By Pamela Hartigan and John Elkingston

The Power of Unreasonable People

The idea of the unreasonable man came from renowned playwright George Bernard Shaw who said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Authors Pamela Hartigan and John Elkington argue that social entrepreneurs are such unreasonable people – they disrupt and restructure traditional business models to tackle the critical challenges of the world from poverty to climate change and other issues.

The book addresses a few fundamental questions about social entrepreneurship: What is the general consensus on who social entrepreneurs are? What are the different kinds of social enterprise models? Should and how can social impact be measured? How differently do social entrepreneurs think as compared to their business counterparts?

For social entrepreneurs, examples of entrepreneurs accompany the many points made in the book and success stories provide valuable insights of how these unreasonable people are shifting paradigms of the world by building innovative enterprises to solve pressing economic, environmental and social problems of the world. An analysis of why their enterprise is innovative, how it would impact the community or beneficiaries and what could be learnt from them is illustrated. Some notable names that appear frequently among the many mentioned are Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Group, Kyle Zimmer from First Book, and Nick Moon and Martin Fisher from KickStart.

The Power of Unreasonable People, filled with numerous examples and success stories from all over the world, clearly puts across how the small but promising movement of social entrepreneurship could help solve the big problem of poverty and other social issues. At the same time, it encourages social entrepreneurs to be boldly “unreasonable”.

About the authors

John Elkingston is the founder of global consultancy firm SustainAbility Ltd and Pamela Hartigan is the managing director for the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Both the authors are founding partners of Volans Ventures, a for-profit organization based in Singapore and London that provides support for social enterprises including consultancy and portfolio building services.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 2:14 am and is filed under Resources, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.