The entrepreneur enjoys cult status in the United States today. At the end of the last century, technological and business entrepreneurs transformed the American economy, forging information into an industry and creating more wealth more quickly than at any other time in history. Bill Gates at Microsoft, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Pierre Omidyar with eBay, Steve Case for AOL, and countless others inspired a generation to innovate, take risks, and reap the rewards that come with designing the future.
Entrepreneurs have been defined many different ways. I think of them as jaywalkers, too impatient and resourceful to wait for the light to change. A nation that idolized and idealized the early pioneers who settled it found a new generation of them in its technology entrepreneurs. They embodied all of the great American myths: independence, the lone ranger taking on the system, guts and daring and defying the odds. They literally remade our world.
Following in their wake, and unabashed in their adoption and adaptation of entrepreneurial strategies and techniques, came social entrepreneurs, who are today changing the way civic and nonprofit organizations are run and managed. Social entrepreneurs introduce market forces into the nonprofit sector, like Bill Drayton at Ashoka, or like the Nature Conservancy.
They measure social return on investment. From India to Indiana, from health care to housing, their innovations are ensuring that essential human needs are being met in ways that are more affordable, sustainable, and scalable than ever before.
My very patient editor at Random House, e-mailed me about a New Yorker magazine profile of Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner, a prolific writer who also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School. Politically conservative, grounded in free markets, Posner presents his opinions in an intellectually brash manner, which has earned him a reputation as a judicial provocateur. The New Yorker writes:
What Posner really despises, though, is, as he sees it, the whining, sanctimonious pedantry of moral philosophers. . . . Posner contrasts the academic philosopher with what he calls "moral entrepreneurs" such as Martin Luther King or the feminist Catharine MacKinnon (whom Posner admires despite disagreeing with her politics): those who through sheer charisma and rhetorical force sweep people headlong out of their accustomed inertia and inspire new moralities altogether.
Moral entrepreneur is one of those perfect phrases that, in putting two large ideas next to each other, unexpectedly resolves false choices and illuminates new possibilities. Moral entrepreneur seems like an oxymoron. Moral implies a fixed compass point, something unyielding, stubbornly faithful and true to a conviction about right and wrong. An entrepreneur, on the other hand, though not amoral, is free from the orthodoxies of how things have always been done. He tries one thing and then another, discarding what doesn't work until he finds what does. Focus is on ends rather than means. Pragmatism rules. Entrepreneurs are jaywalkers, while morality rarely permits cutting corners. But forging together two, often disparate concerns, moral entrepreneurs do what it takes to bring morality to places where it hasn't been before.
The idea of moral entrepreneurs who "inspire new moralities altogether" connotes something entirely different from social entrepreneurs. There are at least four principal distinctions.
Social entrepreneurs embrace business strategies to support sustainability and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of social programs. Moral entrepreneurs embrace new responsibilities, making them their own, and persuade their peers to do likewise.
Social entrepreneurs build programs that work and expand them to scale. Moral entrepreneurs expand conscience, the fundamental prerequisite for concern, commitment, and action.
Social entrepreneurs build and lead new organizations. Moral entrepreneurs build and lead new movements. The mission of the moral entrepreneur is not to create a new tax-exempt organization. It is to inspire others to engage deeply in community causes and to do so in a way that leverages their unique strengths.
The passion of the social entrepreneur is to invent ways to do more with less, putting resources together in a way that represents more than the sum of their parts. The passion of the moral entrepreneur is to generate more so that more can be accomplished.
The social entrepreneur aims to remake the nonprofit sector, envisioning nonprofits behaving in different ways. The moral entrepreneur aims to remake the for-profit sector, envisioning people in for-profits behaving in different ways. By introducing a new ethic or a new way of being into an entire industry, they significantly leverage and widen their potential social impact.
Unlike social entrepreneurs, who introduce market forces into the nonprofit sector, moral entrepreneurs introduce moral principles into the for-profit sector. They change the way their colleagues in business think about their jobs and themselves by showing them why they need to get involved in their community and how to do so, and by helping them envision the impact they can have. They all but make it unfashionable not to. Coming from the private sector, they create vehicles designed to appeal to the interest of their peers in getting engaged.
Moral entrepreneurs intentionally influence society's leadership strata across all walks of life. By example and design they are redefining not only what it means to give back to society, but also what it will take to solve society's most pressing problems, whether in education, poverty, health care, child development, or other critical areas of need. Pioneering strategies of personal engagement and leverage, the moral entrepreneurs have the potential to unleash and mobilize the talents and resources of society's most successful individuals to address our most pressing needs. The product at the core of their business, far more complex than any software program, networked communications system, or even redesigned social service program, is the transformed conscience of their fellow human beings.
Moral entrepreneurship has less to do with the inflexible dogmas of moral certainty than with introducing elements of morality into places one long took for granted as morally neutral. It contemplates a world in which a chef is more than a chef, a doctor more than a doctor, a world in which a central question that each of us asks and answers is how our professional skills can be deployed beyond our profession, not only in the service of profit, but so others can profit from our service.
The new moral dimension introduced by moral entrepreneurs is likely to bring sweeping and lasting change as they redefine entire professions and industries. There are still many industries left to find their way, perhaps waiting for a moral entrepreneur to lead them.
Moral leaders like King and Gandhi are wonderful inspirational icons, but their utility as role models is more limited. They were unique individuals alive at unique times in the world's history. Most of us couldn't lead the kind of lives they led. Moral entrepreneurship is not reserved for a handful of history's greats who come along once a century or so, but is something we can all apply in our daily lives.
Mario Morino: Technology entrepreneur turned venture philanthropist. Morino is the founder of Venture Philanthropy Partners focusing the organizations investment fund on youth development in the DC-area. As one entrepreneur once said, "Mario is the kind of guy who does the right thing even if no one is looking."
Danny Meyer: Owner of Union Square Hospitality Group which operates Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, Tabla, Blue Smoke and soon a restaurant to be affiliated with the Museum of Modern Art. He and his colleagues are helping to make commitment to community a rite of passage in their industry; they participate in Taste of the Nation, buy produce from the Union Square green market, and donate surplus food to City Harvest, to name a few.
Captain Herman van Heuvelen: A retired pilot in Holland's Royal Air Force now director of flight operations for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF). MAF's fleet of more than 70 planes flies humanitarian missions around the world to places no one else will go; literally turning weapons of war into daring tools of peace deliver aid workers and supplies.
Moral entrepreneurs work at points of great leverage. While their professions and social interests are diverse, they usually have these five things in common:
1. Consistent professional success has put them near the top of their field and earned the respect of their peers. They have enjoyed financial security, favorable press, and expanded contacts.
2. They are purposeful in capturing knowledge about the ingredients of that success, whether customer service, marketing, or quality assurance, and applying those ingredients in the social arena.
3. Their principal experience comes from outside the nonprofit sector, in business, entertainment, art, medicine.
4. They are more pragmatic than political, committed more to performance than to ideology.
5. They leverage their networks, beginning with those closest to them, and those networks are often rich in resources and skills.
