100 Books Like The Unfinished Social Entrepreneur

In Changing the World, Alex tells his own story, and it’s a compelling one, chocked full of useful lessons for anyone hoping to find a way to make a difference and take on any of the world’s seemingly intractable problems.   It’s all here, from how to break in, to recognizing an opportunity when it presents itself and knowing how to take full advantage of it, to building an organization and populating it with the right people, and how to raise the dough to finance your dream.  As to how to break-in, while he doesn’t say as much, I know Alex shares my view that the fastest and best way to break into international development work is to go and live where the problems of poverty live – which in Alex’s case was Bangladesh.  There he apprenticed himself to a 100-karat visionary, authentic social entrepreneur, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.… show more.

Alex Lazarow is one of those rare people who can observe things taking place around the world and package them for us in a way we can comprehend that an important change in the way things used to be done is taking place, and if we want to keep up we need to pay attention.  The change Alex sees is in the way start-ups are happening and companies are being structured.  Whereas investors and entrepreneurs alike used to try to create “unicorns” – i.e., companies that “disrupted” an existing sector with little capital investment and could scale from thousands to millions in sales in less than a year, and IPO the next year to achieve a market cap of billions – Alex thinks the future is with “Camels”, which do not try to scale recklessly to achieve a gigantic short term payday but rather try to build something that is… show more.

This is the follow up to The Art of Innovation which describes the strategies of the world-famous design firm, IDEO, which has dissected the process of innovation and, in this book, identified the types of “personas” a CEO should attract in order to tackle big, difficult problems with novel, creative approaches.  I could definitely relate to the first persona described, The Anthropologist, who spends an inordinate amount of time with the clients, listening and observing, in order to understand what they really desire and what has prevented them thus far from achieving or obtaining it.  I also found The Cross-Pollinator interesting, which argued that you should sometimes involve people from other sectors or countries which may at first glance seem irrelevant to the job at hand but, if given the chance to be “heard”, could lead to a solution.  The author makes the case for another eight personas, who may… show more.

This book is a guide to surviving an existential crisis – what Grove calls a Strategic Inflection Point – when your business is subjected to one or more of six external forces, which, if powerful enough, could destroy the business.  Some of them are obvious – competitors, regulators, customers, vendors – but others more esoteric, like “the possibility your business could be done a different way”, what today we would call being disrupted.  I read it in 2015, when the company I run, FINCA International, was facing five of these six forces, each of which clobbered us with a 10x force compared to the first three decades of our existence, when competition was weak and most external forces enabled our success. How does a CEO respond to this challenge?  Grove’s answer is summarized in the title: remain in a permanent state of dread, which to outsiders might appear on the… show more.

One of the more readable books on the topic of social entrepreneurship, Getting Beyond Better clarifies the mission of the modern social entrepreneur. Like many governments, the social entrepreneur is seeking to provide goods and services to fellow citizens but, unlike most governments, this do-gooder also must contend with the imperative to turn a profit, albeit not to the same extent as most “regular” entrepreneurs. 

Within this distinctive paradigm, social entrepreneurs may be empowered to tackle social problems in ways that are more sustainable, equitable, and benevolent than purely profit-driven entrepreneurship is capable of. For those eager to “do well” for themselves while “doing good” for society, Getting Beyond Better offers a compelling blueprint.

This short book hits the nail on the head over and over about what social entrepreneurship is, what it isn’t, why it matters, and how it differs from other approaches to causing social change.  I have given it to countless people over the years, especially those seeking their own place in the “do good” ecosystem.  On virtually every page, I found multiple insights about the realities of leading social change that I found not only true but also extremely helpful to me as I reflected on my own journey and its highs and lows as well as its more mundane elements and its many absurdities.

Daley-Harris chronicles his experience founding and leading RESULTS, a scrappy and highly effective anti-poverty advocacy organization, and later his work to embed his insights into other organizations working on other crucial issues such as climate change.  His stories of citizens studying issues and then acting in concert with others to drive desperately-needed policy changes and divert hundreds of millions of dollars to effective programs are instructive as well as inspirational.  In this edition, he helpfully breaks down his tactics for spurring unprecedented and highly successful citizen advocacy into bite-sized steps that any organization can adapt.

This guidebook in the form of a memoir, or memoir in the form of a guidebook, is both highly entertaining and profoundly useful.  Through brutally honest stories from his years leading FINCA, the global microfinance network, Scofield shows how social change happens: one mistake, one insight, and one breakthrough at a time.  By laying them out so clearly and in such a reader-friendly format, he has provided a valuable gift to a new generation of changemakers.

The prevailing corporate form renders corporations prone to anti-social and environmentally destructive behavior because they are designed to maximize profits for shareholders without considering the consequences to society and the environment.

I love Better Business because it tells the story of the creation of an emergent alternative corporate form, the B-Corp with benefit corporation governance, that provides a material positive benefit to society and the environment in addition to making profits for shareholders.  

A sustainable economy not only requires new economic principles, but also new corporate forms that are endowed with a social and environmental conscience in addition to the usual pecuniary one. Better Business introduces you to these new corporate forms without bogging you down in legalese.

In social change, it’s easy enough to think you can look at a problem, map out a plan, and execute it. But reality always gets in the way.

In Lean Impact, Ann Mei Chang Shows how to bring an iterative approach to doing good in the world. Translating the “Lean Startup” methodology to social change, Chang shows that it is possible to listen, to learn, and to get results.