Guy Kawasaki's Interview With David Bornstein

Global X interviewing author David Bornstein

Watching people discover social entrepreneurship on Twitter is one of the best ways to get a sense of how the language of the field is permeating. I'll often see tweets about content that was created years ago, but just got someone hooked. A number of people yesterday retweeted a link from @e180 about an interview that serial entrepreneur, author, and tech evangelist Guy Kawasaki did with "How to Change the World" author David Bornstein.

I particularly love the section where Bornstein discusses jobs and happiness:

Question: How can social entrepreneurs attract talent when there aren't high salaries and options?

Answer: By offering people employment opportunities that align with their talents, interests, and values. By inspiring them with a vision of changing the world, of being part of something bigger than themselves. We have to think about an assumption behind this question-namely the notion that people seek to maximize how much money they make. Certainly, we all care about making money. But choices that people make every day-becoming teachers, having children, giving money to charity-indicate that we are complex creatures motivated by many different things.

We are also at an interesting point in America's history. With all our wealth and freedom of choice, we seem to be obsessed with finding happiness. Everyday it seems another book is published focusing on how we can make ourselves happy. Most Americans today are phenomenally wealthy compared to their grandparents, yet many studies show we are no happier, and we actually may be less so. At the very top of the list of things that make people feel happy and fulfilled are doing work that you find challenging and deeply meaningful with colleagues whom you respect and care for. Social entrepreneurship offers this.
Question: Is this why many prominent business people move into social entrepreneurship?

Answer: Business people are moving into social entrepreneurship for the same reasons that so many other people across society are moving into this field: They see new opportunities to solve problems in creative ways; as individuals, they have far more power to understand and address problems at scale than in the past; they see enormous needs to solve problems that aren't being addressed by traditional institutions, whether businesses, governments or nonprofits; they have lived through what may be described as the "failure of success"-the extraordinary accumulation of wealth and possessions over the past fifty years that has left people feeling dissatisfied and often empty.

When Bill Gates announced that he would be stepping down from Microsoft to run his foundation, he made it clear that he was not retiring, but rather "reordering" his priorities. Why? It was through his research trips in the developing world that he came face to face with people suffering and dying-and he couldn't shake it. He saw that he could be more valuable to the world helping to develop AIDS or malaria vaccines, or expanding access to health care systems, than helping to create more software tools, as valuable as those tools may be. Lots of people are coming to similar conclusions. It is like a global awakening.

There's a lot more great stuff in there, and its well worth a read. In general, Guy's blog is a must read.