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.

The social entrepreneurs are governments' best friends.

An entrepreneur is someone who brings a pattern change.

It's not to give people fish It's not to teach them how to fish It's to build a new and better fishing industry

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.

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.

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.