How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
By:
David Bornstein
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Lowest New Price: $9.86
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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Description:
How to Change the World provides vivid profiles of social entrepreneurs. The book is an In Search of Excellence for social initiatives, intertwining personal stories, anecdotes, and analysis. Readers will discover how one person can make an astonishing difference in the world.
The case studies in the book include Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign against landmines she ran by e-mail from her Vermont home; Roberto Baggio, a 31-year old Brazilian who has established eighty computer schools in the slums of Brazil; and Diana Propper, who has used investment banking techniques to make American corporations responsive to environmental dangers.
The paperback edition will offer a new foreword by the author that shows how the concept of social entrepreneurship has expanded and unfolded over the last few years, including the Gates-Buffetts charitable partnership, the rise of Google, and the increased mainstream coverage of the subject. The book will also update the stories of individual social entrepreneurs that appeared in the cloth edition.
Description:
Book Description
Published in over twenty countries, How to Change the World has become the Bible for social entrepreneurship. It profiles men and women from around the world who have found innovative solutions to a wide variety of social and economic problems. Whether they work to deliver solar energy to Brazilian villagers, or improve access to college in the United States, social entrepreneurs offer pioneering solutions that change lives. Discover surprising facts about social entrepreneurs from author David Bornstein  | - According to a recent Harris Poll, a whopping 97% of Generation Y are looking for work that allows them "to have an impact on the world."
- In recent years, courses or centers in social entrepreneurship have been created in over 250 universities and colleges such as Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Duke, NYU's Stern & Wagner, Wharton, Oxford, and Stanford.
- Teach for America received 25,000 applications for 3,700 slots in 2008, an increase of more than a third over 2007. In Ivy League schools such as Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth, close to 10% of all graduates applied to the program.
- In the past two years, the Acumen Fund, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs who solve major problems through business solutions (eg. malaria nets, water purification, loans for housing), received more than 1,000 applications from top ranked business students for just 15 fellowship positions.
- The list of top business entrepreneurs who are focusing either full time or a considerable amount of time on social entrepreneurship is highly impressive:
- Pierre Omidyar, founder of ebay, created Omidyar Network to "enable individual self-empowerment on a global scale."
- Jeff Skoll, cofounder of ebay, also runs Participant Productions, which makes socially conscious films including An Inconvenient Truth and Goodnight and Good Luck.
- Bill Gates has left Microsoft to pursue a full-time career in philanthropy.
- Warren Buffett recently donated $30 billion to the Gates Foundation.
- William Draper, one of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, created the Draper Richards Foundation to support social entrepreneurs.
- Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (Davos), founded the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
- Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, created Google.org, which supports social entrepreneurs and has raised over $1 billion.
- Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr is leading an effort to raise $100 million for microcredit loans.
- The Grameen Bank, the leading example for social entrepreneurs worldwide, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
- The Bridgespan Group, a consulting group that advises social entrepreneurs, received 1,800 applications for 18 job openings in 2006.
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Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Great mini-stories, case studies. - We read this as one of our books for the Harvard Extension school's Social Entrepreneurship class. It's a great book, very accessible with stories that travel a quick loop around the globe. While broad, it presents emotional and rationale reasons for how to change the world. It is worth your time. It shows how you can make a difference in a community even if you have nothing, e.g. no running water? no electricity? One young man's approach is not only resourceful, but he changes the way his community lives and now the whole country! (I also recommend reading Half the Sky, a wonderful, emotionally upsetting book about injustices in the world that people are trying to right: one singular person at a time -- it makes you jump up onto your feet because you can't sit there doing nothing, you have to do something, and fight back).
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Important reading but not "a bible in the field" - I enjoyed learning about how social entrepreneurship is quietly blurring the boundaries between social action and the way to do business to better the world. The case studies in How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition are inspiring to those who are, in whatever capacity, contributing to make a difference and to drive change, and for those who are at least thinking about the need to change.
However, I would have liked to see more inclusion of what social action could mean even for all of us (people and organisations), particularly for those who are still blinded by greed and and growth and everything else that got us into the predicament we are finding ourselves in. Our belief systems need to change dramatically and with more urgency. We need critical mass and we need it fast.
Christine Maingard, Author of Think Less Be More:Mental Detox for Everyone
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Eye opening - As someone just entering the social entrepreneurial space, this was a good segway into the sector. Bornstein does a good job at highlighting different social entrepreneurs and their strategy to success.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Lots of details, but overall theme very encouraging - Theme of book is change. Stories about people who have changed world and analysis of common trends of these social entrepreneurs. Lots of details, mostly boring details of little interest to average student (economics, history of organization with lots of acronyms, statistics). However, these stories are real and you are encouraged to step up and follow in the footsteps of these men and women who are still alive, impacting the world. Stories of real men and women, who they are, what they have done, what they continued to do to this day. Note: some of these people are doing so great of things that you might feel incompetent and faulty but author's message is not to compare yourself to these people but rather to see that you as a human being possess the power to make changes, to help everyone around you. Don't have to change world; can help to make your home community a better place if want. Key: passion and determination to make world better place to live. Author delves into personalities of these people, how they act, their attitudes toward life, and you are tempted to ask, "Am I like them?" Do I have the courage, the will, the desire to change this world, or to change this community, to make it a better place to live for all? From political standpoint, consider this: trend has been private organizations in control, then governments step in (try to do everything like welfare, social security, health care) but can't handle everything, so citizen sector/nonprofits charities/organizations show up where people are donating time and/or money to help poor, sick, under-served, less fortunate (loosely speaking, rely less on government and more on private "charities" more). Book printed very recently (2007) so applicable to today's society. This is history, but the kind textbooks don't mention.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Fine Case Histories of People You Don't Know about Who Are Positively Changing the World - "Rejoicing in the world, His earth,
And having my delight in the sons of men." -- Proverbs 8:31
Can one person make a difference for the poor, the helpless, and those with no hope? The case histories in this book will encourage you to think that it's more than possible: The process can be studied, taught, and encouraged as journalist David Bornstein recounts this point through his story of what the Ashoka foundation is doing to develop social entrepreneurs and establish a discipline that can be rapidly improved through sharing of best practices. Whether you are a social entrepreneur, want to become one, or want to encourage what they do, this book is must reading. It systematizes much of what is scattered throughout many speeches, good stories, brief articles, and a variety of excellent books.
The book's main weakness is that it doesn't do enough to draw more than big-picture conclusions about social entrepreneurs. To me, those profiled here simply look like successful business model innovators who care more about the social impact of what they do than the financial rewards for themselves. As a result, the book's focus is a little too narrow to be totally useful. There are also for-profit entrepreneurs who great vast amounts of social benefit using different, but similar, methods to what is described here. Both groups can learn a lot from one another. I suspect that there are also other streams of creativity conjoining as well, such as I often see accomplished by people who want to systematically raise up socially conscious entrepreneurs by the tens of millions in Africa, Asia, and South America.
I hope that this book will be updated and expanded in scope every year or two. That will be a great blessing for those who are interested in the field and those who want to help it advance.
Bravo, Mr. Bornstein!
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