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Global Speakers Series : Bill Drayton: Additional Reading

Thursday, October 28, 2010
Global Speakers Series

Bill Drayton, CEO and Founder, Ashoka Foundation

 

Bill Drayton has been a social entrepreneur since he was a New York City elementary school student. He was born to a mother who emigrated from Australia as a young cellist and an American father who, also unafraid to step into the unknown, became an explorer at an equally young age. Public service and strong values run through the stories of both parents' families -- including several of the earliest anti-slavery abolitionist and women's leaders in the U.S. These family influences, the rich diversity and openness of life in Manhattan-as well as America's deep cultural concern with equity, which flourished during the Civil Rights years-all interacted with one another and with Bill's temperament to plant Ashoka's earliest roots. More

Selected Articles

Due to contractual arrangements, remote access is only available to the current Stanford community and the subscribers of the "Library Databases" offered through the GSB Alumni's Lifelong Learning Program. Other access is limited to onsite at the Library. Inclusion below does not imply University endorsement of ideas expressed.

A New Alliance for Global Change. Harvard Business Review, 9/2010
The citizen sector, composed of millions of groups worldwide that are attempting to address critical social needs, has long been regarded as understaffed and inefficient. But it has grown and matured over the past three decades, say the authors, both of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. Citizen sector organizations (CSOs) are attracting talented and creative leaders, and their work is changing the game in critical industries such as energy and health care. For-profit companies now have an opportunity to collaborate with CSOs to create new markets for reaching the four billion people who are not yet part of the world’s formal economy. The power of such collaborations lies in the complementary strengths of the partners: Business offers scale, expertise in manufacturing and operations, and financing. Social entrepreneurs offer lower costs, strong social networks, and deep insights into potential customers and communities. The authors call this framework the hybrid value chain.
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Tipping the world: The power of collaborative entrepreneurship. McKinsey&Company, 4/8/10
What defines the true social entrepreneur is that he or she simply cannot come to rest in life until his or her vision has become the new pattern societywide.
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Q&A: Bill Drayton. Fast Company, 12/1/07
For decades, Bill Drayton has preached on the coming -- and necessary -- convergence of the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors in addressing social change. Here, he discusses recent changes in the global capital markets that are accelerating that phenomenon.
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The Importance of Being a Changemaker. Social Innovation Conversations, 11/11/07
According to Ashoka founder and social entrepreneur Bill Drayton, we are at the "takeoff point" of the biggest cultural transition since the agricultural revolution. In an era in which "change" is moving at an algorithmic rate, he says, social entrepreneurs have a particularly vital part in helping this transformation take place in as constructive and democratic a manner as possible.
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Entrepreneur For Social Change. U.S. News & World Report, 10/31/05
In the summer of 1963, Bill Drayton witnessed the power of a simple idea to effect vast social change.
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Selected Websites

Ashoka Foundation

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