A Good Time to be Unreasonable

Pamela Hartigan became the new director of the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship at the Oxford Said School of Business earlier this year.  With experience as the first Managing Director at the Schwab Foundation, and a Co-Founder and Partner at Volans, she is an entrepreneur in her own right.  Beyond Profit editor, Lindsay Clinton, caught up with Mrs. Hartigan at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford on March 27.

Beyond Profit (BP): How do you define social entrepreneurship, and what makes a a social entrepreneur different from an entrepreneur?

Hartigan: Social entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship.  It is innovative, resourceful, and leverages new opportunities to create new systems and products.  It is about system change.  It is not about palliative, charitable solutions to poverty.  It is actually about finding sustainable, innovative pathways to completely change the system.  Social entrepreneurs are very practical, innovative, and solutions-oriented.  They want to completely change the situation for whatever condition is spurring inequity.

The difference between social and business entrepreneurs is that when business entrepreneurs set up their enterprise, they have to focus on how to make a profit.  Why?  Because the assumption is that they have to pay back their investors and begin to make profit.  The social entrepreneur, in contrast, is actually setting out to correct market and government failures.  And while it might be profitable, the bottom line is to not to make a profit, but to change the system.  

BP: How do you differentiate between social entrepreneurship—focusing on the person—and social enterprise—the business?

Hartigan: Social entrepreneurs create social enterprises.  But not every social enterprise is created by a social entrepreneur. There are many managers that set up a social enterprise because the government has a need that it can’t respond to.  So, they get some funding for a community-based organization to deliver those services—and they slap the name “social enterprise” on them, which is very confusing because there is nothing innovative or systems changing about them. So, not every social enterprise is a socially entrepreneurial enterprise.

BP: How does Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) fit into all this?

Hartigan: CSR is very different.  It’s an add-on.  A company decides, well, we have been maximizing profits, and our clients are not happy with us.  So, how do we actually address this by setting up a tangential initiative to our company, that may not have anything to with the business?  Basically, it’s window dressing.

The good news is that companies are actually waking up to the fact that it is actually extremely valuable to bring together their core business with social and environmental goals, and we’re seeing more of that.

BP: Here at the Skoll Forum, there has been a lot of conversation inside the sessions and in the hallways about the effects of the economic downturn, over-consumption, climate change, the need for global education standards—and the solutions social business might bring to these problems.  As such, it feels that, collectively, we are at a tipping point.  Why are we gravitating towards social entrepreneurship right now?

Hartigan: It’s complex.  For the past five years, social entrepreneurship has been thought to be a passing fad. But, because of the economic meltdown, people are realizing that the reason this is happening is because the way that we make our money has been completely separated from what makes us happy as people.  And, social entrepreneurs married those two things.  Our society, or at least our financial community, has completely dichotomized the way that we make our money and the way that we impact society.  Social entrepreneurs are the harbingers of where we need to go because it brings together these two things.  I always used to say, “A social entrepreneur is what you get when you combine Richard Branson with Mother Theresa.”

BP: Have you seen a growth in interest at the Skoll Centre?

Hartigan: Huge.  The future leaders of tomorrow, who are the MBAs of today, are embracing this idea of combining where they put their talent and how they improve society.  And it’s not just about lining your pockets—I want to get out a get a big job for an investment bank or be a consultant—they’re not interested in that anymore.  They want to know how they can make a difference in the world and how they can use their business talents to make that difference.  Because markets are fundamentally important to changing systems.

BP: What is your vision for the Skoll Centre?

Hartigan: There are three areas I’m focusing on: incorporating aspects of triple bottom line businesses into finance, accounting, marketing, management classes.  To do that we need case studies, data, and visiting professors who understand this stuff.  We are going to be focused on building a community of Oxford students who are interested in this area of study and providing the inspiration and inputs to do that.  And the third area is research.  We need to improve the research we do on how social entrepreneurs are contributing to areas they work within, like water scarcity, energy, etc.

BP: There has been a lot of talk about impact at the Forum.  How do we measure impact?  Who is making the most impact?  But, isn’t it enough to know that I’m working with coffee farmers in Colombia to get them fair prices, or helping children in India.  Why is knowing your impact so important?

Hartigan: If you don’t know your impact, you can’t improve.  In essence, what you don’t measure hasn’t happened. If you don’t know your impact, how do you know whether you’re doing more damage than good?  The age of unaccountability and lack of transparency is over.

BP: What about scale?  These days you can’t start and run a business without explaining your plans to scale.  What’s wrong with small is beautiful?

Hartigan: There are thousands of small, beautiful businesses, which is fantastic.  There are many entrepreneurs who are interested in and are focused on their local communities and they are doing incredible things.  But, at the Skoll Center, we are very much focused on how-big-can-small-get.  Because the world has such huge problems that we really need to affect them on a massive scale.

BP: What can the role of women be in social entrepreneurship?

Hartigan: Women are entrepreneurial by nature.  We have to solve problems and develop creative solutions, but I think that the difference is the following: I think that there are thousands of women entrepreneurs, but women are much more interested in the small, local business.  As you go further up the ladder of socially entrepreneurial initiatives, you’ll find that most are [run by] men. They have women that work with them and are probably running their operations for them, but visions of ‘huge’ and ‘scale’ seems to be certainly a gender difference.

BP: A lot of social entrepreneurs don’t actually identify as social entrepreneurs.  They think, “I work in health,” “I work in education.”

Hartigan: You’re absolutely right. Social entrepreneurs don’t identify as such, and when people say that they are social entrepreneurs, I’m immediately suspect.  Because, the really great social entrepreneurs—the ones who have been about it for years—simply don’t use the term.  Many in fact say, “I never knew what I was until someone said, ‘You’re a social entrepreneur.’”  Usually, these folks say, “I’m an engineer and I came up with a way to save women billions of hours…”  But, just because someone doesn’t call themselves a social entrepreneur doesn’t mean that they aren’t one.

BP: What advice would you give to someone who knows that they want to be a social entrepreneur, or knows that they want to work in this space, but is not sure what their big idea is?

Hartigan: Well, two things.  One, it’s okay not to be an entrepreneur.  Unfortunately, with the glamorization of entrepreneurship, everyone thinks that they have to go out and create the next big idea.  I think that’s insane. I think that across the board, entrepreneurs desperately need strong teams behind them, and that’s where I see the business school coming in because they teach accounting, finance—the fundamental tools you need to grow solid organizations.

First of all, you don’t decide you want to be an entrepreneur.  You ARE an entrepreneur.  It’s like, you can’t help being the way you are.  When someone says, “Gee, when did you decide to be an entrepreneur?” I tend to think it’s a ridiculous question.  Because I tend to believe that people are born with entrepreneurial traits—and they can be nurtured and stimulated or stifled—which depends on the society in which you were born and whether they nurture innovative thinking, creativity, risk-taking, failure—all the things that are part of being an entrepreneur.  When I counsel young people, I tell them, “Whether you are an entrepreneur or not, go and spend time working with a social entrepreneur in their organization before you decide, or to help you better decide.”

BP: You’re the co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World.  What makes social entrepreneurs unreasonable?

Hartigan: They’re only unreasonable to people who think that what they are doing is completely off the wall.  George Bernard Shaw’s quote was, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” You can look at our last couple of decades and all the horrific situations we have had in terms of poverty, climate change, energy depletion, deforestation—all of these things are carried out by so-called reasonable people.  And nobody sets out to create any of these things.  But, if your one pursuit is short term profit, you’re going to be a lot less concerned about all these other things.  So, we have the situation that we have now.  A few people have become extremely wealthy, and a whole lot of others have not.  And we have organizations who are running around picking up the pieces because of this greed and lack of long-term thinking.  So, the system isn’t working.  We need unreasonable people.