INTERVIEW may not have anything to with the business? Basically, it’s window dressing.
visions of ‘huge’ and ‘scale’ seems to be certainly a gender difference.
The good news is that companies are actually waking up to the fact that it is actually extremely valuable to bring together their core business with social and environmental goals, and we’re seeing more of that.
BP: A lot of social entrepreneurs don’t actually identify as such. They think, “I work in health.” Why is that? Hartigan: You’re absolutely right. Social entrepreneurs don’t identify as such, and when people say that they are social entrepreneurs, I’m immediately suspect. Because, the really great social entrepreneurs—the ones who have been about it for years—simply don’t use the term. Many in fact say, “I never knew what I was until someone said, ‘You’re a social entrepreneur.’” Usually, these folks say, “I’m an engineer and I came up with a way to save women billions of hours…” But, just because someone doesn’t call themselves a social entrepreneur doesn’t mean that they aren’t one.
BP: At the Skoll Forum, there has been a lot of discussion about social business might change problems like economic turmoil, climate change, and education. Why are we gravitating towards social entrepreneurship now? Hartigan: It’s complex. For the past five years, social entrepreneurship has been thought to be a passing fad. But, because of the economic meltdown, people are realizing that the reason this is happening is because the way that we make our money has been completely separated from what makes us happy as people. And, social entrepreneurs married those two things. Our society, or at least our financial community, has completely dichotomized the way that we make our money and the way that we impact society. Social entrepreneurs are the harbingers of where we need to go because it brings together these two things. I always used to say, “A social entrepreneur is what you get when you combine Richard Branson with Mother Theresa.” BP: Impact has become such a buzzword. How do we measure it? Who is making the most? But, isn’t it enough to know that I’m helping coffee farmers in Colombia or kids in India. Why is knowing your impact important? Hartigan: If you don’t know your impact, you can’t improve. In essence, what you don’t measure hasn’t happened. If you don’t know your impact, how do you know whether you’re doing more damage than good? The age of unaccountability and lack of transparency is over. BP: What about scale? These days you can’t start and run a business without explaining your plans to scale. What’s wrong with “small is beautiful”? Hartigan: There are thousands of small, beautiful businesses, which is fantastic. There are many entrepreneurs who are interested in and are focused on their local communities and they are doing incredible things. But, at the Skoll Center, we are very much focused on how-big-can-small-get. Because the world has such huge problems that we really need to affect them on a massive scale. BP: Where to women fit in social entrepreneurship? Hartigan: Women are entrepreneurial by nature. We have to solve problems and develop creative solutions, but I think that the difference is the following: I think that there are thousands of women entrepreneurs, but women are much more interested in the small, local business. As you go further up the ladder of socially entrepreneurial initiatives, you’ll find that most are [run by] men. They have women that work with them and are probably running their operations for them, but
BP: What advice would you give to someone who knows that they want to be a social entrepreneur, but is not sure what his/her big idea is? Hartigan: Well, two things. One, it’s okay not to be an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, with the glamorization of entrepreneurship, everyone thinks that they have to go out and create the next big idea. I think that’s insane. I think that across the board, entrepreneurs desperately need strong teams behind them, and that’s where I see the business school coming in because they teach accounting, finance—the fundamental tools you need to grow solid organizations. First of all, you don’t decide you want to be an entrepreneur. You ARE an entrepreneur. It’s like, you can’t help being the way you are. Because I tend to believe that people are born with entrepreneurial traits—and they can be nurtured and stimulated or stifled—which depends on the society in which you were born and whether they nurture innovative thinking, creativity, risk-taking, failure—all the things that are part of being an entrepreneur. BP: You’re the co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People. What makes social entrepreneurs unreasonable? Hartigan: They’re only unreasonable to people who think that what they are doing is completely off the wall. George Bernard Shaw said, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” You can look at our last couple of decades and all the horrific situations we have had in terms of poverty, climate change, energy depletion, deforestation—all of these things are carried out by so-called reasonable people. And nobody sets out to create any of these things. But, if your one pursuit is short term profit, you’re going to be a lot less concerned about all these other things. So, we have the situation that we have now. A few people have become extremely wealthy, and a whole lot of others have not. And we have organizations who are running around picking up the pieces because of this greed and lack of long-term thinking. So, the system isn’t working. We need unreasonable people. www.beyondprofitmag.com
27