Bill Drayton Quotes

#1. I was taught by my parents that people who are loud don't have anything to say. I've found if you're suggesting quite big changes, a quiet style may be reassuring.

Bill Drayton

#2. Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

Bill Drayton

#3. Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world's community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

Bill Drayton

#4. Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker.

Bill Drayton

#5. We are all very deeply the children of our parents and their parents. Far more than we generally realize.

Bill Drayton

#6. We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

Bill Drayton

#7. You can't be a change-maker by reading a book.

Bill Drayton

#8. What is the most powerful lever you can imagine? A big idea, but only if it's in the hands of a truly outstanding entrepreneur. It starts with the person and the idea, and then grows to the institution. All three are intertwined.

Bill Drayton

#9. There are millions of people who can get things done. There are very, very few people who will change the pattern in the whole field.

Bill Drayton

#10. If everyone is a changemaker, there's no way a problem can outrun a solution

Bill Drayton

#11. It's not to give people fish It's not to teach them how to fish It's to build a new and better fishing industry

Bill Drayton

#12. How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus? Especially since the work involves such breadth that the boredom of routine or specialization does not exist.

Bill Drayton

#13. The one single factor that determines society's success is the percentage of change-makers within it.

Bill Drayton

#14. An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.

Bill Drayton

#15. What does an entrepreneur do? The first thing is they've given themselves permission to see a problem. Most people don't want to see problems ... Once you see a problem and you keep looking at it, you'll find an answer.

Bill Drayton

#16. We have to have a revolution so that all young people grasp empathy and practice it. This is the most fundamental revolution that we have to get through.

Bill Drayton

#17. We would like to have every middle and high school become a place where there will be lots of examples of youth competence and confidence.

Bill Drayton

#18. Public service and respect for ideas is a recurrent theme in both the American and Australian sides of my family.

Bill Drayton

#19. Entrepreneurs almost always have to step out of existing institutions that embody old ways of doing things to build their vision.

Bill Drayton

#20. The most critical variable [to becoming a change-maker] is one's willingness to give oneself permission. To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot.

Bill Drayton

#21. The social entrepreneurs are governments' best friends.

Bill Drayton

#22. We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don't fit the business paradigm.

Bill Drayton

#23. Entrepreneurs cannot be happy people until they have seen their visions become the new reality across all of society.

Bill Drayton

#24. Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.

Bill Drayton

#25. What is your personal definition of "good"?
A world in which everyone is universally empathetic and exercises love and respect with full change-making power.

Bill Drayton

#26. All the problems sitting there are an invitation for you to be creative, make use of your skills and resources and find a solution.

Bill Drayton

#27. It's the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there's nothing more powerful.

Bill Drayton

#28. Everyone says you've got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!

Bill Drayton

#29. Organizations must shift away from repetitive-function hierarchies with rules and enforcement and walls. Instead, we must migrate rapidly to becoming a global 'team of teams' that comes together in whatever combination necessary to add the greatest value to the changes underway.

Bill Drayton

#30. Change begets change as much as repetition reinforces repetition.

Bill Drayton

#31. Listening is understanding. The skill of empathy is a must to be able to listen ... One can listen better if one sees the whole.

Bill Drayton

#32. Here's my advice: The first step to becoming a changemaker (the only secure job going forward) is to give oneself permission, i.e. to ignore - politely, of course - all those who say 'Don't do it

Bill Drayton

#33. Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern.

Bill Drayton

#34. What is our job as entrepreneurs if not to change things that are crazy?

Bill Drayton

#35. The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.

Bill Drayton

#36. The life purpose of the true social entrepreneur is to change the world.

Bill Drayton

#37. White House cultures inevitably reflect the president's character. Jimmy Carter is a thoroughly honest, good person. So was his White House.

Bill Drayton

#38. The first - the most obvious test of a true social entrepreneur - is are they possessed, really possessed by an idea.

Bill Drayton