Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works

Got the book in good condition. All the pages are intact.

Addresses the mechanisms and working of a social enterprise. Must read!

Highly recommend! Martin and Osberg have written a book that shines new light on the concept of social entrepreneurship – and, more broadly, achieving widespread social change. The book is not a “how to” handbook for social entrepreneurs (although surely will be useful to them), but rather offers an interpretive guide that helps us make sense of one of the most important phenomena in the world today: social entrepreneurship.Take the idea of “shifting an equilibrium”, which Martin and Osberg highlight as at the heart of the work of social entrepreneurs. That lens calls for an analysis of what forces keep the status quo as it is – not painting a portrait of an inert context, but understanding the set of reinforcing dynamics that keeps things as they are. Only by doing that analysis can we understand what levers might fundamentally change the equilibrium. Of course, this idea echoes writers that talk about system theory, is consonant with on-the-ground innovators like Bill Drayton whose work with entrepreneurs at Ashoka aims for broader changes in systems, and also is reflected in the work of funders like Omidyar Network (and the Skoll Foundation, which is led by Osberg and where Martin sits on the Board) that focuses on the interplay between the entrepreneurs and their enabling context. But this book illuminates the relationship between the entrepreneur and shifting the equilibrium in fresh and useful ways that help us make sense of these disparate threads.While the book is propelled by the stories of remarkable organizations and people, the heart of the argument is not just about their personal, heroic qualities. Rather it is about how they managed to understand and move complex systems – typically not via an amazing new technology or the replication of a single solution, but via, for example, the hard work of shifting and strengthening the health care infrastructure in country (PIH) or moving the social norms and self-empowerment of a community (Tostan’s work in Senegal.) Where the authors discuss the characteristics of the entrepreneurs, it is by identifying a compelling set of tensions with which the leaders grapple – abhorrence and appreciation, expertise and apprenticeship, and experimentation and commitment.The last few chapters of the book offer a guide to factors that may facilitate the odds of scaling up solutions, highlighting factors such as managing costs down aggressively, open source platforms for sharing, adding value to existing assets, reducing labor costs. These categories are intuitively compelling, and several are strangely absent from the existing writing on social entrepreneurship and scale. I hope the final few chapters will be a provocation to others to conduct research on these factors. For example, the authors’ focus on the role of cost brings under the microscope a factor that is a core dynamic driving firms, industries, and disruption in the for-profit sector – and in the social sector outside the US (where designing for scale and low unit cost is often THE starting point) – but which is only occasionally visible in dynamics that unfold in the US. Why is that? Similarly, under what conditions does an “open source platform” lead to the spread of ideas versus being one more failed “build it and they will come” strategy? These questions go beyond the scope of the book, but are prompted by it—a sign of a provocative argument that points to the next step of questions we need to explore as a field.An important contribution and a good read!

The book was identified as been new. The book had underlines from one cover to the other.

ENJOYED READING IT!