ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Power of Unreasonable People has involved a much longer journey than either of us originally imagined. Our families, friends, and colleagues could be forgiven for considering the project an unreasonable incursion. But the upside has been that our thinking— and, with it, this book—has had to evolve.

In retrospect, The Power of Unreasonable People forms part of a trilogy, beginning in 1997 with the first publication of Cannibals with Forks.¹ This book brought the notion of multidimensional value creation—and the term triple bottom line—to a wider audience, mainly businesspeople but also some of the entrepreneurs profiled here.² The book focused on some of the processes by which economic, social, and environmental value can be created— or destroyed. The Chrysalis Economy, the second book in the trilogy, explored some of the ways in which—to use a term coined by our friend and colleague Jed Emerson—new forms of “blended value” can be created.³ Published in 2001, The Chrysalis Economy predicted a period of profound creative destruction in the global economy, most intensively through 2000–2030.

That same year that the second book was published, we first met at a summit on social entrepreneurship held at the World Economic Forum and hosted by the Schwab Foundation. We began formal work on what would become The Power of Unreasonable People a couple of years later. The book introduces and evaluates some of the most interesting entrepreneurs we have had the pleasure to meet and, in a number of instances, work with. A key part of our purpose is to better connect these people with mainstream markets, businesses, and financial institutions.

Recalling and thanking everyone who contributed directly or indirectly to The Power of Unreasonable People would be a Herculean task. Having visited hundreds of entrepreneurs and companies around the world, and talked to literally thousands of people, it is impossible to rewind and acknowledge all the conversations and events that have shaped our thinking.

Take, as an example, the breakfast one of us had with Hervé Houdré, general manager of one of Washington, D.C.’s, best-known institutions, the Willard Hotel. When he heard what we were doing, he steered us across the street to a nearby Borders bookshop and ensured that we tracked down a copy of Walter Isaacson’s stunning biography of one of the most extraordinary social entrepreneurs of all time: Benjamin Franklin.⁴ Houdré—who has led the charge in greening the Willard and the wider InterContinental Hotels Group—also underscores a central theme of the book: entrepreneurial solutions to the world’s greatest challenges are being developed in major global businesses, not just in small-scale social enterprises. And both sides, we argue, have a huge amount to learn from the other.

The Power of Unreasonable People has been an open source project.⁵ That said, many of those whose wisdom, expertise, and experience we have drawn on are mentioned in the text and in the references section at the end of the book. To further signal and acknowledge those wider debts, we would like to thank four groups of people without whose support the book would not have been possible—at least, not in anything like its current form.

First of all, our sincere thanks go to Professor Klaus and Hilde Schwab for creating the Schwab Foundation—and for opening up the workings of the World Economic Forum, which they also founded, to social entrepreneurs. We also acknowledge the debt we owe to the foundation’s other board members: Stephen Brenninkmeijer, business entrepreneur and head of the United Kingdom’s Andromeda Fund; best-selling author Paulo Coelho; David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University; composer Quincy Jones; Zanele Mbeki, South Africa’s first lady; Lord David Puttnam, former chairman of the United Kingdom’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts; and Muhammad Yunus, founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. We also thank the Schwab Foundation’s Mirjam Schöning, Parag Gupta, Kevin Teo, and Sandor Nagy, a great team of colleagues whose constant work makes a difference to social and environmental entrepreneurship globally.

Second, our thanks go to five other groups that played key roles in supporting The Power of Unreasonable People: Sustain-Ability (particularly Seb Beloe, Maggie Brenneke, Ritu Khanna, Sam Lakha, Mark Lee, Geoff Lye, Kavita Prakash-Mani, Sophia Tickell, and Peter Zollinger—plus SustainAbility faculty members Jed Emerson of Generation Investment Management, Peter Kinder of KLD, Jane Nelson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Jan-Olaf Willums of InSpire Invest); the World Economic Forum, especially André Schneider and Ged Davis (who has since retired from the forum but is actively involved in the renewable energy industry); the DSM Agency (especially Doris Michaels and Delia Fakis), which has enthusiastically and professionally represented the book and helped us improve the manuscript in a number of ways; and Harvard Business Press, our publishers (particularly Astrid Sandoval, to whom—alongside George Bernard Shaw—we owe our title, and Kirsten Sandberg, Jennifer Waring, Ania Wieckowski, Carolyn Monaco, Michelle Morgan, Daisy Hutton, Zeenat Potia, and Sarah Mann); and Colleen Kaftan and Lorry Maggio, who helped us run the last quarter mile. SustainAbility also gratefully acknowledges the generous three-year funding it received in 2006 from the Skoll Foundation, with particular thanks to Jeff Skoll and Sally Osberg. Thanks, too, to Sandy Herz, Rowena Young, and Andrea Westall for their help in building our involvement in the Skoll World Forums.

Third, we want to express our huge admiration of—and appreciation for—the social entrepreneurs and their many investors and supporters, without whom this book would have been impossible. Many are referenced in the following pages, but for a fuller sense of who is now involved, we recommend visiting www.ashoka.org, www.schwabfound.org, and www.skollfoundation.org. For further background, we recommend the work of David Bornstein, especially How to Change the World.

Fourth and finally, honoring our most heartfelt debts, we dedicate the book to our families: Elaine, Gaia, and Hania Elkington; and Martin, Emilie, and Jesse Hartigan. They have made contributions too numerous and too diverse to mention. This book has benefited from an array of conversations over several years, many of them with those dearest to us. We hope they will think that the journey has been worth the adventures to date—and that they will be happy to embark with us on the next leg.