How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition [Paperback]

David Bornstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0195334760 | ISBN-13: 978-0195334760 | Edition: Updated

How to Change the World provides vivid profiles of social entrepreneurs. The book is an In Search of Excellence for social initiatives, intertwining personal stories, anecdotes, and analysis. Readers will discover how one person can make an astonishing difference in the world.
The case studies in the book include Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign against landmines she ran by e-mail from her Vermont home; Roberto Baggio, a 31-year old Brazilian who has established eighty computer schools in the slums of Brazil; and Diana Propper, who has used investment banking techniques to make American corporations responsive to environmental dangers.
The paperback edition will offer a new foreword by the author that shows how the concept of social entrepreneurship has expanded and unfolded over the last few years, including the Gates-Buffetts charitable partnership, the rise of Google, and the increased mainstream coverage of the subject. The book will also update the stories of individual social entrepreneurs that appeared in the cloth edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Book Description
Published in over twenty countries, How to Change the World has become the Bible for social entrepreneurship. It profiles men and women from around the world who have found innovative solutions to a wide variety of social and economic problems. Whether they work to deliver solar energy to Brazilian villagers, or improve access to college in the United States, social entrepreneurs offer pioneering solutions that change lives.

Discover surprising facts about social entrepreneurs from author David Bornstein

According to a recent Harris Poll, a whopping 97% of Generation Y are looking for work that allows them "to have an impact on the world." In recent years, courses or centers in social entrepreneurship have been created in over 250 universities and colleges such as Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Duke, NYU's Stern & Wagner, Wharton, Oxford, and Stanford. Teach for America received 25,000 applications for 3,700 slots in 2008, an increase of more than a third over 2007. In Ivy League schools such as Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth, close to 10% of all graduates applied to the program. In the past two years, the Acumen Fund, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs who solve major problems through business solutions (eg. malaria nets, water purification, loans for housing), received more than 1,000 applications from top ranked business students for just 15 fellowship positions. The list of top business entrepreneurs who are focusing either full time or a considerable amount of time on social entrepreneurship is highly impressive: Pierre Omidyar, founder of ebay, created Omidyar Network to "enable individual self-empowerment on a global scale." Jeff Skoll, cofounder of ebay, also runs Participant Productions, which makes socially conscious films including An Inconvenient Truth and Goodnight and Good Luck. Bill Gates has left Microsoft to pursue a full-time career in philanthropy. Warren Buffett recently donated $30 billion to the Gates Foundation. William Draper, one of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, created the Draper Richards Foundation to support social entrepreneurs. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (Davos), founded the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, created Google.org, which supports social entrepreneurs and has raised over $1 billion. Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr is leading an effort to raise $100 million for microcredit loans. The Grameen Bank, the leading example for social entrepreneurs worldwide, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. The Bridgespan Group, a consulting group that advises social entrepreneurs, received 1,800 applications for 18 job openings in 2006.

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From Publishers Weekly

Journalist Bornstein (The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank) profiles nine indomitable champions of social change who developed innovative ways to address needs they saw around them in places as distinct as Bombay, India; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and inner-city Washington, D.C. As these nine grew influential when their ingenious ideas proved ever more widely successful, they came to the attention of Ashoka, an organization that sponsors a fellows program to foster social innovation by finding so-called social entrepreneurs to support. As Bornstein interviewed these and many other Ashoka fellows, he saw patterns in the ways they fought to solve their specifically local problems. To demonstrate the commonality among experiences as diverse as a Hungarian mother striving to provide a fuller life for her handicapped son and a South African nurse starting a home-care system for AIDS patients, he presents useful unifying summaries of "four practices of innovative organizations" and "six qualities of successful social entrepreneurs." Bornstein implies that his subjects are in the tradition of Florence Nightingale and Gandhi; the inspiring portraits that emerge from his in-depth reporting on the environments in which individual programs evolved (whether in politically teeming India or amid the expansive grasslands of Brazil) certainly show these unstoppable entrepreneurs as extraordinarily savvy community development experts. In adding up the vast number of current nongovernmental organizations and their corps of agents of positive change, Bornstein aims to persuade that, "without a doubt, the past twenty years has produced more social entrepreneurs than terrorists.".
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Updated edition (September 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195334760
• ISBN-13: 978-0195334760
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,032 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > Business & Investing > Job Hunting & Careers > Volunteer Work
  • #15 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > Social Services & Welfare
  • #30 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Social Work

More About the Author

David Bornstein specializes in writing about social innovation. He is the author of The Price of a Dream and How to Change the World, which has been published in 20 languages. His articles have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and many other publications globally. He co-wrote the PBS documentary "To Our Credit." He is the founder of Dowser.org, a Web site devoted to uncovering stories of change. He lives in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

217 of 226 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars ONLY A FEW CHANGE THE WORLD January 2, 2004

By Don Blohowiak

Format:Hardcover

So many of us share a palpable hunger to make the world a better place. You can sense it in vigorous retirees still aching to contribute; and in restless baby boomers ready to marry the idealism of the '60s to all their practical skills gained since then. And you can easily detect it in young people. They refuse to inherit such hollow, bankrupt ideas as slavishly working and consuming being either their destiny or patriotic duty.

Without question, many people are ready to roll up their sleeves and dig in to fix, or at least substantially address, the very problems that evade governments and established institutions.

Some folks, David Bornstein shows us, are doing that all over the world already.

This thoughtful, well-researched book serves up plenty of hope replete with case studies from around the globe. Dig in to this book and you will believe that people with imagination and commitment can make substantial contributions. (Though, despite the author's assertion, it still helps, in a major way, to have connections to those with money or power.)

The book makes the case that a few driven people (who, as Bornstein points out, are not selfless) can make a major impact when more powerful players are either not willing or not capable to do what needs doing.

STORIES OF SOCIAL ACTION

The tapestry woven by Mr. Bornstein is mostly a collection of enlightening biographical profiles of social movers (in India, Brazil, South Africa, Hungary...). You'll find chapters on Florence Nightengale (yes, the 19th century British nurse), Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka (the organization that provides much of the foundation for Bornstein's interest and research), and others who've made great contributions with little notice....

Interspersed with the biographical profiles are essays about the phenomenon of social entrepreneuring. There is a chapter describing the "Six Qualities of Successful Social Entrepreneurs" (placed between an account of India's movement to provide access for the disabled, and a profile of former Unicef head James P. Grant).

GRAND MISSIONS, A PRACTICAL OMISSION

Quite surprisingly, what's not to be found in the book is the content promised in its very title: HOW TO. For all the delights to be found in this far-reaching and well-documented work, that's a glaring gap. The title (probably the publisher's fancy) more accurately should have been: "Changing the World" or "People Who Are Making a Difference" or anything else that neither stated nor implied HOW TO.

The book's title is accurate in regard to its reference to changing the world. Bornstein's "How to Change the World" focuses on grand schemes that do demonstrably change parts of the world.

And that's a shortcoming for most of us readers. Profiling extraordinary social entrepreneurs -- whom the book describes as being "possessed" -- is a bit like using the biographies of Ted Turner, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates to make the case that starting a business can make a major impact on the world. You certainly must agree, but you don't really know what to do about it. (Unless the "HOW TO" is to hope and pray that more possessed people step forward to do good works rather than chase more lucrative traditional careers.)

"How to Change the World" definitely is not a primer on how to do good works on a modest scale. In fact, there isn't so much as a sidebar distilling lessons for the aspiring social entrepreneur (something such as "How to Convert Your Own Stirrings Into Social Action"). A quasi-practical-sounding chapter on "Blueprint Copying" essentially says that it's a good idea not to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.

So I left the book as I started it, still hungry for actionable advice on how to give birth to my own nascent, modestly ambitious, do-gooding idea (creating a tradition -- and mechanism -- whereby every December 26th people donate their unwanted holiday gifts to charities that can redistribute them or otherwise mine them for value. "Gift Back Day" would be a charitable version of England's Boxing Day.)

CONCLUSION

Reading this book, I did come to believe that:

1) Exceptional people with neither high office nor deep pockets (but with unusual drive and maybe some well-placed connections) can accomplish great things -- and are doing that with very impressive results. And

2) The mass media, destructively obsessed with tragedy and failure, has ignored social entrepreneuring while lazily traipsing around the old, familiar bastions of power.

Interestingly, Mr. Bornstein notes in his Conclusion:

"To be sure, some social entrepreneurs seem hard-wired. But countless other people, perhaps less single-minded and obsessive in their focus, share the desire and possess the talent to build and support citizen organizations at all levels."

Yes. And we'll be here waiting for a book that addresses us.

[A related article on the social entrepreneur phenomenon
appeared in the New York Times, December 20, 2003.] Read more ›

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This way to Change! March 22, 2004

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

My takeaway from this highly inspirational book is: Dare to care. In a self-obsessed world, where the "I" reigns supreme, along comes a book that has the potential to change that for ever. I would be surprised if this book did not serve as a catalyst for all those people who are aching to leave their mark on the earth's future by altering the world for the better.

In How to Change the World, author David Bornstein presents short biographies of ordinary citizens who have cared enough to actually go out and change what is wrong in society. The nine stories of social entrepreneurs or innovators, dubbed 'transformative forces' by the author, have the power to inspire readers to want to do something. The fine examples of social entrepreneurship within the pages of this book make one realize that there is hope for the planet after all.

To quote Bornstein, "Across the world, social entrepreneurs are demonstrating new approaches to many social ills and new models to create social wealth, promote social well-being, and restore the environment." What is tremendously energizing is that so many of these change agents already exist and are moving mountains for you and me, and for our children.

The major contribution of the book is that it underlines that one doesn't have to be rich or powerful to alter the current reality. What is required is to feel empathy and concern in high doses, and to recognize and understand a problem. The stories trace how, if one is sufficiently charged, creative ideas for `getting around' problem areas -- be it public apathy or bureaucratic indifference -- flow naturally. The hallmark of a true social entrepreneur really shines through at the next stage, when these ideas are converted into reality....

For Bornstein, these illuminating stories are merely the fireworks display. What he goes on to do is to distill for us the factors that ensure success of any venture -- the do's, the don't's, the must-watch-out-for's, the how-to's. Everything that you ever needed to know about entrepreneuring, but didn't know where to start, is in here. What is the citizen sector and what have been its achievements thus far? What are the qualities of successful social entrepreneurs? What is so cutting-edge about their work that makes their strategy stand apart? Are they really effecting a systems change as against providing band-aid? What are the Four Practices of innovative organizations? Whom do you turn to if you want to become a social entrepreneur?

Bornstein attempts to answer all these, and more. For the very first time ever, we have been given a viable, highly sophisticated blueprint for pattern-changing social action. Bornstein has done the world a service by putting this into the easy reach of anyone who has a conscience.

Policy makers should make note of the book as it offers insights on how to look at problems and problem solving. It is particularly enlightening to note that all the social entrepreneurs in the book have facilitated some form of cross-sectoral partnership, be it with municipal-level governing bodies, state-level government departments, or businesses.

The book also spotlights win-win models of strategic convergence between social good and businesses. Original and ingenious examples of the entrepreneurship process, and its effectiveness of strategy, could serve the business sector well.

For academia, the book throws up diverse areas of social and economic concern that beg a relook and analysis.

The media, saturated as it is with reports of a world gone horribly wrong, could infuse fresh hope and energy with incisive stories on the work of social entrepreneurs.

And for young people, who hold the keys to the world's future, this book is a must-read. At an age when cynicism is almost a virtue, it will inspire them, and hammer home the realization that there is an alternative route to getting meaning from life. By changing others' lives. Read more ›

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A few good people . . . September 20, 2005

By Stephen A. Haines HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This account of one man's efforts to revise the defintion of "entrepreneur" demonstrates the capacity of what can be achieved from small beginnings. Bill Drayton has created a "consulting" firm that girdles the world. Creator and promoter of Ashoka, a foundation dedicated to social change, Drayton uses a highly selective arrangement to locate and encourage people desiring social change. Their efforts, rarely, if ever, depicted in either mainstream media or even specialty publications, are here explained and endorsed. As is Drayton's unorthodox methods. Yet those methods, and the people adapting them to local conditions, have been demonstrably successful. They need further study and application.

Drayton, through Bornstein's depiction, has redefined the term "entrepreneur" from its narrow economic framework into a broader and more flexible environment. Money "profit" is no longer the basis for evaluation. Instead, how widely can a new idea and its promoter[s] affect betterment of the people shunted aside by pure capitalism? Is the multinational the sole or even the major means for offering employment and economic gain? Must the values implied by major infusions of capital, often with restraints tied to the investment, be limited to what firms successful in developed countries decide? Drayton argues that instead of "top-down" economic structures, change for the better should come about by local initiative. How far this idea has spread is exemplified by the map opening the book. From Brazil to Bangladesh, people with drive, patience and talent have made, and are making substantive changes within their communities, regions and entire nations....

The book provides real examples of people who identified a problem, then set about to improve conditions that had come to be accepted by social inertia. His opening example, that of Fabio Ruiz of Palmares, demonstrates how effective one person can be. Ruiz, living in a depressed area in Brazil, discovered how greatly something most of us take for granted, electrical power, could influence a local economy. Ruiz observed the condition of the rice farmers in the state. A steady supply of water would allow growth of successful crops. Erratic natural supplies, often interdicted by highland farmers, meant turning to groundwater supplies. Groundwater means pumps and petrol-driven pumps were expensive. Ruiz instituted an inexpensive method of distributing electricity throughout the area. The farmers provided the minimal investment and performed much of the labour. As electrification spread, farmers produced steady crop returns, reaching a level that led to marketing co-ops and economic independence. The programme meant dealing with banks, bureaucracy and competiton. Ruiz and his associates doggedly promoted their success, finally seeing it adapted to other regions. It's an object lesson for many rural farmers in the developing world.

Drayton's methods require a draconian approach to assessing ideas, programmes and the people behind them. Once an idea is presented, the obstacles and restraints must be planned for. A good suggestion isn't enough. The people seeking Ashoka's support must demonstrate they can follow through and adapt to changing conditions or outright opposition. From Brazil, through Africa, into the Subcontinent of India and its neighbours, back through Europe and North America, his evalution teams are constantly assessing, inquiring, and selecting those individuals and their plans for improvement. Money, of course, must be stretched to the limit. Government funding is a bane to most NGOs, since too many conditions are generally tied to resource allocation. Drayton's entrepreneurs must demonstrate their proposals are good enough to use with local resources. Only that way can they be launched into a project with Ashoka support. These projects aren't limited to developing countries alone. Bornstein shows how these examples may be applied to any community feeling their social advancement is under restraint. The models are clearly spelled out in detail. The only thing lacking in your community is the individual who can clearly identify the problems and find innovative ways of implementing the solutions. Is that you? [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada] Read more ›