Book summary “Getting beyond better”: summary

Introduction

You often face persistent social problems that seem immune to charity, government programs, or political advocacy. Pumping money into broken systems only treats symptoms without shifting the underlying structures that cause suffering.

Roger L. Martin and Sally Osberg argue in Getting Beyond Better that true social entrepreneurship is not about scaling an organization or delivering services. You must instead aim to transform an unjust or stable equilibrium into a new, superior, and permanent state of balance.

The book provides a clear framework to help you understand this distinct form of change. You will learn how to identify equilibrium dynamics, envision a better future, build sustainable models, and scale your impact.

• How do you distinguish social entrepreneurship from social service and social activism?
• What mental models do you need to see hidden structures in society?
• How do you construct and scale a new equilibrium that lasts?

1. What is Social Entrepreneurship

Many important leadership roles and benevolent acts are often mislabeled as social entrepreneurship. You must carefully distinguish social entrepreneurs from social service providers and social advocates.

Social entrepreneurship must be strictly defined by its goal to transform an existing, stable, but unjust equilibrium rather than merely providing social services or advocating for policy changes.

Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity provided vital direct aid to the poor without changing the systemic drivers of poverty. That effort made her an exemplary social service provider rather than a social entrepreneur.

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked as social advocates. They took indirect action through legislative lobbying to transform equal rights.

Building a Theory

The Skoll Foundation's awards program has acted as a developmental laboratory for clarifying the definition and practices of social entrepreneurship. Established in 1999, the foundation provided recognition and funding to organizations driving positive change. That support helped the authors refine their theoretical framework as reflective practitioners.

The authors used insights gathered from sifting through applications for the first Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship in the spring of 2004 to clarify their definitions. By that time, the foundation had recognized and funded approximately one hundred social entrepreneurial organizations.

Social engagement can be categorized along two axes: direct versus indirect action, and system maintenance versus system transformation. Crossing those two distinctions separates different actors clearly:

• social service providers who take direct action to maintain systems;
• social advocates who take indirect action to transform systems;
• social entrepreneurs who take direct action to transform systems.

Social entrepreneurship requires three distinct characteristics to succeed. You must navigate the process by following specific requirements:

• Identify a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes exclusion, marginalization, or suffering.
• Develop, test, refine, and scale an equilibrium-shifting solution deploying a social value proposition.
• Forge a new stable equilibrium that unleashes new value for society, releases trapped potential, or alleviates suffering.

Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for Grameen Bank. Kailash Satyarthi won in 2014 for GoodWeave, exemplifying successful global recognition of social entrepreneurship.

Andrew Carnegie shifted a closed loop of privilege regarding access to books by creating a structured funding model that established thousands of free public libraries. Recognizing how expensive books created a closed loop of privilege for the wealthy during the industrial revolution, Carnegie deployed his wealth to build a national network of public libraries based on strict community commitments.

Andrew Carnegie leveraged a childhood experience using Colonel James Anderson's personal library of four hundred volumes to eventually fund over twenty-five hundred libraries globally using a specific set of matching criteria across thirty-six years of program operation. Out of those, seventeen hundred libraries were funded in the United States, representing half of all US libraries by 1919. Communities met strict requirements to qualify:

• Demonstrate the need for a public library.
• Provide the building site.
• Commit to dedicating an amount equivalent to 10 percent of the construction cost annually for operation through raised or allocated taxes.
• Promise free service to all.

Vicky Colbert transformed rural education in Colombia by creating a self-paced, cooperative learning model that replaced the old traditional teacher-centered classroom equilibrium. According to the 1973 Colombian census, 33.6 percent of the labor force with no schooling was concentrated in rural areas. The adult literacy rate in Colombia was 63 percent in 1960 and rose to 81 percent in 1975. Colbert founded Escuela Nueva as an NGO to codify pedagogical approaches that eventually became national policy in Colombia and expanded to twenty thousand schools in Colombia, as well as to Vietnam and Brazil.

The work of social entrepreneurship follows a four-stage process heuristic consisting of understanding the world, envisioning a new future, building a model for change, and scaling the solution. Successful transformation requires studying the existing system, setting high-bar directions for targeted constituents, building a permanent and sustainable model, and executing scalable solutions without requiring constant uniform investments. Vicky Colbert acted as a prototypical social entrepreneur by taking direct action through Escuela Nueva, and then leveraged social advocacy by becoming Minister of Education to scale her model rapidly.

2. Pathways of Social Transformation

Progress often requires shifting an established social equilibrium that is stable yet unjust or suboptimal.

A system in equilibrium is balanced, persistent, and self-reinforcing. It feels entirely natural to its participants. Social transformation happens when individuals challenge this status quo to move society to a superior state.

Before Gutenberg, the written word was cartelized by the church and elites. Expensive hand-produced books kept knowledge away from the masses.

Foundations of Social Transformation

Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities operate under a prevailing paradigm. This paradigm solves local puzzles until accumulated anomalies create a crisis. A revolutionary shift to a new paradigm then occurs.

The Ptolemaic model of an earth-centered universe was upended by Copernicus and later Galileo. They established a new heliocentric paradigm.

During normal periods, societies tend to ameliorate the negative effects of an unhappy equilibrium rather than remaking the system. Governments enact regulatory patches and charities apply balms to sore spots. These actions make life slightly better for the disadvantaged while leaving the fundamental structure intact.

Legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank attempt to manage broken systems. Food banks and free health services do the same.

Pathways of Change

Governments generate transformative change through policy innovation, legal frameworks, and enforcing a social contract. Governing bodies can establish new mandates enshrined as law that permanently redistribute rights and benefits. This change typically happens through dialogue and pressure from citizens or activists.

The Magna Carta in 1215 forced King John to relinquish unlimited powers. The US Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination.

Businesses act as catalysts for social transformation by creating new markets and providing commercial innovations. Customers pay for these offerings. Commercial enterprises scale solutions to unmet needs, generating profits that fuel their expansion while altering the terms of how people live and work.

Thomas Edison created an electric company to manufacture and market the commercial incandescent lightbulb, transforming a sooty, dark world. Global economic output grew at a rate of 0.22 percent per year for the thousand years leading up to 1820. In the 180 years following 1820, global growth reached a 2.2 percent compound annual rate.

Commercial personal computing liberated users from the centralized control of corporate information technology departments. Processing power and data moved inside desktop devices, overthrowing the suboptimal equilibrium of massive, centralized mainframe computers.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created the Apple II in 1977, following the 1974 release of the Altair computer kit. This effort established the first commercial personal computer with a supporting enterprise behind it.

Many complex modern challenges require combining elements of both government-led and business-led transformation. Pure business innovation and government policy each have distinct limits. Social entrepreneurs emerge to draw tools and principles from both realms to change an equilibrium.

3. The Nature of Social Entrepreneurship

Government-led and business-led transformations operate through fundamentally different beneficiaries, scopes, structures, and purposes. Government-led transformation aims at social benefit and ubiquitous improvement for all citizens through mandatory structures like laws and policies. Business-led transformation aims at profit through voluntary, limited offerings designed for customers who choose to purchase products or services.

Social entrepreneurship navigates between government and business constraints by creatively combining elements from both poles to achieve equilibrium change.

While businesses are constrained by the profit imperative and governments by the need for ubiquitous benefit, social entrepreneurship tackles challenges that affect most citizens but do not conform to mandated solutions or generate traditional business profits. You find that charity often perpetuates poverty by taking initiative away from the poor, whereas social business provides sustainable income-generation capability.

Muhammad Yunus broke the cycle of poverty in Bangladesh by creating a new banking model that collateralized the poor through joint liability groups. Conventional banking requires collateral that the extremely poor lack, forcing them into exploitative middlemen. Yunus realized he could derisk microloans by lending to individuals through small groups with joint liability and frequent collection.

Muhammad Yunus started by lending the equivalent of 27 US dollars from his own pocket to forty-two stoolmakers in Jobra, Bangladesh, who successfully repaid every taka and spawned the Grameen Bank. The Grameen Bank serves more than eight million customers and achieves over 96 percent loan recovery rate of Grameen Bank each year while earning $250 million in revenue in 2010.

To replicate such models, you can apply specific operating steps:

• Make loans to individuals but through small groups who have joint liability
• Ensure loans are for business, not consumption
• Require frequent collection, usually weekly
• Charge significant interest rates that remain relatively low compared to moneylenders

Government vs Business Transformation

Sir Ronald Cohen applied venture capital tools to the social sector by founding Big Society Capital to give not-for-profits access to capital markets. While the social sector has vast assets and workforce, it lacks access to diverse capital options like secured debt and equity. Big Society Capital acts as a wholesaler of capital to create social investment firms that fund frontline social organizations.

Sir Ronald Cohen cofounded Apax Partners, Britain's first private equity and venture capital firm, before launching Big Society Capital in 2011. Apax Partners operates $20 billion in assets, while the US not-for-profit workforce includes nine million people alongside three-quarters of a trillion dollars in US foundation assets. The UK social sector workforce reaches eight hundred thousand people supported by 100 billion pounds in UK foundation assets and 600 million pounds in funding from the UK Commission on Unclaimed Assets for Big Society Capital.

Outsiders to the social sector possess an analytical advantage that allows them to spot opportunities missed by insiders conditioned to the current equilibrium. Insiders within a constrained sector are often too habituated to existing limitations to fathom structural changes, whereas outsiders with expertise from other fields can introduce revolutionary models. Sir Ronald Cohen was able to see the possibilities in social finance because his venture capital background gave him an outsider's advantage.

Outsiders and Financial Innovation

Nandan Nilekani applied business-to-government entrepreneurship through India's Unique Identification Authority to solve legal exclusion and welfare fraud. Hundreds of millions of poor individuals lacking birth certificates or identification documents are treated as nonpersons, cut off from legal rights and economic activity. Project Aadhaar provides a unique, fraud-proof digital identifier using multimodal biometrics.

Nandan Nilekani, cofounder of Infosys, was appointed chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2009 to implement Project Aadhaar. A decade ago, four hundred million people lacked formal identification documents in India, out of 1.2 billion total citizens of India. Project Aadhaar achieves a 99.9 percent accuracy rate of biometric uniqueness assessment with a peak number of thirty thousand enrollment stations across India.

UIDAI processed one million unique IDs processed by UIDAI per day at peak using a core staff of three hundred people in the main UIDAI organization. By 2014, 720 million people were issued an Aadhaar number. Social entrepreneurship can operate successfully even within traditional government spaces by applying entrepreneurial tools and voluntary participation models. Although UIDAI was a government branch staffed by civil servants offering free identification, it operated like an entrepreneurial venture with a lean core team, an extensive partner ecosystem, and voluntary adoption.

4. Understanding the World and Envisioning Change

Social entrepreneurs must deliberately navigate opposing tensions and envision specific, superior future states rather than settling for amelioration.

To change an unjust equilibrium, you must deliberately navigate three opposing pairs of tensions: abhorrence and appreciation, expertise and apprenticeship, and experimentation and commitment. If you lean entirely into abhorrence, you reject the system completely and lose the ability to see its levers. If you only appreciate it, you accept the unhappy equilibrium. Similarly, you must balance your domain expertise with the naïveté of an apprentice.

Traditional top-down development aid frequently fails because experts impose technological solutions without understanding the context. Rooted in post-World War II ideologies, aid agencies often operate with an expert-driven mindset that ignores indigenous traditions.

Development officials in Senegal brought water wells, schools, and millet grinders without community dialogue or education. This resulted in corroded machines and broken pumps.

While domain expertise helps you spot misalignments in a system, it can become a trap if it limits your perspective. Muhammad Yunus used his expertise as an economist to understand how moneylending excluded the poor. Yet he had to immerse himself in villages to see through their eyes.

The Tensions of Understanding

Molly Melching experienced these tensions in Senegal, where she balanced her abhorrence of poverty with an appreciation of village structures. She shifted between her background as an educator and an apprentice to local women.

Sustainable social change requires building a community-empowerment model that equips locals with literacy and problem-solving skills. Molly Melching founded Tostan in 1991 to scale a Community Empowerment Program reaching 350 villages and 15,000 participants three years after its founding.

Participating villages follow specific practices:

• House a Tostan facilitator for the program's three-year duration.
• Provide a place for classes to meet.
• Establish a community management committee of 17 members, with at least 8 being women.

Harmful traditional practices like female genital cutting are sustained by deep social norms. Change happens when women learn about human rights and engage in internal deliberation. Tostan added a human rights module addressing female genital cutting after local women advocated for it. By early 2014, 6,500 communities in eight African countries had publicly declared their decision to abandon female genital cutting, which affects 125 million girls and women worldwide.

Gerry Mackie noted the parallel between Tostan's community declarations in Senegal and historical pledge societies that ended foot binding in China. Systemic shifts in widespread social conventions require a critical mass of people across interconnected communities to publicly pledge their commitment to change.

Transformation Not Amelioration

Severe infrastructure gaps in sub-Saharan Africa render health systems ineffective due to a lack of reliable transportation management. Barry Coleman and Randy Mamola witnessed hemorrhaging women carted in wheelbarrows and countless vehicles left to rust during a 1988 trip to Somalia. Africa suffers from a ten-year shorter life expectancy, double the global average for child mortality, and 0.2 doctors for every thousand citizens. Thirty thousand children under five die every day from preventable diseases, and twenty-two million children are missed by immunization programs. An unmanaged vehicle in rural Africa lasts a little over a year, while a motorcycle lasts eight months.

You must operate in high-risk zones analogous to flat-track racing cushions to achieve breakthrough social change. Andrea and Barry Coleman, founders of Riders for Health, apply their passion for motorcycle racing to manage transportation systems for health care in sub-Saharan Africa.

Social entrepreneurs must aim for structural equilibrium change rather than merely ameliorating current negative conditions. Instead of simply buying new trucks to replace broken ones, Riders for Health partners with African health ministries to reform the entire discipline of fleet management.

A winning aspiration must focus on a targeted constituency while simultaneously accounting for the broader ecosystem. Molly Melching considered not only young girls subjected to forced genital cutting but also families, religious leaders, and government agencies.

Systemic transformation in health delivery requires disciplined preventive maintenance and operator training rather than mere equipment procurement. Transport Resource Management ensures vehicles run with maximum reliability.

Workers follow clear operational practices:

• Provide regular scheduled maintenance on health-care delivery vehicles on an outreach basis.
• Train health workers on how to operate their vehicles effectively.
• Conduct daily maintenance checks including oil levels, tires, brakes, and lights.
• Plan and budget for ongoing operating costs like fuel.

In Lesotho, after six years of Riders for Health implementing proper maintenance, workers achieved 100 percent reliability for fleet operations. In Zimbabwe, malaria deaths decreased by 21 percent in a served district, whereas a neighboring unserved district saw a 44 percent increase.

A vision for a new equilibrium must be specific and portray a demonstrably superior and sustainable future state. You must remain adaptable in your methods and evolve your operational models while keeping your core vision unchanged. Riders for Health evolved from maintenance services to Transportation Asset Management in the Gambia, covering twelve million kilometers without a single breakdown across a total area of eleven thousand three hundred square kilometers where less than 20 percent of roads are paved and 43 percent of the population lives in rural areas.

10 Key Ideas

1. Social entrepreneurship must be strictly defined by its goal to transform an existing, stable, but unjust equilibrium rather than merely providing social services or advocating for policy changes.
2. Andrew Carnegie shifted a closed loop of privilege regarding access to books by creating a structured funding model that established thousands of free public libraries.
3. Progress often requires shifting an established social equilibrium that is stable yet unjust or suboptimal.
4. Social entrepreneurship navigates between government and business constraints by creatively combining elements from both poles to achieve equilibrium change.
5. Muhammad Yunus broke the cycle of poverty in Bangladesh by creating a new banking model that collateralized the poor through joint liability groups.
6. Outsiders to the social sector possess an analytical advantage that allows them to spot opportunities missed by insiders conditioned to the current equilibrium.
7. Social entrepreneurs must deliberately navigate opposing tensions and envision specific, superior future states rather than settling for amelioration.
8. Molly Melching founded Tostan in 1991 to scale a Community Empowerment Program reaching 350 villages and 15,000 participants three years after its founding.
9. Andrea and Barry Coleman, founders of Riders for Health, apply their passion for motorcycle racing to manage transportation systems for health care in sub-Saharan Africa.
10. Social entrepreneurs must aim for structural equilibrium change rather than merely ameliorating current negative conditions.