Upon finishing The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, three words came to mind: it's about time.  Lately, I've felt that the social entrepreneurship movement has grown too large, encompassing too many sub-topics that don't necessarily relate to each other.  With their new book, however, authors John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan manage to unite the wide-ranging discipline of social entrepreneurship, using sharp analysis, compelling anecdotes and an eye towards future study.  Simply put, this book is a must-read for the 'social entrepreneurship' crowd – one that transcends the aforementioned sub-topics.

As I read The Power of Unreasonable People, I decided to mark pages on which something unique appeared.  Rather than summarize the book – go to Amazon for that – my review will concentrate on these unique elements, listed in no particular order.

Page 2: A growing number of companies, like Accenture, say that offering the opportunity to work alongside accomplished entrepreneurs factors into staff retention.  This indicates a new trend among Generation Y employees (those born after 1982) – they want meaningful careers as well as well-paying jobs.  Can’t have your cake and eat it too?  Maybe you can – and companies need to get on board if they are to continue to attract top talent.

Page 11: The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship has joined forces with the Lemelson Foundation to establish the Leapfrog Fund, designed to spur the transfer of successful innovations between entrepreneurs in different parts of the world.  I hadn’t heard about this, but it is long overdue.  The tools, models and ideas that work should be replicated – but that requires serious technical assistance and favorable financing.  Kudos to Lemelson in particular for stepping up on this.

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This year's topic for the St. Gallen's Symposium set me thinking...

Global Capitalism, Local Values
There has been much discussion about Bill Gates' keynote address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he pushed for "a creative capitalism" that uses market forces to address the needs of the world's poorest countries. In his keynote, Gates told the audience that, "We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well."

Even as academics such as Prof. C. K. Prahalad at the University of Michigan and Prof. Kasturi Rangan at Harvard Business School write and research extensively on the opportunities at the base of the economic pyramid, does development through enterprise (DTE) remain by and large a Western concept? Is global capitalism a wave that originates from the West and trickles to the developed countries?

Clash in Values
Based largely upon my experiences in the development sector in India, I believe the success of global concepts (spawned in the West) ultimately lies in their implementation at a local level.

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