America's Best Leaders: Q&A with Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka
Led by my colleague, Sushmita Ghosh, and our Strategy Group, we have now installed rigorous staff hiring, promotion, and management systems (modeled on our proven process for selecting the leading social entrepreneurs that Ashoka helps launch, support, and network together. These systems are all focused around four criteria: (1) proven entrepreneurial quality, (2) whether or not the person "gets" and truly, personally believes Ashoka's full vision, (3) applied emotional intelligence, and (4) strong ethical fiber.
This learning is one of the most important steps toward Ashoka's becoming the irreversible institution its mission requires.
A great leader stays the course. At what moments has this been particularly difficult for you? And how did you keep your resolve?
Ashoka is just entering its 25th year. And the founding idea and principle are older, dating back to my undergraduate years.
I have never doubted that we are serving the most powerful and most hopeful historical force of our era. Or that we are positioned to play a truly important role. We are, after all, a community of most of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. As a result, we can see where history is going and where there are jujitsu leverage points. Even better, we are a community of entrepreneurs who are learning how to entrepreneur together — how to take the most powerful new universal principles that cut across our individual innovations and, by working together, use them to flip whole fields globally.
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.
Of course, there are frustrations. A broken financial system for the citizen sector, for example. But that is only another huge opportunity to bring urgently needed structural change for the field.
Great leaders empower others to become leaders themselves. Give us an example of how you knew you had succeeded in this important and very satisfying role
Ashoka's job and, indeed, our field's most important job is to empower people. Our ultimate objective is "everyone a change maker."
To succeed, we must do this consistently at all levels — staff, our social entrepreneur "fellows," and every person in society.
Second, Ashoka is a community of and for leading social entrepreneurs. What we are best known for is finding the most important new social change ideas and the entrepreneurs behind them. We help launch them, help them succeed over their decades-long careers, and link them together so that we can be far more than the sum of our sole practitioner parts. Ninety-seven percent continue full time in the pursuit of this vision within five years after Ashoka elects them to fellowship.
Our field's and Ashoka's ultimate objective is an "everyone a change maker" world. Every successful social entrepreneur is a role model that encourages others to care and organize to cause social change.
More important still, consider the impact a successful social entrepreneur has on one local community after another. Their new idea disrupts existing patterns and the sense that things cannot change. Moreover, their idea is designed to be as user friendly as possible precisely to encourage someone in that community to step forward to implement the entrepreneur's innovation in that community — i.e., to become a local change maker. The example of these champions in turn encourages their family and friends to follow suit with other ideas later. -
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