the financial means or political clout to effect transformational change on its own. (Location 234)
  • •The development, testing, refining, and scaling of an equilibrium-shifting solution, deploying a social value proposition that has the potential to challenge the stable state. (Location 236)
  • •The forging of a new stable equilibrium that unleashes new value for society, releases trapped potential, or alleviates suffering. In this new state, an ecosystem is created around the new equilibrium that sustains and grows it, extending the benefit across society. (Location 238)
  • Unlike social service providers, social entrepreneurs explicitly aim to permanently and systematically transform a miserable or unfair societal condition. Unlike social advocates, social entrepreneurs act directly, creating a product, service, or methodology that spurs the transformation of the status quo. (Location 240)
  • A system of actors can and often will produce a relatively stable equilibrium that is unpleasant and unproductive for some of those actors, typically for the most underprivileged and marginalized. (Location 254)
  • Social entrepreneurs seek to shift a stable but suboptimal equilibrium in a way that is neither entirely mandated nor entirely market-driven. (Location 315)
  • Third, there is a deeper connection between social entrepreneurship and social advocacy than we first conceived. (Location 328)
  • John W. Gardner (Location 364)
  • He was also the founder of multiple organizations including Independent Sector, which brings US nonprofit organizations and foundations together, and Common Cause, which works to safeguard the tenets of American democracy. (Location 367)
  • Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society— (Location 370)
  • Lord Michael Young, (Location 371)
  • School for Social Entrepreneurs (Location 374)
  • Bill Drayton, (Location 375)
  • Jeff Skoll, (Location 380)
  • Skoll World Forum (SWF), and the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, (Location 385)
  • Greg Dees. (Location 389)
  • United Kingdom—have (Location 406)
  • A new and superior equilibrium emerged—not all at once, but in fits and starts, because pervasive change is often bitterly contested—until an equally stable but superior state was produced. (Location 475)
  • Social transformation—by which we mean positive, fundamental, and lasting change to the prevailing conditions under which most members of a society live and work—is (Location 484)
  • Normal science looks a lot like our traditional slow-and-steady narrative. (Location 495)
  • The resulting revenue produced profits that enabled Edison’s enterprise to grow and thrive—in fact, it would go on to become one of the world’s largest and most successful businesses, General Electric Corporation. Today, GE consistently ranks among the twenty most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization. (Location 640)
  • “When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often, we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.”1 (Location 719)
  • The terms were strict but straightforward: “Loans were made to individuals but through small groups who in effect (if not explicitly) had joint liability; the loans were for business, not consumption; and collection was frequent, usually weekly. Interest charges were significant . . . but the rates were relatively low.”2 (Location 730)
  • Yunus’s Grameen Bank (Location 734)
  • The new model would ultimately spawn the microfinance industry, which has spread across the world and provided access to banking services and credit for hundreds of millions of poor customers. (Location 735)
  • Yunus realized he could collateralize the poor themselves by organizing them into guarantee-solidarity groups, in which members would back each other up, sharing the risk of individual default. (Location 742)
  • In business-led transformation, typically, the customer’s life is made better through a fundamentally new product or service offering. Individuals are enabled, satisfied, or entertained in some new way. (Location 777)
  • This means, since there is no mandate or fiat, that a business must design its offerings to be attractive to customers and meet their needs. (Location 781)
  • no demand that all customers be served or treated equally, (Location 783)
  • Businesses are constrained by the profit imperative and governments are constrained by the need for ubiquity of benefit. Social entrepreneurship negotiates these constraints. (Location 807)
  • “The role of Big Society Capital was that it should be a wholesaler of capital,” he explains. “The purpose was to create social investment firms that would fund frontline social organizations in the not-for-profit sector.” (Location 841)
  • “The balance sheet can have philanthropic capital at the bottom and then all the layers of capital sitting on top of that . . . It isn’t really that different, in a way, in terms of entrepreneurship. You’re backing entrepreneurs, giving them access to capital, except that their purpose is social.” (Location 845)
  • the sector must develop credible metrics that can be correlated with financial returns, largely for governments but by extension to society at large. (Location 847)
  • equilibrium change at scale, positioning his organization as an enabler for the broader sector. Big Society Capital takes direct action, providing funding to organizations that support frontline social service organizations and social entrepreneurs. It acts as an accelerator, helping to build the broad set of funding instruments and organizations that will scale and secure his innovative approach. (Location 867)
  • social finance, or what’s being more broadly framed as impact investing, is an innovation conceived by social entrepreneurs aiming to drive social transformation through equilibrium change. (Location 883)
  • “Scalability at the back end through technology, scalability at the front end through technology and process, and a business model that allowed multiple organizations to become enrolling agencies . . . There were more than a hundred thousand people in our ecosystem, but only three hundred people in the main organization,” (Location 942)
  • In order to intervene in an existing equilibrium, one must first recognize it for what it is: a condition established over time and held in place by members of the society who take its existence, and their role in perpetuating it, largely for granted. (Location 1022)
  • Social entrepreneurs must navigate three powerful tensions in understanding the world they wish to change: abhorrence and appreciation; expertise and apprenticeship; and experimentation and commitment. (Location 1042)
  • Those who most appreciate the current equilibrium, in other words, may be least likely to want to change it. Yet it is often those most deeply inside the system who can articulate its mechanisms—how and why it works as it does. (Location 1077)
  • Aid work was then and largely continues to be rooted in a powerful ideology that took shape in the wake of World War II. (Location 1100)
  • many NGOs operate with a similar mind-set: “We know what people need, we know how to deliver it, and we are here to give it to them.” (Location 1118)
  • It took an approach that said: a specific current equilibrium in Africa is unacceptable, and we will change it with technology from the outside. There was little appreciation of the reasons indigenous communities operated as they did, why the unhappy equilibriums that prevailed in Africa persevered even in the face of new incentives. (Location 1123)
  • To reach this in-depth understanding, Melching needed to toggle between seeking to understand the system—appreciating and considering its dynamics—and seeking to change it. (Location 1157)
  • Expertise in a specific domain can be vital for social entrepreneurs, helping them understand the system dynamics of a current equilibrium in a new way or to identify what is missing or misaligned in a social system. (Location 1171)
  • The most successful social entrepreneurs demonstrate a willingness to question assumptions and a resilience that prevents them from being devastated when those assumptions turn out be invalid. They know that the only way to really learn about the world, and certainly the best way to learn how to change it, is to test and experiment in that world. Again, though, an experimental mode must be balanced with another, opposing mode: deep commitment. The successful social entrepreneur does not flit from one approach to another, forever playing with new ideas. (Location 1204)
  • “A person’s family is not their village. The family includes one’s entire social network: their relatives in many surrounding villages, in all of the places they marry, even in far-off countries like France and the United States. If you want this work to continue, if you truly want to bring about widespread change, you must understand something: When it comes to important decisions, they must all be involved.” (Location 1275)
  • Counterintuitive as it may seem, it was her negotiation of expertise and apprenticeship—her many years of living within and learning the rules of an equilibrium she questioned—that prepared her to aim for and begin to achieve truly fundamental transformation. (Location 1306)