A Lever Long Enough to Move the World

Here is a concise history of the modern world, according to Bill Drayton. Well, no: In real life, Bill Drayton would never -- could never, it's fair to say -- be so concise. He is an expansive thinker of remarkable intensity, not easily gathered in -- a mind informed by influences as diverse as Gandhi and Hubert Humphrey, and as likely as not to travel intellectual parts sundry and exotic before returning, methodically, triumphant, to . . . the point.

So here is Bill Drayton's history of the modern world, made concise by us. The Industrial Revolution of the 1700s split society into two unequal halves. Commerce became entrepreneurial and competitive, its compounding productivity gains sparking rapid income growth. But enlightenment bypassed society's other half, the half concerned with education and public welfare and the environment. As the consumer sector grew more productive, the social sector, supported by taxes and protected from competition, fell ever further behind.

And then, about 25 years ago, something happened. We'll let Drayton describe the moment: "We could see it," he recalls. "The system was beginning to change. It was like hearing the ice breaking up at the end of winter in a lake. Creak, creak, groan, crash! The need was so big, the gap so huge, the opportunity to learn right before people's eyes. When do systems begin to change? When entrepreneurs decide it's time."

Or, to the point, when Drayton does.

Drayton is founder and chief executive of a group called Ashoka. It is not hyperbolic to call Ashoka this century's (much better) version of the United Way, and Drayton the most important innovator of any sort out there -- a seer who has correctly predicted the rise of the "citizen sector" in the past two decades and an audacious visionary of what will yet come.

Ashoka, named for a peace-minded third century BC Indian emperor, has identified and supported 1,500-plus Fellows, as it calls them, in 53 nations since Drayton founded it in 1980. (Five of them are winners of our 2005 Social Capitalist Awards.) It seeks out social entrepreneurs with enormous ideas -- solutions of such ambition and force that they cannot be denied. They are pioneers like Mary Allegretti, a Brazilian who thought of legally separating rubber-extraction rights from land-ownership rights in the Amazon rain forest to give indigenous rubber tappers economic standing -- and then made it happen.

What Drayton has created is a network of incalculable power. It's not so much about funding, though Fellows do receive a modest stipend. Rather, these entrepreneurs, who typically work alone amid hostile circumstances, get support, ideas, and, quite literally, protection. (When one Ashoka Fellow in Brazil attracted the ire, and gunshots, of local police for his drug rehab program, other Brazilian Fellows intervened with the state governor, and the problem went away.) How do you market a big idea? How do you run a big organization? How do you combat corrupt local politicians? The answers come from other Ashoka Fellows.

The potential of this emerging network is what gets Bill Drayton's blood coursing. Because he can see what's going on now, as clearly as he did 25 years ago. Society's citizen sector is expanding rapidly, irresistibly. Ashoka itself is growing, too: Its budget was set to jump 50%, to $30 million, in 2004. What happens in the next five years, he thinks, will prove crucial to, well, everything -- finally redressing the chasm between consumer and social sectors.

"An entrepreneur plows the field," Drayton says, "and it weakens the idea that change isn't possible. He seeds with some very user-friendly idea. The next entrepreneur comes, and there's more plowing, more seeding. Then hundreds. As we wire the world together, ideas flow from Bangladesh to the United States and Brazil, and back. This becomes multiplicative. The network becomes a distribution channel."

Drayton, 61, is a slight man, nearly inconspicuous, with thin hair and a frumpy suit. Self-effacing and unfailingly deferential, he is not charismatic in any traditional sense. When he speaks, it is at something just above a whisper -- and not always on message. David Bornstein, whose recent book How to Change the World (Oxford University Press, 2004) dwells on Ashoka, recalls asking Drayton to speak up above the din of traffic outside his apartment building. Drayton, typically, responded with an expert 20-minute discourse on the effect of canyons on noise.

But beneath the eccentric-uncle veneer is a willful and fearless thinker, a crusader of near-monastic devotion to the possibility of massive social change. (He is unmarried and childless, and lives in a simple apartment a few blocks from Ashoka's offices in Arlington, Virginia.) He first dedicated himself to the idea of Ashoka while a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1960s, then nurtured it through his years at Oxford, Yale Law, McKinsey, and the Environmental Protection Agency. "Bill is totally committed to an important idea, and has unshakable faith in what's he's doing and in the value of each person's life toward effecting change," says Julien Phillips, who worked with Drayton at McKinsey and was one of Ashoka's founding directors. "That's a tremendously powerful combination."