The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World

PREFACE

First, a word or two about our title. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, whereas “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”¹ By this definition, not only are most of the entrepreneurs described in the following pages unreasonable—many have actually been dubbed “crazy,” even by family and friends—but a large slice of the future may hinge on their success in spreading their apparently unhinged ideas and business models.

It is clear that the world faces epochal challenges—from outright conflict, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction; to poverty and hunger; to the threat of global pandemics ...