Bill Drayton (C.E.O., Ashoka) [영상 메시지]


This is a really smart thing to do, the important thing to do. Let me see if I can draw out why, and then contribute a little bit to how you can go back doing this. First question. What is the most powerful force in the world? I think it's always a big pattern change idea but only if it's in the hands of a really good entrepreneur. It’s that combination that has always changed the world and always will change the world.

That we’ve known for centuries, because business entrepreneurship has driven history for the last three centuries. In the last thirty years, the citizen center has become entrepreneurial and competitive in the same sense, and so we now have both halves of society who are entrepreneurial and competitive but we have many institutions who support business entrepreneurs and almost none to support social entrepreneurs; so, a little investment here is hugely important.

We’ll be watching more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more institutions supporting them, and of course, ultimately that builds up into the world’s community and Korea’s community of leading social entrepreneurs which is far more powerful, even than that combination of idea and a single entrepreneur.

So, let me ask you a second question. What is the key factor of success in the world we’re going into, a world of very rapid change for each individual, and for each human grouping, whether it’s a city, a country or a company. And I think again it’s pretty intuitively obvious, it’s to what degree is the person a change-maker, and to what degree is the institution constituted of change-makers. At what level of skill of change-making and how well do they work together with the rest of the world. We can see the half-life of traditional sources of competitive advantage ?technology, for example, just getting shorter and shorter and shorter.

The faster the world changes, the more people engaged in change-making. By definition, those traditional advantages just get shorter and shorter. The one thing that has sustainable - it really is the heart of the competition - is, to what degree does the company or country excel at change-making. In the world of very rapid change, and change coming at us, coming at every institution for more and more inclusive combination of angles, it can no longer possibly be a few people managing everyone else. Instead you need teams of teams where everyone is a change-maker, they know how to work together and they can respond to all these different challenges, and can truly change back. So the old form of organization is a dinosaur. It cannot succeed, it has a lot momentum behind it, but it is now being replaced by individuals and organizations of change makers. That’s the heart of where we’re going.

Think about what happened to Detroit and Milwaulkee and St. Louis, as compared to San Jose, which, fifty years ago, forty years ago, was just a bunch of lemon groves. Think about what happened to Culcutta versus Bengalore; now, that took fifty years. It’s not going to take fifty years for some countries to come out ahead, and others to fall way behind, and the key variable to Korea’s case is what proportion of Koreans will be change-makers ten, fifteen years from now. Which means, when you translate through our understanding, through the work of (name?), what proportion of the young Koreans today are actually practicing change-making at twelve, fifteen, and seventeen.

Mastering skills of empathy, teamwork, leadership, change-making ? you have to make that investment now so you’ll have a change-making workforce in 10 to 15 years, which is the key factor for success. You have to figure out how to manage institutions very differently, how to manage the country differently. So that’s the challenge.

A little bit of history will help you understand this. Agriculture produced a very small surplus, so only a few people were able to move off the land and be players. And as a result we’ve had thousands of years, a millennia, where the world has been a world of small elites. Good elites, bad elites, but always elites. That is the dinosaur that cannot work anymore. The break came around the 1700 in Northern Europe, when business did something very radical and said "anyone with a better idea, if you actually implement it we’re going to make you really happy and we’re going to copy you." Well, that ended the world of small elites, it generated a different psychology, dynamic, and it created more and more surplus, which in turn allowed more and more people to, in fact, be change-makers, for us to invest in cities and education.

This is the most profound transformation in the structure of society in ten thousand years. We are just now reaching the point where that building momentum is about to go over the top. So far, typically for a change you’ve had building blocks, islands to develop. But most parents, for example, don’t know that they are failing as parents if they have a fifteen year old at home who is not practicing change making. They know that fifteen year old has to master math and they know exactly what to do, but how many parents would even know this if their fifteen year old was not having a dream, building an organization, leaving their school of neighborhood changed? Because there’s now a tutoring service, a dance academy, a teen to teen confidential hotline. That’s what it means to be a change-maker. How many parents would actually notice that? That is an example of our being just at the edge of society going over the point where everyone understands that they, their children, their institutions have to make the transition from small elites to everyone a change-maker.

Social entrepreneurs are absolutely at the center of this. They disrupt, they are role models. "If she can do this, for you, maybe I can do something." At less well understood they are also mass recruiters of local change-makers. The job of the social entrepreneur is not to capture the market but it's changed to the world. To do that, typically the social entrepreneur that tries to make their idea as understandable, as simple, as safe, as supported where needed as possible, specifically so that thousands of people and thousands of communities will stand up and say "I get this idea, this is pretty important, let me make sure that it works here." When they do that, they have become local change-makers. And they will become role models in their family, with the people they’re working, with their neighbors; and some of them will be the next generation of entrepreneurs. This is very powerful. So that’s part of the hidden dynamic pulling societies to everyone change-making. As I mentioned before, we’ve learned from the five hundred Ashoka fellows focused primarily on young people. But you have to change the experience of young people to be powerful in that age group. Otherwise, you have a blockage in making this transition to make everyone a change-maker. So, those are two of the things that Korea needs to do. It needs to adjust what happens with young people, and it needs more social entrepreneurs. Those two levers are really important. Let me just share with you some statistics of the impact of Ashoka fellow. At the end of five years, we’ve done this analysis now for seven years, and it’s true - in the countries of every continent all across the world, in every subject matter across time - 97 percent, five years later, are continuing full time to pursue their vision, 90 percent have had independent institutions copy their idea, and over half that's already have changed national policy.

The last is more impressive than it sounds, because a lot of people don’t need to change national policy to succeed. Korea has many of these people. They may not have a word to describe who they are, they don’t have the supports, probably. But you can help them dramatically, in a faster, more surely, more safe way, not least by creating a community in Korea, and between the best Korean social entrepreneurs and their peers all across the world. The leverage for Korea in doing that is enormous. Who is going to be most effective in bringing in the best ideas from the best entrepreneurs across the world other than entrepreneurs in Korea who know Korea, who are committed to bringing fundamental pattern change to Korea in their field. And by the same token, the great ideas that some of your entrepreneurs have created should be part of this global network.

So you have a whole series of things, leverage points; young people watching social entrepreneurs building a community of social entrepreneurs, and very importantly, helping everyone in Korea understand that this is the most defining change in the structure of society since the agricultural revolution the transition from a world of small elites to a world where everyone is a change-maker. And I do not mean everyone metaphorically, I mean everyone. Adults today find it too hard to change because they don’t have the skills, they didn't define themselves as change-makers, and the whole pattern of their relationships is different.

But there is no excuse for young Koreans or young anyone else in the world, not to have the ability to be a change-maker. Think of what it’s going to be like for a fifteen year olds today, who hits twenty one and doesn't have that self definition and those skills when they’re thirty. The rate of change is increasing, it’s like a river. They’re not going to be able to be a player, a contributor; this is a very sad thing. It is inexcusable to do that to any human person. So thank you again, your getting together to think through what you can do is exactly the right issue, the right challenge, and Ashoka would like to do whatever we can to be helpful, we love to work with you and work with Korea’s best entrepreneurs, to marry you into this wonderful global community. Thank you very much for what you’re doing.