Bill Drayton Quotes & Sayings

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. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

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

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. — Bill Drayton

What is our job as entrepreneurs if not to change things that are crazy? — Bill Drayton

The social entrepreneurs are governments' best friends. — Bill Drayton

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

In 1962, when I was 19, I visited India. With introductions from people involved in the U.S. civil rights movement, I was able to visit with several of the leading Gandhians there. The hundred-to-one difference in average per capita income between America and India at the time was a stark reality for the people who became my friends there. — Bill Drayton

You can't be a change-maker by reading a book. — Bill Drayton

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

Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

Entrepreneurs cannot be happy people until they have seen their visions become the new reality across all of society. — Bill Drayton

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

Here's my advice: The first step to becoming a changemaker (the only secure job going forward) is to give oneself permission, i.e. to ignore - politely, of course - all those who say 'Don't do it — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

The one single factor that determines society's success is the percentage of change-makers within it. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

Change begets change as much as repetition reinforces repetition. — Bill Drayton

White House cultures inevitably reflect the president's character. Jimmy Carter is a thoroughly honest, good person. So was his White House. — Bill Drayton

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

Thomas Jefferson explained, Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.. If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?. — Bill Drayton

It's the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there's nothing more powerful. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

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 — Bill Drayton

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

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

I was taught by my parents that people who are loud don't have anything to say. I've found if you're suggesting quite big changes, a quiet style may be reassuring. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

We would like to have every middle and high school become a place where there will be lots of examples of youth competence and confidence. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change. — Bill Drayton

We are all very deeply the children of our parents and their parents. Far more than we generally realize. — Bill Drayton

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

The life purpose of the true social entrepreneur is to change the world. — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton

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

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. — Bill Drayton

Everyone says you've got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense! — Bill Drayton

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. — Bill Drayton