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Bill Drayton, founder and Chair of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, describes the substantial transformation that we're seeing today in the citizen sector, where the world of social concern is catching up with the growth of the business sector. Starting around 1700, the business sector went through this kind of transformation, one that empowered anyone with an idea to start a business. This shift was so effective that, over the past three centuries, it compounded productivity in the business half of society two to three percent a year. An equal shift in the social half of the world did not happen. As a result, societies became half-stunted and backward, and relatively unproductive, while the business sector grew dramatically. The very recent citizen sector breakthrough is a direct result of this intolerable imbalance.
The social entrepreneurial movement started earlier, of course, with individuals like Florence Nightingale and Maria Montessori, who were as brilliant, in a social context, as Carnegie or Rockefeller were in business. Despite these remarkable pioneers, however, the social sector as a whole did not make the jump to the entrepreneurial/competitive architecture that had allowed business productivity to soar. Roughly two and a half decades ago, the social sector began the process of tipping from premodern to the same entrepreneurial/competitive architecture adopted by business centuries earlier. Control by a few percent was no longer cutting it in a world of ever more pervasive and rapid change. Social entrepreneurs have led this transformation. However, two decades ago we didn’t even have the word “social entrepreneur.”
Drayton's Ashoka strives to shape this new global, entrepreneurial, competitive citizen sector by helping social entrepreneurs to thrive, and enabling the world’s citizens to think and act as changemakers. Ashoka operates on three simultaneous levels: 1) Trying to find the best social entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas and supporting them throughout their life cycles, 2) working toward being more the just the sum of these parts of these people and ideas, and 3) getting the patterns and institutions of the field right and globally integrated for the long term.
Bill Drayton has been a social entrepreneur since he was a New York City elementary school student. By high school he was also a NAACP member and actively engaged in and deeply moved by civil rights work. At Harvard he founded the Ashoka Table; and, at Yale Law School, he launched Yale Legislative Services which, by the time he graduated, engaged one third of the student body in helping key legislators throughout the northeast design and draft legislation.
Mr. Drayton's deepening commitments to Asia, especially South Asia, and to civil rights were closely linked. Martin Luther King, Jr. followed Mahatma Gandhi's way, and anyone concerned with inequity within the U.S. could only be more disturbed by the greater inequalities between the world's North and South. Once focused on such a chasm, any entrepreneur would have to ask: "What can I do?" At Harvard and Oxford, Drayton did ask. Fully appreciating how central to significant change ("development") entrepreneurs are, his answer was the Ashoka idea.
He is also a manager and management consultant -
choices that also grow from his fascination with how human institutions
work. Although he loves and thinks first in historical terms, he is
trained in economics, law, and management, the three
key-interventionist disciplines. He was a McKinsey and Company
consultant for almost ten years, gaining wide experience serving both
public and private clients.
He also served briefly in the
White House, and taught both law and management at Stanford Law School
and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is currently
significantly involved as board chair of Get America Working! and Youth
Venture, both major strategic innovations for the public good. Drayton
has received many awards for his achievements. He was elected one of
the early MacArthur Fellows for his work, including the founding of
Ashoka. Yale School of Management gave him its annual Award for
Entrepreneurial Excellence. The American Society of Public
Administration and the National Academy of Public Administration
jointly awarded him their National Public Service Award, and the Common
Cause gave him its Public Service Achievement Award. He has also been
named a Preiskel-Silverman Fellow for Yale Law School and is a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Most recently in 2005, he
was selected one of America's Best Leaders by US News & World
Report and Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. In the same month he
was the recipient of the Yale Law School's highest alumni honor, The
Yale Law School Award of Merit - for having made a substantial
contribution to Public Service.
Resources:
This program is from our Ashoka series.
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