America's Best Leaders: Q&A with Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka
Because this is the fastest-growing, most vibrant sector now, it is where the talent is flowing. The best, most entrepreneurial leaders go where they can have the biggest impact for the good, where they will find the most ethical and engaged colleagues, and where they will be most challenged.
Over half the Ashoka social entrepreneurs have changed national policy within five years of their launch. Roughly 90 percent have seen independent organizations copy their innovations. There is no decline in leadership – but you must look for it in new places.
Leaders are rarely, if ever, exceptional in every way. And they need not be. But the great leaders know that their deficiencies can't be ignored. What are yours? And how do you address them?
Entrepreneurs cannot be happy people until they have seen their visions become the new reality across all of society. They learn how to master whatever skills are necessary. I am, for example, modestly an introvert. However, I spent most of my days dealing with people. It helps hugely that my daily interactions are with wonderful, caring, creative entrepreneurs from whom I learn and with whom I connect. My decision to commit to the Ashoka vision turned in part on recognizing how important this balance would be. My escape for long backpack trips in the wilderness also helps. And so, of course, does finding colleagues who are complements–and with whom I and our values-based entrepreneurial community share so much that the fit works.
Great leaders take risks; therefore, they make mistakes. Tell us about one of yours (the bigger, the better!) and how, as any great leader would, you used it as an opportunity to improve.
Ashoka's two core constituencies are leading business and social entrepreneurs. We are also serving a historical transformation that is moving so fast that almost everyone in Ashoka must be creating and entrepreneuring at a very high level if we are to succeed.
As a result, we must be a community of collegial entrepreneurs. And, to attract and hold such extraordinary people, we must be an integrated, decentralized organization that in every way enables and strongly encourages each of us to fly and yet that channels all that energy to serve the organization's goals.
The worst mistake I have made was to compromise on these core principles. For example, toward the end of our first period of very rapid growth (45 percent a year for five years), we hired several wonderful, spirited managers. However, they were not entrepreneurs; and they never could, partly in consequence, intuitively "get" our vision, our core stakeholders, or our culture. They set to work managing, which ended in failure, uncomprehending frustration, and culture division. 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.
My experience in not insisting on our core hiring criteria not only led to tears and weakened our very young culture but caused a several-year revenue plateau, which in turn made it quite impossible to meet our rolling five goals.
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