Bill Drayton on the power of collaborative entrepreneurship in McKinsey's "What Matters?"

Ashoka founder and CEO Bill Drayton has contributed an essay to McKinsey&Company's new What Matters publication and website.

In it he describes the qualities and instincts of social entrepreneurs, sharing lessons learnt from 30 years of seeking out the world's most high-impact changemakers.

He goes on to describe the vital "second dimension" of impact a true social entrepreneur creates, that of inspiring others to become changemakers, contributing to the creation of an Everyone a Changeamker world:

"Every social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers. Here is one of the few significant structural differences between the social and the business entrepreneur. The social entrepreneur has no interest in capturing a market and digging a moat. Instead, the goal is, indeed, to change the world.

"The way social entrepreneurs do this almost always is to make their idea as understandable, attractive, safe, and as supported as necessary precisely so that local people in community after community after community will recognize that the idea would be hugely valuable to their community and also judge that they could make that idea fly. The moment one or several local people make that decision, stand up, and champion the idea, they have become local changemakers. They will disrupt local patterns; they will recruit others to be changemakers; and a few will later become large-scale social entrepreneurs in their own right."

Read the whole thing and join in the conversation!