Best 35 quotes of Bill Drayton on MyQuotes

All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.

An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.

Entrepreneurs almost always have to step out of existing institutions that embody old ways of doing things to build their vision.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.

Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world's community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus? Especially since the work involves such breadth that the boredom of routine or specialization does not exist.

If everyone is a changemaker, there's no way a problem can outrun a solution

Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker.

In an increasingly connected world it is less likely that a few people 'manage' everyone else. The new environment requires a shift in the organization of both institutions and societies, one of flexible teams of teams that come together around whatever change opportunities exist and then reform around the next.

It's not to give people fish It's not to teach them how to fish It's to build a new and better fishing industry

It's the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there's nothing more powerful. That's just as true [for] education and human rights as it is for hotel or steels.

Listening is understanding. The skill of empathy is a must to be able to listen...One can listen better if one sees the whole.

Of course you can do it. It doesn't require brilliance. It's just giving yourself permission and then being persistent. Persistent in seeing the problem or opportunity and persistent in thinking about it until you have come up with some interesting ideas that might change the pattern. It's really a mindset, not anything in the objective world - that is the problem.

Organizations must shift away from repetitive-function hierarchies with rules and enforcement and walls. Instead, we must migrate rapidly to becoming a global 'team of teams' that comes together in whatever combination necessary to add the greatest value to the changes underway.

Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.

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.

Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

The biggest problem is getting beyond the "you can't" syndrome. The moment you figure that out, you're on your way to flying. Anyone who cannot see problems around him or herself is utterly blind. All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.

The first - the most obvious test of a true social entrepreneur - is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea.

The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.

The most critical variable [to becoming a change-maker] is one's willingness to give oneself permission. To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.

The most powerful force in the world is a big idea- if it is the hands of a great entrepreneur.

The one single factor that determines society’s success is the percentage of change-makers within it.

There are millions of people who can get things done. There are very, very few people who will change the pattern in the whole field.

There is nothing more powerful than a new idea in the hands of a social entrepreneur

We have to have a revolution so that all young people grasp empathy and practice it. This is the most fundamental revolution that we have to get through.

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.

We need to teach empathy as we do literacy.

We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don't fit the business paradigm.

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.

What is the most powerful force in the world? And I think you would agree that is a big idea if it is in the hands of an entrepreneur who is actually going to make the idea not only happen, but spread all across society. And we understand that in business but we have need for entrepreneurship just as much in education, human rights, health, and the environment as we do in hotels and steel.

What is the most powerful lever you can imagine? A big idea, but only if it's in the hands of a truly outstanding entrepreneur. It starts with the person and the idea, and then grows to the institution. All three are intertwined.

What is your personal definition of "good"? A world in which everyone is universally empathetic and exercises love and respect with full change-making power.

The first - the most obvious (test of a true social entrepreneur) - is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea... The idea - making it happen across society - is something they are married to in the full sense of the word. One key test of that is this: Is this an idea that you see growing out of their whole life? I get very, very suspicious when I see someone who had an idea two years ago. It just doesn't ring true. Because with the typical entrepreneur you can see the roots of the interest when they're very young. There's a real coherence to people's lives.