Ashoka
Bill
Bill Drayton is a social entrepreneur with a long record of founding organizations, bringing big change, and service. As a student, he founded organizations ranging from Yale Legislative Services to Harvard’s Ashoka Table, an inter-disciplinary weekly forum on how society truly works. After graduation from Harvard, he received an M.A. from Balliol College in Oxford University and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Over ten years at McKinsey & Company, he brought significant structural changes to policy and organizations. He also taught at Stanford Law School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He served in the Carter Administration White House and as Assistant Administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, where he launched emissions trading and many other lasting reforms. He launched Ashoka in 1981. He used the stipend he received when elected a MacArthur Fellow in 1984 to devote himself fully to Ashoka. Bill is Ashoka’s Chair and Chief Executive Officer. He is also chair of three other organizations; Youth Venture, Community Greens, and Get America Working!
Bill has won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. He has honorary doctorates from Yale, NYU, and others; and he is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was selected one of America’s Best Leaders by US News & World Report and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. Other awards include the Yale Law School’s highest alumni honor, the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Achievement Award International; and the National Academy of Public Administration National Public Service Award.
Bill is an avid backpacker. He especially loves long, off trail, above the tree line immersions.
As Ashoka’s CEO, Bill brings history-based vision and a deep grasp of how things work to help Ashoka keep learning and keep changing big time so that it and its community can make the truly big contributions it can and must. He has overall management responsibility and, as one of three members of the Leadership Team, has special responsibilities for Purpose Teams (e.g. Young People, Climate), “Jujitsu” Partners and Metro Areas, Frame Change/Communications, organizational evolution, and Search/Talent.
(photo: (c) Yusuke Abe)
Become Local Change Makers Through Social Entrepreneurship
We now live in an ever-changing world that demands everyone to be able to contribute to and adapt to change, i.e., to be a changemaker, to be able to participate and contribute.
Ashoka insight
It would not be an exaggeration to say that we face the "everyone a changemaker" challenge. The rate of change and the degree and extent of interconnection are going up exponentially, faster and faster all across the world. The choice is to prepare all Indians to be able to contribute to this change -- in which case it can either quickly become one of the world’s most successful societies -- or to miss the opportunity and end up being deeply and bitterly divided by "the new inequality" between a portion of the population that can and is playing in the new game and the others who do not have the ability to do so.
This, "the new inequality." is deeply destructive and divisive leading to unequal income distributions across the world. There’s a bidding war for those who have the skills to participate in the fast-growing "everyone a changemaker" world. Indeed, that demand is rising exponentially just as the demand for repetition is fading drastically. This is worse than all those that went before because it deepens every year -- and by an amount greater than it deepened the year before. Each country tends to think they are a function of peculiarly local dynamics. However, they are universal because the underlying forces are universal.
Individuals and organizations that see the historical transition that is already dominant will have tremendous advantages. On the other hand, missing a deep historical turning point like this is a big mistake. This profound transformation taking place because the ‘everyone a changemaker’ world is a dramatically better world. With everyone a collaborating changemaker, there is no way the problems can continue to outrun solutions. With everyone needing all those in one’s constantly changing team of teams to be highly skilled, this is inherently a society where everyone is powerful. Finally, this is a world where everyone can experience happiness and health of living a life of expressing love and respect in action at significant levels.