I usually take notes while I’m reading a book. Below are my notes and selected quotations form this book.

Chapter 1: Restless People

• More people today have the freedom, time, wealth, health, exposure, social mobility, and confidence to address social problems in bold new ways.

• “At the time of accelerating change, NGOs are quicker than the governments to respond to new demands and opportunities. And they are better than governments at dealing with problems that grow slowly and affect society through their cumulative effort on individuals.” — Jessica Mathews

• Entrepreneur: The source of “creative destruction” necessary for major economic advances.

Chapter 2: From Little Acrons Do Great Trees Grow

• Every change begins with a vision and a decision to take action.

• “If we can help children grow up learning to think rather than memorize and repeat, learning to problem-solve, learning to be creative, learning to be actors–rather than acted upon, we can create a generation that will be very different… And that’s revolution.” — Gloria de Souza

Chapter 3: The Light in My Head Went On.

• For he who marches toward the light need not worry about what occurs in the darkness.

• Rosa saw that to make it cost effective, he would have to package it with something else.  __ the way he’d packaged a mono-phase system with irrigation in Palmores.

• “The context and the environment have changed… but the necessity of my work is the same. I am an entrepreneur, and as an entrepreneur, I am always possessed by an idea. If it doesn’t go well, you haven’t come to the end. You have to do more work. If you haven’t succeeded, the work goes on.” — Fabio Rosa

• “When we use our intelligence and knowledge to serve people, humanity has hope. We are the hope, we are the future.” — Fabio Rosa

Chapter 4: The Fixed Determination of an Indomitable Will

• The existence of knowledge and the widespread application of knowledge are very different things.

• Changing a system means changing attitudes, expectations, and behaviours. It means overcoming disbelief, prejudice, and fear. Old systems do not readily embrace new ideas or information; defenders of the status quo can be stubbornly impervious to common sense.

• It takes concentrated focus, practical creativity, and a long-term source of energy to advance a system change and to ensure that the change becomes well rooted in institutions and cultures.

Chapter 5: A very Significant Force

• McClelland, psychologist, defined three dominant human motivations– need for power, need for affiliation, and need for achievement. The need for achievement is correlated with entrepreneurship.

Chapter 8: The Role of the Social Entrepreneur

• An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it is a masterpiece. Otherwise the play may never open; or it may open but, for lack of audience, close after a week. Similarly, an idea will not move from the fringes to the mainstream simply because it is good; it must be skillfully marketed before it will actually shift people’s perceptions and behaviour.

Chapter 10: Are They Possessed, Really Possessed by an Idea?

• “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Given that a new idea is continually being revised, the relevant question is: Does the person pushing the idea have the consistency to stay focused on the big vision, the creativity to solve unforeseen problems, the insistence to make it work, and the toughness to stay the course– no matter how long it takes, no matter how many miscalculations or screw-ups or reversals of fortune are in store, no matter how much opposition or loneliness lies ahead? This of course is the million-dollar question.

• Drayton, the management consultant, devised a system that broke the question (How to develop a process to assess qualities and produce rational and consistently high-quality decisions?) into four categories: 

1- Creativity

2- Entrepreneurial Quality

3- Social Impact of the Idea

4- Ethical Fibre

• Drayton: “The first criterion is creativity. This has got two parts to it: the goal-setting creativity– the visionary seeing over the horizon to a different pattern in the field; and the problem-solving creativity– to get to that new place, there are a thousand hurdles, a thousand adjustments that these people have to make and they have to be creative about it. They have to find new ways around barriers all the time. So we have to look for both types of creativity. One alone is not enough. 

→ Creativity types: – the goal-setting and the problem-solving 

Chapter 11: If the World is to Be Put in Order

• Goethe: “Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it now. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

• “Sometimes a person has success because that person continues fighting. I think if I have some value it is that I continue fighting.” — Vera Cordeiro

Chapter 13: The Talent is Out There

• “If people told a part of their story that was important to them, it would convey their strengths to another human-being in a way that nothing else could.” J.B. Schramm

Chapter 18: Six Qualities of Successful Social Entrepreneurs

• The key difference to successful entrepreneurs is not their confidence, persistence, or knowledge. Rather, it has to do with the quality of their motivation.

• Willingness to Self-Correct: For entrepreneurs, a willingness to share credit lies along the “critical path” to success, simply because the more credit they share, the more people typically will want to help them. This quality also grows out of motivation.

• Willingness to Break Free of Established Structures: Stepping out of the governments, academia, or current roles. In doing so, they often assure considerable financial and professional risk. What they gain is the freedom to act and the distance to see beyond the orthodoxy in their fields.

• Willingness to Cross Disciplinary Boundaries: One of the primary functions of the social entrepreneur is to serve as a kind of social alchemist: to create new social compounds; to gather people’s ideas, experiences, skills, and resources in configurations that society is not naturally aligned to produce.

Forced with whole problems, social entrepreneurs readily cross disciplinary boundaries, pulling together people from different spheres, with different kinds of experience and expertise, who can, together, build workable solutions that are qualitatively new.

The “creative combining” on the part of the social entrepreneurs may be an intuitive response to the excessive fragmentation and specialization in the modern industrial world.

• Willingness to Work Quietly: A person must have very pure motivation to push an idea so steadily for so long with so little fanfare. 

Jean Monnet: “One cannot concentrate on an objection and on oneself at the same time…  Do something, or be someone.”

• Strong Ethical Impetus: At some moment, in their lives, social entrepreneurs get it into their heads that it is up to them to solve a particular problem.

Over time, their ideas become more important to them than anything else. Every decision — whom to marry, where to live, what books to read– pass through the prism of their ideas.

Chapter 19: Morality Must March with Capacity

• An organization with thousands of employees can be kept doing the same thing only so long before boredom sets in.

“The easiest way to keep people motivated is to come up with a fresh idea every few years.”– James Grant

Chapter 20: Blueprint Copying

• Guns, Germs, and Steel: Knowledge can be transmitted from one society to another by a variety of means, some of which are highly efficient and some of which are not. The least efficient way to transmit knowledge is “idea diffusion”– “when you receive little more than the basic idea and have to reinvent the details. The most efficient is blueprint copying.– When you copy or modify an available detailed blueprint.”

• Of course, before blueprint copying is possible, it is necessary to create the blueprints– to identify and document models or processes that can be widely copied or adapted.

• Hybrid social business ventures: new business models that build wealth, repair the earth, and address major social problems.

Conclusion

• “Because of competition, survival in business means not only continually coming up with better inventions, but putting them to use faster than your competitor.”

• Governments are often not the ideal vehicles to carry out the social R&D, just as they are not the ideal vehicles to create new businesses. As in business, advancing new ideas and creating new models to attack problems require an entrepreneur’s single-minded vision and fierce determination, and lots of energy and time.

• Powerful social initiatives emanating from the citizenry not only lead to faster adaptation, they encourage decentralized thinking and action, which strengthens democracy.

• Metrics clearly have a role to play in performance assessments, but citizen groups and funders should remain cautious when embracing numerical assessments. Numbers are problematic to the extent that they give the illusion of providing more truth than they actually do. They also favour what is easiest to measure, not what is most important. They can easily be used to dress up failure as success– as when a company boots its short-term profits by slashing its R&D budget.

• “What fascinates me most about the social entrepreneurs, at a personal level, is the way they hold to an internal vision no matter how many disruptive forces surround them. Somehow they find ways to construct meanings for themselves and hold to those meanings.” – David Bornstein

 

Epilogue

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter last. — Goethe

“There is an exciting world behind this terrible world we see. People all over the world need to see it– like they need water to drink and air to breathe.” – Vera Cordeiro 

“What is wisdom? It’s when we pull together all the individual pieces and see the patterns and feel increasingly a oneness with the whole.” — Drayton