Enterprise in action
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD — Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas: David Bornstein; Oxford University Press, 198, Madison Avenue, New York-10016. $ 28.
AFTER A catastrophic cyclone devastated Orissa in 1999, the reviewer spent a week there, helping with relief. People had come from all over the country to work in Orissa and brought a humbling dedication and selflessness to this disaster. If building a nation meant anything, I thought, it had to be this — the spirit of all these people.
One of them had apparently read the news about the cyclone, rose from his desk at a big Delhi bank and caught the next train to Orissa. P.K. Gupta had arrived with a sheet and the clothes on his back. Nothing more.
He threw himself into work, tramping tirelessly from village to devastated village, asking families their needs and reporting back to relief headquarters. Day after day. One day, I asked him why he was here. he said, "I just had to see what I could do."
Reaching out
Gupta has been in my thoughts through this book. Partly because one social entrepreneur David Bornstein profiles, Veronica Khosa in South Africa, says something similar in response to the plight of AIDS patients; " (I thought) I can help. People cannot just be left to die like dogs. Something needed to be done."
But he also came to mind because what he said, this simple yet astonishingly moving thing he said, captures the essence of entrepreneurship — ordinary people reacting to a problem by asking, simply, "What can I do?" And then going out and doing it.
There is no disrespect when I say that Gupta was a nondescript young man, not well read or sophisticated. Yet his extraordinariness came out of that ordinariness. And that is the lesson you take from this book.
These people Bornstein describes, these social entrepreneurs around the world, strike you above all as humdrum people leading routine lives; yet from that routine- ness springs the remarkable initiatives they have led. And it is that quality that inspires, because the flip side of "What can I do?" is a simple "This, I can do."
It is like this: Rahul Dravid is an admirable batsman, a fine sportsman, a superb role model. Yet I know without blinking that I could never be a great cricketer like him. But these Veronica Khosas and Jeroo Billimorias? They inspire because they seem to be like us. If they can do innovative, useful things for their fellow humans, maybe we can too. (Well, we can hope). This is the fundamental lesson from this book, maybe even the reason it was written.
Social entrepreneurs
The Ashoka Foundation searches in several countries for "social entrepreneurs" — men and women who dream up innovative solutions to problems their societies face, whether addressing child abuse or caring for the disabled or helping poorer kids apply to college. You could make a good case that Ashoka's founder, a once-U.S. government official called Bill Drayton, was himself such an entrepreneur for hitting on this idea and building on it. But anyway, when Ashoka finds such people, it makes them "Ashoka Fellows" — giving them money and support to take their ideas to fruition.
Ashoka has been doing this since the early 1980s. In these two decades, there have been hundreds of Fellows across the world, including many in India. Most are success stories, their ideas now embodied in organisations that make a difference to people's lives. And isn't that what entrepreneurship is about, really? Identify a problem, find a way to tackle it, go implement it and make lives better.
Innovative practices
Bornstein traces the path Ashoka has taken, alternating profiles of selected Fellows with lessons Ashoka and the rest of us can draw from their experiences. Like the Four Practices of Innovative Organisations — institutionalise listening; pay attention to the exceptional; design real solutions for real people and focus on the human qualities. Eminently sound principles. After all, how many of us, even in our daily lives, actually listen to others? Yet, the willingness to listen is fundamental to the willingness to learn and organisations that learn will do well.
So the idea of institutionalising the business of listening — making it a cornerstone of how you run your organisation — is a compelling one. What is more, Bornstein shows how these principles are especially relevant to social entrepreneurs, whose primary motive is not profit, but bringing change to lives.
But in the end this book is more than the sum of its parts — more than the experiences of Ashoka's Fellows and the entrepreneurial principles they put to work. It is an inspiration, and I do not say that lightly. "Entrepreneurs have in their heads the vision of how society will be different when their idea is at work," Bornstein quotes Drayton saying, "and they cannot stop until that idea is not only at work in one place, but is at work across the whole society." Which might just be another way of saying "I just had to see what I could do."
DILIP D'SOUZA
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