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Monolog: Beth Anderson
"Monolog" is a standing feature of The Sophist in which we ask one person to share his or her point of view on issues pertinent to those involved with socially focused organizations. In this issue, we feature Beth Anderson, from the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Name: Beth Anderson
Title: Lecturer and managing director
Organization: Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/case)
Least Favorite Buzzword: “Leverage.” While a useful term and concept, and one that I must admit I actually do use at times, I try to be careful as I hear it used so much now in the philanthropic and nonprofit worlds that it is starting to seem meaningless. If all of these organizations are really “leveraging” so many resources and intervening at points of “high leverage,” it’s amazing we haven’t solved more of the world’s problems. If searching for “leverage” promotes more collaboration in the sector and more rigorous analysis of how and where to invest resources, then I’m all for it. I’m just not sure it’s “leverage.”
Favorite Web Site: While I certainly spend a lot of time online, other than Google or Google News, I can’t say there is any particular Web site I consult regularly. I actually rely on my husband to send me interesting information or links, and I’m rarely disappointed by what he passes on from Arts & Letters Daily (http://www.aldaily.com/). Its motto is “Veritas odit moras,” or “Truth hates delay,” and it’s a long page of brief summaries and links to articles, books, and opinions on ideas, art, and culture. With updated links every day, if you have time to scan it, there’s almost always something new and thought-provoking of interest.
Favorite Quotation: “I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound--if I can remember any of the damn things.” --Dorothy Parker
Recommended Reading: While I used to be an avid reader, the only book I’ve managed to read since returning to work from maternity leave last summer is actually David Bornstein’s How to Change the World (which I recommend to anyone interested in social entrepreneurship, and, no, he didn’t pay me or even ask me to promote it). Having resigned myself, at least in the short term, to only reading what I can digest in one sitting, I’d recommend the new Stanford Social Innovation Review, which seems to be aiming to be the Harvard Business Review of the social sector, and subscribing to the weekly digest of the Gilbert Center’s Nonprofit Online News (http://news.gilbert.org/), which I find does a great job of surfacing and vetting worthwhile articles, information, and opinions of interest to the nonprofit community and society in general.
Prediction for the Sector: I recently returned from the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, which was both a humbling and inspiring experience. One of the real themes I heard there was the need for improvements in the “social capital markets,” or really the creation of a new financial services industry to serve the social sector. This was not a new theme by any means, but it did seem to have taken on a greater sense of urgency, mixed with a feeling of hope. Lester Salamon’s presentation on the rapid growth and scale of the “civil society sector” around the world was quite striking. And while there are clearly significant challenges facing this sector, it seems likely it will continue to grow and become an even greater economic force and one that will actually be recognized as such. But for the sector to reach its real potential, there need to be some fundamental, radical advances in the mechanisms and institutions for social investment. My hope is that with this growth, the increased attention on the role of social entrepreneurship in society and the continued blurring of sector boundaries (for-profit, nonprofit, and public), the revolution, or at least rapid evolution, of the social financial services industry is not too far in the distance. So this may be more wishful thinking than a prediction, but I’m cautiously optimistic, at least some of the time.
Hedgehog or Fox?* I’d have to say that I’m a fox that is envious of the hedgehogs. I feel like I am often in search of that unified vision, but that the older I get, the further I feel from discovering it.
* This alludes to Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," in which he uses a line from the Greek poet Archilochus ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.") as the basis for dividing writers and thinkers into one of two categories: the hedgehogs "who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance" and the foxes "who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause…seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision." Berlin says Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust are hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, and Joyce are foxes.
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