What can we learn from nearly a hundred inspiring stories – saving rain forests in the Amazon, transforming education in Latin America,
This is the question that Roger Martin, one of Canada’s best known business school leaders and management consultants, and Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, which champions social change efforts around the globe, answer in their book, Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works. They also uncover a lot about the frequently referred to, but poorly understood, craft of social entrepreneurship. Here are three of their biggest insights.
First, the authors argue that transformative change requires would-be change makers to disrupt the “stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity.” Disruption, they go further to define as, “a necessary condition in creating a new equilibrium in the world that alleviates suffering, unleashes new potential and addresses fundamental challenges.” This statement challenges all those who secretly hope we can get transformative change through incremental, non-messy, improvements to the status quo.
Second, Martin and Osberg place social entrepreneurship within the wider field of actors working for a better world. Specifically, they identify three distinct, complementary and important types of change makers:
The authors’ third big finding is that social entrepreneurs typically unfold their work through four key phases. These include:
Martin and Osberg identify a variety of behaviours and patterns of successful social entrepreneurship in their description of each of these phases. They found that social entrepreneurs wrestle with a series of paradoxes, such as the tension between experimentation and commitment, where social entrepreneurs are deeply committed to making an idea work, but very open to questioning their assumptions about what they think will work and adjusting their innovations when they get new information. Similarly, they have uncovered different ‘mechanisms for change’ – e.g., new measurements, standards, methods – underlying new models for change. These insights not only shed light on the craft of social entrepreneurship, they are practical.
There are plenty of excellent books, papers and tools on social entrepreneurship: a search on google produces 4 ½ million results in less than a second. Yet Getting Beyond Better stands out among the bunch. Why? Because its authors have skillfully distilled key ideas, phases and practices of social entrepreneurship without going so far as to pretend that these can be summed up neatly in a collection of recipe-like practices. It is very difficult to find this balance, but Martin and Osberg have succeeded in spades.
Getting Beyond Better is not the definitive work on social entrepreneurship - the field is too complex to capture it all even in as impressive a book as this - but it is one of the best of a very large bunch. If you count yourself amongst the growing legions of people working to build a world that is beyond better, and treat your work as a craft that requires us to stay abreast of leading edge thinking, then this book is an essential part of your journey.
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