Quotes about Social enterprise

What is Social Entrepreneurship?
Whenever society is stuck or has an opportunity to seize a new opportunity, it needs an entrepreneur to see the opportunity and then to turn that vision into a realistic idea and then a reality and then, indeed, the new pattern all across society. We need such entrepreneurial leadership at least as much in education and human rights as we do in communications and hotels. This is the work of social entrepreneurs.

You can be entrepreneurial even if you don't want to be in business. You can be a social entrepreneur focused on the not-for-profit sector. You can be an agriculture entrepreneur if you want to change how people think about farming. You can be a policy entrepreneur if you want to go into government. The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges. Trying to instill that sense of entrepreneurship in areas other than business is one of the areas I want to focus on in the years ahead.

One of the things I'm most focused now on, with the Case Foundation, is the notion of social entrepreneurship. I'm an entrepreneur. I like building companies, but I also like building projects, and one of the things I learned in the last five years is it's easy to start new things, particularly in the not-for-profit world. It's harder to scale them, and so we're trying to figure out a way to work with some of the not-for-profit organizations -- around maybe ten years, or already well led, already well respected -- on how to kind of get them over that tipping point where they really become more mainstream phenomena. One statistic that was startling to me is if you look at the top 20 companies, and you look at the list 20 years ago and you look at the list today, about half of the companies change every 20 years, because 20 years ago CISCO and Microsoft and some of the other companies didn't really exist. Wal-Mart. And so in the business world there's this process of constant change and evolution and a list changes. In the not-for-profit world, if you look at the top 20 not-for-profits 20 years ago and today, 19 of them are the same. One has broken through, which is Habitat for Humanity, which is a great group that we work closely with.

We are living in a phenomenal age. If we can spend the early decades of the 21st century finding approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits and recognition for business, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce poverty in the world.

God gave me my money. I believe the power to make money is a gift from God , to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.

We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing.

The developed world has a vast, under-utilized asset that is not being leveraged to its best advantage: idealistic people who want to make the world a better place.  For most of a century, idealistic people have been encouraged to use anger, protest, lobbying, and legal action in order to make the world a better place.  While most certainly some of these behaviors and activities were necessary, we have reached the point at which the social benefit of such behaviors is decreasing.  We have reached the point at which creation, rather than attack, ought to be the first obligation of reformers.  The social entrepreneurship movement is the first tip of this iceberg.  We want to create a world in which all idealists realize that the creation of new enterprises is the most powerful way to make positive change in the world.  If all the energy that is currently invested in zero-sum political conflict was gradually transferred to the committed creation of sustainable enterprises, the cumulative impact on behalf of the good would be extraordinary.

What does an entrepreneur do? The first thing is they've given themselves permission to see a problem. Most people don't want to see problems ... Once you see a problem and you keep looking at it you'll find an answer.

The core psychology of a social entrepreneur is someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern in an area of social concern all across society. Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern. They will persist for decades. And they are as realistic as they are visionary. As a result, they are very good listeners. They have to hear if something isn’t working; and, whenever they do, they just keep changing the idea and/or the environment until their idea works. They are intensely concerned with the how-to’s: How do I get from here to there? How do I solve this problem? How do these pieces fit together?

"It's not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely."

"You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now. "

Welcome to the Dawn of Conscious Capitalism--a popular, decentralized, broad-based crusade to heal the excesses of capitalism with transcendent human values. Every day Conscious Capitalism wins new converts in the paneled boardrooms of global business.... Equally important, the actions millions of us take, "from the supermarket to the stock market," are drafting a more wholistic brand of free enterprise which will forever outshine the Chicago School--and win someone somewhere a brand-new Nobel Prize.

The ultimate competitive advantage of your enterprise comes down to a single imperative--your ability to grow and develop leaders as fast as your competition.

The communications revolution has given millions of people both a wider and more detailed understanding of the world. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states. One consequence of this change is that citizens have become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Another consequence is that people possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems.

Social entrepreneurs have existed throughout history. St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, would qualify as a social entrepreneur -- having built multiple organizations that advanced pattern changes in his "field." Similarly, Florence Nightingale created the first professional school for nurses and established standards for hygiene and hospital care that have shaped norms worldwide. What is different today is that social entrepreneurship is developing into a mainstream vocation, not only in the United States, Canada, and Europe, but increasingly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In fact, the rise of social entrepreneurship represents the leading edge of a remarkable development that has occurred across the world over the past three decades: the emergence of millions of new citizen organizations.

According to the management expert Peter F. Drucker, the term "entrepreneur" (from the French, meaning "one who takes into hand") was introduced two centuries ago by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say to characterize a special economic actor--not someone who simply opens a business, but someone who "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield." The twentieth-century growth economist Joseph A. Schumpeter characterized the entrepreneur as the source of the "creative destruction" necessary for major economic advances.