Imagine a world where everyone is really a change maker.

We started Ashoka here in India with a simple idea: that you needed social entrepreneurs to deal with problems that don't fit the business paradigm.

How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus? Especially since the work involves such breadth that the boredom of routine or specialization does not exist.

What is the most powerful lever you can imagine? A big idea, but only if it's in the hands of a truly outstanding entrepreneur. It starts with the person and the idea, and then grows to the institution. All three are intertwined.

Of course you can do it. It doesn't require brilliance. It's just giving yourself permission and then being persistent. Persistent in seeing the problem or opportunity and persistent in thinking about it until you have come up with some interesting ideas that might change the pattern. It's really a mindset, not anything in the objective world - that is the problem.

What is the most powerful force in the world? And I think you would agree that is a big idea if it is in the hands of an entrepreneur who is actually going to make the idea not only happen, but spread all across society. And we understand that in business but we have need for entrepreneurship just as much in education, human rights, health, and the environment as we do in hotels and steel.

Every successful organization has to make the transition from a world defined primarily by repetition to one primarily defined by change. This is the biggest transformation in the structure of how humans work together since the Agricultural Revolution.