Publisher. Entrepreneurship came early to Drayton. As a child, he made crafts and set up a store in his bedroom. And he had no problems recruiting helpers. A one-page newspaper he started in the third grade quickly turned into an ad-supported 64-page publication staffed with elementary school children. "I can't tell you how excited I was to get this mimeograph machine," says Drayton. "It's amazing how supportive my parents were. There were 64 piles of mimeographed paper that had to be collated and stapled, and it never occurred to me this might be inconvenient to my family."

Even now, Drayton's enthusiasm for a project has a way of sweeping up bystanders who question how they end up laboring in the eye of his storm. Julien Phillips was working in Venezuela in the early '80s when Drayton came for a weeklong visit. "He had asked me in his soft way if I could arrange some appointments with people interested in making changes," says Phillips, a friend from McKinsey who runs his own nonprofit organization. He tried to oblige but soon realized that Drayton, who spoke no Spanish, had expected him to analyze the social structure of Venezuela, find the top 25 change makers, and arrange interviews with at least 10. "He imagined I would drop everything. It's never clear to me whether he's aware that he's making some fairly unreasonable requests or whether he's entirely oblivious to all that--and he relates to a lot of people in that way."

But Phillips and others say they tolerate and even admire his demands because they are not driven by ego. "His actions and his ethics are well integrated," says David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Drayton lives modestly, in an apartment near his office. For years, he did not take a salary at Ashoka. Sushmita Ghosh, president of Ashoka, remembers first meeting Drayton 17 years ago at a hotel in Calcutta, where she estimates the rooms cost about $12 a night. "One of Ashoka's policies is never to do anything that is not compatible with the lifestyle of the fellows," says Ghosh.

Although Drayton's energies are stretched, he is continually moving forward with new projects. His latest, Youth Venture, comes from his belief that children are a great untapped resource in social change--correctly leveraged, they have the power to "flip" society very quickly. He likens their marginalized position to what was once considered a natural secondary place for women and minorities.

"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," says Drayton. "You can be a cog in society if you've learned enough, but you'll never be a powerful person."

Like Vinoba Bhave, Drayton is in his own way walking through the world and trying to persuade as many people to sign over their rights as a cog and join him. "Right now, 2 or 3 percent of people control changes," he says. "Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker."

BORN: June 15, 1943 EDUCATION: B.A., Harvard; M.A., Oxford; J.D., Yale Law School FAMILY: Single FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE: Helped organize civil rights sit-ins FOOD FOR THOUGHT: "Florence Nightingale is just as powerful an entrepreneur as Andrew Carnegie or Rockefeller, probably more so." HOBBIES: Backpacking, reading history, "helping young people dream and do"