Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition
GO to any recent meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), including the one in Davos, Switzerland, last week, and you cannot fail to be struck by the yearning in the corporate world to be a good environmental citizen—provided that it does not cost the earth. Gloomy lectures on climate change are packed, and copies of heartening books on how to turn greenery into gold are in much demand.
Quite what readers will learn, though, from this work by an environmental consultant and a WEF stalwart, is harder to fathom—even if a copy was handed out free to every delegate at Davos last week. The book sketches briefly the activities of many people who have found ways to improve the lives of others. Many have created laudable projects. Some have made money, and a few have become substantial employers, or founded large businesses. But the problems of social entrepreneurship soon emerge.
An obvious one is the difficulty of raising money. If you are setting out to save the world rather than to make a profit, it is perhaps not surprising that financial institutions are less likely to give you money than your friends and family, or trusts and foundations. It is all very well for the authors to point out that “all enterprises—including the most profit-hungry mainstream ventures—start out as nonprofits.” If the business plan does not set profitability as a goal, then investors are likely to see it as philanthropy, not investment.
More worrying, though, is the fact that both for-profit and non-profit social enterprises seem so rarely to grow large or to be replicated on a big scale. One survey found that only 144 of the 200,000 non-profit enterprises founded in America since 1970 had reached more than $50m in annual revenue; another, that 75% of a sample of American for-profit social and environmental enterprises had fewer than 25 fulltime employees.
The solution for which the authors clearly yearn is a different world. “Like it or not [and they clearly like it], the world is in the early stages of powerful, deep-running and pervasive changes that will transform its economics, its cultures and people's understanding of who they are and what they stand for.” Well, maybe. But those changes may not necessarily make life easier for the “unreasonable man” who (quoting George Bernard Shaw) “persists in trying to adapt the world to himself”.
And some of these unreasonable people may succeed in changing the world in ways that nobody at last week's Davos meeting would have advocated. “Increasingly,” say the authors, “small groups of people use multiple kinds of leverage to drive change on a disproportionate scale.” Tucked away in a footnote to that sentence is the name Osama bin Laden, a social entrepreneur who has used his leverage all too effectively.
The greatest agents for sustainable change are unlikely to be the well-intentioned folk described in this book, interesting though they are. They are much more likely to be the entirely reasonable people, often working for large companies, who see ways to create better products or reach new markets, and have the resources to do so. Ratan Tata, with his one-lakh car, may improve more lives than any social entrepreneur has done. And he might even make money from doing so.
Fuente: The Economist
From The Economist print edition
GO to any recent meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), including the one in Davos, Switzerland, last week, and you cannot fail to be struck by the yearning in the corporate world to be a good environmental citizen—provided that it does not cost the earth. Gloomy lectures on climate change are packed, and copies of heartening books on how to turn greenery into gold are in much demand.
Quite what readers will learn, though, from this work by an environmental consultant and a WEF stalwart, is harder to fathom—even if a copy was handed out free to every delegate at Davos last week. The book sketches briefly the activities of many people who have found ways to improve the lives of others. Many have created laudable projects. Some have made money, and a few have become substantial employers, or founded large businesses. But the problems of social entrepreneurship soon emerge.
An obvious one is the difficulty of raising money. If you are setting out to save the world rather than to make a profit, it is perhaps not surprising that financial institutions are less likely to give you money than your friends and family, or trusts and foundations. It is all very well for the authors to point out that “all enterprises—including the most profit-hungry mainstream ventures—start out as nonprofits.” If the business plan does not set profitability as a goal, then investors are likely to see it as philanthropy, not investment.
More worrying, though, is the fact that both for-profit and non-profit social enterprises seem so rarely to grow large or to be replicated on a big scale. One survey found that only 144 of the 200,000 non-profit enterprises founded in America since 1970 had reached more than $50m in annual revenue; another, that 75% of a sample of American for-profit social and environmental enterprises had fewer than 25 fulltime employees.
The solution for which the authors clearly yearn is a different world. “Like it or not [and they clearly like it], the world is in the early stages of powerful, deep-running and pervasive changes that will transform its economics, its cultures and people's understanding of who they are and what they stand for.” Well, maybe. But those changes may not necessarily make life easier for the “unreasonable man” who (quoting George Bernard Shaw) “persists in trying to adapt the world to himself”.
And some of these unreasonable people may succeed in changing the world in ways that nobody at last week's Davos meeting would have advocated. “Increasingly,” say the authors, “small groups of people use multiple kinds of leverage to drive change on a disproportionate scale.” Tucked away in a footnote to that sentence is the name Osama bin Laden, a social entrepreneur who has used his leverage all too effectively.
The greatest agents for sustainable change are unlikely to be the well-intentioned folk described in this book, interesting though they are. They are much more likely to be the entirely reasonable people, often working for large companies, who see ways to create better products or reach new markets, and have the resources to do so. Ratan Tata, with his one-lakh car, may improve more lives than any social entrepreneur has done. And he might even make money from doing so.
Fuente: The Economist
