Toronto - From climate change to poverty, today’s biggest social problems will persist if we limit ourselves to mitigating them with aid and advocacy. To permanently solve these problems, we need the kind of systems disruption that we’ve seen in the business world from the likes of Uber and Apple.
The definitive book about social entrepreneurs and their revolutionary approach.
How they achieve this Herculean task is the subject of GETTING BEYOND BETTER: How Social Entrepreneurship Works written by Roger Martin, former Dean and a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally Osberg— and is the definitive book about social entrepreneurs and their revolutionary approach.
Unlike social service providers and advocates, social entrepreneurs change an unjust system by getting inside of it, understanding the perspectives of all its players, adapting the best elements from business and government models, and taking direct action to create a fundamentally new and better system.
“They focus their attention not just on the symptoms of a social problem but on finding ways to address the root causes and bring about positive change on a grand scale in ways others can replicate,” writes Arianna Huffington in the foreword.
Why do unjust systems exist? How do they come to be? What would a better world look like? Those questions catalyze the journeys of social entrepreneurs like:
- Molly Melching, who immersed herself in Senegalese village culture in order to understand it and build trust. Once she did, she transformed the traditional views on female genital cutting by helping all members of the community understand how the widespread ritual was at odds with their human rights and their hopes for a better life.
- Andrea and Barry Coleman, who drew on their passions for desert motorcycling to found Riders for Health. Their organization made reliable transportation and vehicle maintenance an integral part of Africa’s health systems.
- Kailash Satyarthi, who created a certification system called GoodWeave to identify rugs made without child labor. By introducing information transparency, GoodWeave shifted the value equation for consumers, selling 11 million carpets and reducing child labor in South Asia’s rug trade by an estimated 75 percent.
- Adalberto Veríssimo, who founded Imazon, which repurposed NASA satellite technology to track illegal deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in real time—all while reducing the cost of surveillance.
Through the narratives of these and other recent and historical examples like Johannes Gutenberg and Andrew Carnegie, we see how the balance can tip from incremental to transformative change.
As history has shown time and again, unjust systems can remain stable for centuries unless social entrepreneurs work to disrupt them from the inside and work with corporate and government partners to create completely new systems that advance peace and prosperity around the world.
Getting Beyond Better provides an urgently needed blueprint for how social entrepreneurs can create transformative change that endures.
About the Authors:
Roger Martin is the Institute Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management and the Premier’s Chair in Productivity & Competitiveness. From 1998 to 2013, he served as Dean. In 2013, he was named global Dean of the Year by the leading business school website, Poets & Quants. He has published 10 books the most recent of which are Getting Beyond Betterwritten with Sally Osberg (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015) and Playing to Win written with A.G. Lafley (Harvard Business Review Press (HBRP), 2013), which won the award for Best Book of 2012-13 by the Thinkers50. He has written 21 Harvard Business Review articles.
In 2013, Roger placed 3rd on the Thinkers50 list, a biannual ranking of the most influential global business thinkers. In 2010, he was named one of the 27 most influential designers in the world by Business Week. In 2005, Business Week also named him one of seven global 'Innovation Gurus.' He has served on the board of the Skoll Foundation since its formation. A Canadian from Wallenstein, Ontario, Roger received his AB from Harvard College, with a concentration in Economics, in 1979 and his MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1981.
Sally R. Osberg is President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, the leading foundation in the field of social entrepreneurship. Under Sally’s leadership, the Foundation has invested in more than 100 ventures led by social entrepreneurs active on five continents; established the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Saïd Business School of Oxford University; created the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship; and brokered cutting-edge partnerships with organizations such as the Sundance Institute. Sally’s work has been covered by CNN, Bloomberg TV, Financial Times, Stanford Social Innovation Review, the MIT Technology Review, Rotman Magazine, and others. She has been recognized as one of Silicon Valley’s Millennium 100 by the San Jose Mercury News and among the social sector’s 50 most influential leaders by the NonProfit Times.
About the Book:
GETTING BEYOND BETTER: How Social Entrepreneurship Works
By Roger L. Martin and Sally R. Osberg
Harvard Business Review Press
Publication date: October 6, 2015
$30; 256 pages
ISBN: 978-1633690684
For the latest thinking on business, management and economics from the Rotman School of Management, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/FacultyAndResearch/NewThinking.aspx.
The Rotman School of Management is located in the heart of Canada’s commercial and cultural capital and is part of the University of Toronto, one of the world’s top 20 research universities. The Rotman School fosters a new way to think that enables our graduates to tackle today’s global business challenges. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca.
-30-