Getting Beyond Better

How Social Entrepreneurship Works

Roger L. Martin, Sally Osberg

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781633690684
• eBook ISBN: 9781633690691
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Who drives transformation in society? How do they do it?

In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders--call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers--develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place.

The book begins with a probing and useful theory of social entrepreneurship, moving through history to illuminate what it is, how it works, and the nature of its role in modern society. The authors then set out a framework for understanding how successful social entrepreneuars actually go about producing transformative change. There are four key stages: understanding the world; envisioning a new future; building a model for change; and scaling the solution. With both depth and nuance, Martin and Osberg offer rich examples and personal stories and share lessons and tools invaluable to anyone who aspires to drive positive change, whatever the context.

Getting Beyond Better sets forth a bold new framework, demonstrating how and why meaningful change actually happens in the world and providing concrete lessons and a practical model for businesses, policymakers, civil society organizations, and individuals who seek to transform our world for good.

Part I

Transformation
for Good

Chapter 1

Shifting an Equilibrium

Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg was born at the end of the fourteenth century, just as change was rippling across Europe. The continent was emerging from a century of death and decay in which famine and plague had combined to kill or displace more than a third of its population. It had been a time of social unrest and seemingly unending war. But now, the population was stabilizing, prosperity was returning, and political power was shifting. As the new century progressed, trade flourished, guilds expanded, and the age of exploration began. The Ottoman Empire rose in the East and the Holy Roman Empire’s grip on Europe weakened. But these changes would pale in comparison with the shift Gutenberg himself would unleash.

Gutenberg’s early career didn’t suggest a change agent in the making. The son of a wealthy merchant, he stumbled badly in his earliest ventures—most notably a scheme to make souvenir mirrors for an exhibition of Charlemagne’s relics. The highly polished mirrors were to be hawked to pilgrims, who would use them to capture the “holy radiance” emanating from the relics. The whole enterprise flopped when a flood delayed the exhibition and the hordes of gullible customers failed to materialize. Broke and dogged by unhappy business partners, Gutenberg promised to satisfy his investors not with funds, but with a tantalizing “secret.” This turned out to be a new invention: an effective process for printing using movable type.

Like most inventions, Gutenberg’s printing press wasn’t an entirely new idea; movable type had been invented in China centuries before and had slowly spread across Asia and into Europe. But Gutenberg adapted those existing technologies to make his printing process far faster and more reliable, enabling the production of meaningful quantities of high-quality typeset pages for the first time. His invention encompassed not only his press and its moveable type, but also a casting process that would reproduce his carefully designed dyes, a means to align and space them, and even a special ink that would facilitate printing in color.

Gutenberg’s printing press had the potential to shift the production of print from artisans to machines, lowering costs and increasing production. In this way, it was not unlike many other inventions. And like those, the printing press might have remained a promising new technology were it not for what happened next. Gutenberg and others began producing and selling printed materials widely. These publishing businesses would make the written word far more accessible than ever before. By enabling broad access to the printed word, Gutenberg’s venture set the stage for widespread literacy and for nothing less than the democratization of knowledge.

Before Gutenberg came along, knowledge in the West was effectively cartelized. The primary form of the written word was the bound book—newspapers, magazines, and other written materials as we know them today didn’t exist. Books, which represented the world’s collected knowledge, were phenomenally costly to produce, especially since these manuscripts were unique works of art. They were created mainly by priests and monks who dedicated painstaking hours of labor to the calligraphy and illustrations on each page, and who had access to the gold, lapis lazuli, and other precious pigments used for that purpose. As a result, only the church and the wealthiest private citizens could afford to commission and own books. Only they could access knowledge in written form.

For the rest of the world, information was communicated orally and by example. Commoners had little chance to learn to read, not because of a lack of intellect or interest, but because there was no reading material available to them. While the seasonal activities of planting and harvesting were richly captured in illuminations in the Trés Riches Heures du Jean, Duc de Berry, the working peasants depicted in those pages would not have seen the book or been aware their labors had been recorded. Instead, workers learned how to cultivate the land from their parents, working alongside them in the fields; in turn, they passed on what they had learned, instructing their children through example and narrative. In parish churches and grand cathedrals, religious instruction was communicated (in Latin) from the pulpit. Ordinary folk didn’t have access to printed Bibles; they absorbed their religious understanding largely from ritual practice and from interactions with parish priests.

The expensive process of book production ensured not only that knowledge, but the power that comes from possessing it, remained out of reach of the masses. A small minority—the church, landed gentry, and the guilds, all of whom prospered and benefited from the status quo—was able to maintain and enforce an advantage over the majority. Those on the wrong side of the equation had only two choices: settle meekly for their lot in life or struggle in vain against an entrenched system.

Then, with the advent of Gutenberg’s press, it became possible to produce the written word at scale. The speed and reliability of the press reduced printing costs enough that many more citizens could afford printed materials. From that point, change came swiftly. Gutenberg’s shop in Mainz, Germany, spurred a new industry; by the end of the fifteenth century, printing enterprises were recorded in some 270 cities across Europe. The Age of Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation subsequently took hold, both enabled by ready access to the written and printed word.

In many ways, Gutenberg was a prototypical entrepreneur. He sought to make his fortune in the world through a commercial enterprise. He looked for an opportunity—an unmet need—and imagined a better answer. He designed a way to meet that need reliably and created a business to exploit that answer. He didn’t just invent the printing press; he established a publishing enterprise, aiming (though largely failing) to enrich himself from his invention.

Yet Gutenberg’s impact was far bigger than he could originally imagine. He fundamentally reset the way the world works. His invention was world-changing because it addressed not just an individual need but also a much broader social equilibrium. Though it is unlikely he would have framed it this way, Gutenberg moved the world forward because he created a mechanism to successfully shift an unhappy equilibrium to one far beyond better.

Recall that a system is in equilibrium when it is balanced and stable. Such systems tend to be pervasive, self-reinforcing, and persistent. That is not to say they are reasonable, just, or fair. As a steady state, systems in equilibrium are all but invisible to their participants. They can feel natural, even inevitable, as the way things are and ever shall be.

Think of the state of knowledge before the advent of the printing press. Only a small minority held and maintained control over information. Though the precise makeup of these elites shifted over time, the central dynamic—cartelization of knowledge and subjugation of the masses on that basis—did not. With the printing press, Gutenberg altered this stable state. He enabled wider access to information, creating the conditions for mass literacy and a much faster, more profound advancement of knowledge. The first newspaper appeared within sixty years of Gutenberg’s invention, as did Shakespeare’s first quartos.

Access to the printed word paved the way for a revolution in human thought, as the theses of Martin Luther and works of Enlightenment philosophers like Locke, Hume, and Voltaire could be read and disseminated far more easily than would have been the case in the past. The publishers who followed Gutenberg extended his impact, helping establish and reinforce the new state of the world.

A new and superior equilibrium emerged—not all at once, but in fits and starts, because pervasive change is often bitterly contested—until an equally stable but superior state was produced. In time, the world was positively transformed.

The new equilibrium, it should be noted, isn’t perfect. As you’ll recall from the story of Andrew Carnegie in the introduction, the printing press didn’t provide equal and untrammeled access to books. But it shifted the world from a state in which a tiny few had access to the written word to one in which printed material was widely available to the masses—spurring enormous increases in literacy as access to broadsheets, newspapers, and some books, particularly in an emergent public education system, opened up more broadly. But widespread as such access was, it was not truly comprehensive. Hundreds of years after the advent of the printing press, books still were far more accessible to the rich than to the poor. Hence, Carnegie’s own transformation, in a time-honored tradition, was erected on the shoulders of the giants who preceded him.

The Nature of Social Transformation

Social transformation—by which we mean positive, fundamental, and lasting change to the prevailing conditions under which most members of a society live and work—is almost always the result of a successful challenge to an existing equilibrium. Individuals and groups take aim at the status quo, attempting to shift it to a new and superior state in which the prevailing conditions are substantially and sustainably improved for the majority. The path to such transformative change, even when conditions appear ripe, is far from inevitable; nor does it always run smoothly.

To understand just how this kind of social transformation happens, it is helpful to step back and look at transformation in a very different realm: the world of science. The standard narrative of scientific progress goes something like this: scientific understanding moves forward in a steady, if occasionally plodding way, with each scientist building on the work that came before, adding and enriching our shared understanding over time.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn upended this narrative with his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.¹ Kuhn argued that scientific knowledge advances not in a steady march from one great thinker to the next but through disruption. Great thinkers, he said, play a role—but not the one we expect. They don’t build on the work that preceded them so much as question and redefine it. He explained this theory by contrasting two distinctly different modes of progress: normal science and scientific revolution.

Normal science looks a lot like our traditional slow-and-steady narrative. In normal science, a scientific community operates under a prevailing paradigm—an essential understanding of the world as it relates to a particular area of inquiry. The job of the scientist is to extend and strengthen the central paradigm by pursuing and solving particular puzzles within it. Scientists accept the underlying assumptions of the theory and make progress within it on that basis. This standard progression can be powerfully efficient, enabling deeper understanding over time. But this mode of progress has significant limitations as well. The paradigm demands adherence. Those who question it, or choose to operate outside of it, are seen as wrong-headed; they can be ridiculed, ostracized, and even punished. Why? Because they represent an unwelcome challenge to the status quo, and as such, they must be ignored, suppressed, or quashed. The existing paradigm, as a result, becomes entrenched and ever more dominant—even if it is flawed.

According to Kuhn, the depth of inquiry into the existing paradigm will eventually start to raise challenges to the paradigm itself—data emerges that can seem anomalous or difficult to explain in the context of the existing framework. As these anomalies pile up, they weaken the current paradigm’s hold, eventually precipitating a crisis. Sometimes, the crisis can be resolved through further inquiry into the paradigm (through more normal science, in other words). But often, the crisis causes the paradigm itself to be called into question.

Some scientists begin to question fundamental assumptions of the field in crisis, positing new and different paradigms that would explain the anomalies and shift the framework substantially. Kuhn called this stage revolutionary science. He described it as a fundamental shift in which the field pivots to a new understanding and new approach. Textbooks are rewritten. Standard procedures are redesigned. Reputations are altered. Outcasts become revered central figures. Then, as the new paradigm becomes established, the community adapts and returns to a normal science approach within the new context. Until the next revolution.

Consider an example familiar to every schoolchild: the Copernican revolution. For centuries, the prevailing view of the scientific community was that the earth was the center of the universe, a stationary point around which the sun, planets, and cosmos moved. Normal science, built on the core theories Ptolemy articulated in the second century, modeled the tracks of celestial bodies around an unmoving earth. By the mid-sixteenth century, though, our ability to track the movements of the stars had advanced to such an extent that cracks were showing in Ptolemy’s model. Planets and stars seemed to move in ways that didn’t fit the paradigm.

In 1543, astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), in which he proposed a new cosmology, with the sun at the center and the earth as just one of the planets revolving around it. Copernicus was largely dismissed, in part because his math didn’t quite work out. He had the right insight, but the wrong data. He attempted to use the tools of normal science, the models inherited from the ancient Greeks, to map out the movements of the planets around the sun. Try as he might, however, he failed to increase the accuracy of predictions using his new paradigm.

It wasn’t until Italian physicist Galileo Galilei articulated a new theory of objects in motion some half a century later that the revolution really took hold. He compensated for the gaps in Copernicus’ ideas by hypothesizing that a previously unknown outside force must cause planetary bodies to move in curved paths rather than in straight lines. For his insights, he was condemned as a heretic. Yet a contemporary, Johannes Kepler, and a successor, Isaac Newton, both built on Galileo’s work. Ultimately, they established a new paradigm for understanding the universe and affirmed new laws of planetary motion. The revolution was concluded. Normal science was reestablished. Scientists set to work exploring questions within the new paradigm, which would hold for the next three centuries.

This pattern, Kuhn argues, repeats itself across every domain of scientific inquiry. Normal science—acceptance and inquiry into the accepted paradigm—is disrupted and transformed by a period of revolution—radical and seismic changes to scientific understanding. Science progresses, he said, not in steady steps from one great thinker to the next, but in cataclysmic leaps. Kuhn’s book, improbably, became one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, altering our understanding of the history and progression of science.

What can we learn from this new understanding of scientific progress to inform our understanding of transformation more broadly? To what extent does Kuhn’s model apply beyond the world of science? As we see it, Kuhn’s thinking applies in helpful ways. Does the history of art, the social sciences—virtually every area of human inquiry and pursuit—not offer a similar pattern of orthodoxy, challenge, revolution, and reset? Monet and Picasso, Maria Montessori and John Dewey are not so different from Copernicus and Galileo. Beyond explaining scientific progress, Kuhn captures something essential about the way in which our world leaps forward across many different domains of human endeavor. He has captured a pattern that also applies to societies and their changes over time.

As with science, most of the time societies move forward in modest increments as we hone and refine an existing model, accepting the current paradigm and attempting to make headway within it. We accept economic inequality as largely inevitable, for instance, and focus on reducing its negative effects through social programs like food stamps, school lunch programs, and foreign aid. We accept that inefficient markets are just a feature of the world, and create businesses to exploit those inefficiencies rather than creating organizations that eliminate them. Our approach to change in this stage is akin to that exercised in the realm of normal science—we accept the current equilibrium, which remains widely stable, if unhappy. As we have noted, this not to say the progress made within the normal science phase is necessarily unhelpful. Often, individuals and organizations can reduce the worst effects of the current state and make life a little better for those who are most disadvantaged by it.

Actors in the normal phase accept the status quo, the existing paradigm, as largely natural and normal. Governments tweak and adapt legislation with the intention of making things a little better and reinforcing the equilibrium should it falter. In the wake of crises threatening the US economy, for example, legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank was introduced to prevent business behaviors of the kind that had so disrupted financial markets. Similarly, entrepreneurs find ways to benefit from the status quo, as when traders build complex quantitative models to exploit tiny arbitrage opportunities in inefficient capital markets. Charities, religious organizations, and social service organizations strive to ameliorate the negative effects of the existing equilibrium, applying balms to sore spots, improving access to health care through free and low-cost services, providing food banks and other services to those who cannot afford life’s basics, and so on. Life continues on, a little better than it was before. But wholesale transformation—remaking the financial markets, building new ways to c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Arianna Huffington
• Introduction: What Is Social Entrepreneurship?
• Part I: Transformation for Good
• Part II: Paths to Transformation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors