In an increasingly connected world it is less likely that a few people 'manage' everyone else. The new environment requires a shift in the organization of both institutions and societies, one of flexible teams of teams that come together around whatever change opportunities exist and then reform around the next.

What does an entrepreneur do? The first thing is they've given themselves permission to see a problem. Most people don't want to see problems ... Once you see a problem and you keep looking at it you'll find an answer.

It's the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there's nothing more powerful. That's just as true [for] education and human rights as it is for hotel or steels.

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.

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.

We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing.

The one single factor that determines society’s success is the percentage of change-makers within it.