20 tweets about social entrepreneurs (by David Bornstein)

1. Social entrepreneurs are unwilling, or unable, to rest until they have spread their ideas society-wide.
2. An important social change frequently begins with a single entrepreneurial author: one obsessive individual who sees a problem and envisions a new solution.
3. Every change begins with a vision and a decision to take action (…) Then, social change takes a long, long time.
4. An entrepreneur is not happy solving a problem in one village or two schools.
5. Social entrepreneurs make dictators uncomfortable.
6. The corpus of knowledge in social entrepreneurship comes from first-hand engagement with the world—from asking lots of questions and listening and observing with a deep caring to understand.
7. Social entrepreneurs have a profound effect on society, yet their corrective function remains poorly understood and underappreciated.
8. A real entrepreneur has to listen to the environment very well.
9. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states (…) People possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems.
10. I am an entrepreneur, and as an entrepreneur, I am always possessed by an idea.
11. An idea is like a play. It needs a good producer and a good promoter even if it is a masterpiece. Otherwise, the play may never open; or it may open but, for lack of an audience, close after a week.
12. An idea will not move from the fringes to the mainstream simply because it is good; it must be skillfully marketed before it will actually shift people’s perceptions and behavior.
13. If ideas are to take root and spread, therefore, they need champions—obsessive people who have the skill, motivation, energy, and bullheadedness to do whatever is necessary to move them forward: to persuade, inspire, seduce, cajole, enlighten, touch hearts, alleviate fears, shift perceptions, articulate meanings and artfully maneuver them through systems.
14. Changing a system means changing attitudes, expectations, and behaviors. It means overcoming disbelief, prejudice, and fear.
15. Old systems do not readily embrace new ideas or information.
16. Gandhi, despite his other-worldly appearance, was fully engaged in the details of politics, administration, and implementation.
17. The best thing is not to have a picture of what you want, but to have basic principles.
18. The essence of good marketing is ensuring that anyone on the path to your destination who can foil your plans by saying no says yes.
19. Entrepreneurs have in their heads the vision of how society will be different when their idea is at work, and they can’t stop until that idea is not only at work in one place, but is at work across the whole society.
20. The how-to test is one of the most important tests for going after this type of personality. Press them. Take a how-to issue— ‘How are you going to solve this problem?’—and push them from the first to the second to the third to the fourth level of the challenge.

David Bornstein 
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
OUP USA (2nd edition), 2017
368 pp.