Bridget Kendall is BBC Diplomatic Correspondent, covering major international developments, with a particular interest in Russia. She is also host of The Forum, the flagship ideas programme for the BBC World Service.
2012 SESSIONS
BBC Forum: A Relationship of Equals?
Location: Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre
Those who come together in pursuit of social change may aspire to a partnership of equality, but do they ever achieve it? Is it possible to create and achieve a true balance of power when the ‘outsiders’ have most of the money and much of the resources? Hear perspectives on this sensitive topic from leaders and practitioners around the globe. This special session will be recorded by the acclaimed Forum radio programme airing on the BBC World Service which reaches over 166 million globally. Audience members will be encouraged to engage with the guests and host, Bridget Kendall.
Speakers: Geeta Rao Gupta, Brizio Biondi-Morra, Bridget Kendall, William Foote
2011 SESSIONS
BBC Forum: Is Heroism Obsolete?
Join celebrated thinkers and doers from different cultures and perspectives for this intellectually provocative conversation around the question “Is HeroismObsolete?” Drawing upon themes relevant to social entrepreneurs, host and BBC correspondent Bridget Kendall engages participants and audience members in this special taping of the acclaimed BBC Forum radio programme airing to 40 million globally. Come prepared to engage.
Speakers: Bridget Kendall, Roshaneh Zafar, Ken Brecher, Larry Brilliant
BBC Forum: Is Heroism Obsolete?
From: BBC Forum: Is Heroism Obsolete? | With: Larry Brilliant, Roshaneh Zafar, Ken Brecher, Bridget Kendall
A warm welcome to the forum from BBC and from me, Bridget Kendall, and an international audience of social entrepreneurs here in Oxford. Yes, as you can hear today, we are at the annual Skoll World Forum - yes, another forum - to discuss heroism and risk in the emerging field of social entrepreneurs.
These mavericks and risk takers, like all of you in front of me here in the audience I guess, take bold ideas from the world of business and look for ways to improve the lives of many. So that sounds quite heroic. But what does it mean to be a hero today? And is the way that social entrepreneurs lead change similar to what heroes do?
Well, to discuss all this with me is Larry Brilliant, doctor and social entrepreneur who helped eliminate smallpox; Ken Brecher, anthropologist, champion of libraries; and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh Zafar</span><span class="STtranscriptContent" name="58860" id="STtranscriptContent28" contenteditable="true" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">,
</span>social entrepreneur working in Pakistan. And to kick off, I wanted to ask all three of you As far as heroes go, who's your favorite hero, whether real or comic book or from the movies or mythical?
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh</span>, what about you? Well, when I was fourteen, it was Indiana Jones. But as I grew maturer I realized there was more to life than just a swashbuckling hero that I needed. So, I guess, in today's...you know, why I do what I do, it's because of Dr. Yunus. And I really learned humility from him.
And I think one of the attributes that heroes carry with them is the sense of knowing that they haven't got it all.
The guru of microfinance. We'll talk about that more in a minute. What about you, Larry Brilliant? It's a hard question to answer. There are so many heroes. But because I'm sitting next to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh</span> Zafar, I will tell you about a young man named Zafar Hussein, who is the person who taught me about small pox eradication.
And he typifies heroism because he came from a poor village in Bhopal and he left everything, his family, his meager income, to take a risk to try to eradicate smallpox from India. He put it all at stake to try to reach a noble goal, and for me that's really an aspect of heroism that I most admire. Zafar by the way means means victory.
Very appropriate. And what about you Ken Brecher? I like those heroes who are full of human faults and hubris and problems. I think Iron Man is a wonderful Particularly in the films where he not only has to ability to do good but he's also a bit of a mess himself.
It's interesting you say that because know the film world very And I wonder, do you think it's easier for us to identify with mythical and movie heroes? I mean, both <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh and Larry</span><span class="STtranscriptContent" name="167430" id="STtranscriptContent83" contenteditable="true" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "> talked about real life heroes. </span>What do you think? I think it's very easy to identify with and I think it's one of the unifying things in our world.
It's a positive thing that many people, I remember being with a group of colleagues and friends in the Middle East who are coming whole range of backgrounds and religions and we are having a very hard time finding a common ground, and finally I asked, "Is there anyone, has everyone has seen the film "Little Miss Sunshine?"" And they all had.
And I said "and did everyone find it funny?" And they all had. And that was the beginning of our conversation. We had one thing in common at moment. That we had all loved the same film.
I suppose I was thinking the heroes of the moment surely must be those Japanese engineers and workers who've been risking high radiation doses to save their country from who knows what, nuclear holocaust. The nuclear samurais, they've been called, but coming back to your three. Larry Brilliant, if you take a quick glance of what you've done, it 's pretty impressive.
You're one of the four doctors on the United Nations team that run a campaign to eradicate smallpox in South Asia. You launched the Seva Foundation which is helped to get nearly three million blind people their site back. You've run a host of successful companies include Google's philanthropy arm, and you've been personal doctor to the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia.
And now your president of the Skoll Global Threats Fund. Do you think that's enough to make you a hero?
No, it's enough to make me a mythological creature. A sort of Iron Man.
Every time I read my autobiography online always begins by a life with a movie that they have rejected from Hollywood and it didn't feel we are living it but reading it is quiet absurd. I think that the real heroes though are the ones who enter into something with something to lose and I have been lucky in my life in that I didn't have that much to lose and smallpox eradication, I was able to go to villages that had thousands of children dying, but I was immunized.
I had an American Passport, I could leave. The real heroes, the hundreds of thousands of Indians who couldn't leave weren't immunized, put their lives at risk every momment. So the term "heroism", we do ourselves I guess it's a human characteristic to want to bring it all together to one person, but heroism is a much more complex, much more noble concept I think.
I can tell the audience has got things to say about that. We will be coming to you in a minute, but Ken, I want to ask you, you have been an agent of change in many guises. You now run the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the most diverse public library system in America. And for a decade you challenged the movie industry by running the Sundance Institute in California and you are an anthropologist so you can look at all this from on high and take a long view too of these questions.
But what do you think of the qualities of a hero and are they the same qualities that are need by social entrepreneur? Larry said a hero is people who've got something to lose. What do you think about that?
I think there are many social entrepreneurs who are actually the personification of heroes. By that I mean they enter into a very difficult situation without much reward in sight. They usually have a very hard time explaining it to their families, who find that they are away from home at the time they need them the most, because the people they are serving or hoping to serve, need them as well.
I find that the hero social entrepreneur is really the person who is thinking of the moral question. The integrity. The issues. Who doesn't sleep well at night because there are people who need opportunities that they don't have. And I think that's true in mythology too, you find people who rise to the occasion.
Who do something you couldn't do yourself. It's always the question, could I have done that? I have a young son who asked me the other day when I told him I was coming to speak with my colleagues here about heroes, he said to me, "Well there hasn't been a hero since the cavalry stopped riding horses," and this is a young man's view of a certain kind of heroism.
Yeah, it's not quite the same thing being in a 4x4 or a tank.
No, I don't think it is, I don't think it is.
But you're talking about leadership qualities, aren't you? Rising to the occasion. What do you think, Roshaneh, so far? Do you think that's, that heroes are leaders, or actually are they people who don't show leadership skills?
I think they're champions actually, champions of a cause, you know, giving voice to a cause and a lot of times when I think of social entrepreneurs I think of people who don't take no for an answer. For example, my hero in real life is a client of mine, Shaheen, who took on men in the field of making auto parts.
Her husband died and she had two options: either she could rely on the charity of her family members, or she could take on this business which was highly patriarchal and masculine in it's environment. And she actually became more successful than her husband. And if you really go and meet her she's a diminutive lady.
She's about 4 feet 11 inches, but my god is she a ball of fire. So, for me she is my hero because she's transforming society. She's changing lifestyles, and she's pushing the threshold of what is possible. And I think that's what a hero really embodies.
Yesterday, we had an award ceremony here to award Archbishop Desmond Tutu with an award, the treasure award, it's called treasure award and Mabel Van Oranje was sitting over there. I said to her--she was the moderator for the panel--and as she was talking to him, he made her cry. He made her cry because of his nobility, because of his character, because of the history of what he gave to South Africa emerging from Apartheid.
She tried to hide the fact that she was dabbing her eyes with Kleenex, but he made her cry because he's a hero. Later that evening he made us all cry. There are a few moral characteristics that heroes have, he has it, we know he is a hero. We feel it inside.
You know, I heard about this event with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And it's interesting, because I understand that he said to all of you that you were fantastic people, that you were the cat's whiskers, right? Yeah he did.
He did. He was also saying that you entrepreneurs are heroes and it's interesting this idea of whether social entrepreneurs are groundbreaking heroes because you gather at these conferences to inspire each other or maybe even feel a little bit good inside, but is it the case that social entrepreneurs to some extent self appointed heroes?
Could I come back to Desmond Tutu for just a moment, because he did something yesterday that I thought was truly the role of a hero When Peter Gabriel is singing a beautiful song about Biko, he stood up and danced. And I thought that it is! That is the key. We are able never lose the joint be able to see the truth of the world and not be stopped from dancing in the moment of both memory and joy, the loss of a great figure, a true hero who gave his life, but also to feel the joy of the moment and not miss that.
What about the praise that Desmond Tutu gave you?
I think a holy person, a saint, recognizes in her or his parishioners that aspiration and nobility in God, and I think that's what he was doing. He was recognizing in his fellow activists the aspiration for a better world, and no one could get more honor than Desmond Tutu, standing up in front of us and holding his arms in namaste and in greeting and saying that he saw something in each of us that could change the world.
And a true hero is inspirational, he inspires others she inspires others and then brings out the best and that is the exactly what Desmond Tutu was doing.
Okay, well lets come to you the audience to find out what you think so many social entrepreneurs and influential thinkers among the audience here today. Are social entrepreneurs self-appointed heroes? Are these people who want to set themselves up to inspire others? Wait for the microphone and please do say who you are and where you're from and what you do and we're looking for comments not questions.
And can you please keep it brief so hands up, anyone who's got something to say? Come on you're not that modest. There's a gentleman at the front here. Where's the microphone? It's just coming down.
Thank you Jim Burke from Participant Media.
There's a lot of focus so far on this concept of heroes on being this exalted higher level being and I think that for the people who are here of any other of this types of gatherings. They don't come here to celebrate and feel good. They come here to amplify and they come here to accelerate the work that they're doing. Because heroes don't think about what they are doing as an end game to a sub higher level and I think what Archbishop was doing yesterday as an audience member was acknowledging the commitment that these people have made, but not so much to place a crown on their head, or for a group to gather together and talk about how wonderful they are.
Everybody here is here to actually expand impact, at least from my perspective.
Sure.
Hi, I'm Jeff Skoll, and, you know, glad everybody's here at the forum.
Thank you for making us part of your event.
Thank you. At the Skoll Foundation we actually have a tagline called Uncommon Heroes, Common Good. And the reason we came up with this was we felt that in the world over time, many of the heroes that have been traditionally looked to for leadership have somewhat fallen, whether it's political leaders, or athletes who have been tainted by drug use, or so on, and we looked around in the world and thought, "Who are the people that are truly doing the work that's so important to the future of humanity?" And we found these incredible people social entrepreneurs who put their lives on the line every day, on the front lines, to make a difference for the thousands or millions of people that they actually serve, and to us that's the new form of hero in the world.
Can I just ask you Jeff Skoll, if you are funding people like this, who are they or you accountable to? Who is it who decides hides the priorities. I mean this is not an elected set of people who around are answerable to a large body of voters. Who decides which disease should be eradicated, which dragon to slay? About ten years ago, Sally Osberg, who is the CEO of the Skoll Foundation, and I had a meeting with a fellow named John Gardner and John Gardner was the architect of the Great Society programs in the US in the 1960's.
He was Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. And we asked him what we could do philanthropists to best ensure the future of humanity. And he said to bet on good people doing good things. And that translated to our mission of investing and connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs and their work.
But really what he was saying was that there were cracks in society that weren't solved by business or government or the church or other institutions and that somebody had to come in and find what these ills were in society and dedicated himself to solving them and that turn out to be the social entrepreneurs.
I just like to hear from other people. Jeff said it is about good people doing good things, but how do you decide if you are a good person, that you really are doing a good thing? Yes.
Thank you. Munqeth Mehyar, I am from Jordan, director of Friends of the Earth Middle East. In fact it's a very very good question, you mean, how to you define a real hero in your area or in your region. I think a real hero is the one who
find himself standing alone in the beginning. Maybe a few supporters, but who does not have enough courage to get out and say that "I support this person for this particular issue," and this is the pressure that he can - or she can - take from all the society. They stand firm to their cause, and they keep fighting for it.
And gradually after year two or three, people around him in the society, they find out that, "Hey, that guy is a real hero, he stood up to his beliefs, and his beliefs are right, and we really need to do the change." And, this is exactly what we need in the Middle East right now. And you see what's going on in the Middle East; it's the Middle East "under construction" I call it, because of a few heroes in a few countries that they get up and say I want to do a change.
And those guys, even the one who started the xx in Egypt and Indonesia and now in Siria, Bahrain and it is really going around They were inspired by heroes from before who stood up and said we do have an Isareli-Arab conflict, we need to stand up and talk about it and sit down on a table and discuss it.
And there's a lot of issues around that, that needs to be discussed by somebody who does not afraid of the consequences but the reality and what we put on the table. Thank you.
That's fantastic comment. There's several hands going up there's a gentlemen, couple of hands behind you.
Hi, I'm Alex Hoffman, founder of Changents, a play on "change agents". We run a web site called Changents.com, which is an open-source storytelling and team-building site for agents of social and environmental change, and we really focus on the charismatic individual and them telling their personal story on an on-going basis.
They are living an adventure, and we feel like revealing that story is the best way to reveal the heroism, and then allow the the intellectually curious public to follow these stories, do their own investigation; they can make their own decisions whether these people are heroes or not. We're not trying to determine We are just trying to make the stories available and let people decide.
So its mavericks who put ideas of there may be learners at the start and you get other people to join forces with them. Other comments? Yes, gentlemen there.
Thank you.
Michael Shapcott with the Wellesley Institute in Toronto, Canada. We work mainly in the area of housing and homelessness, and for us, the heroes that we with are the people that are very much of the front lines.
And for them it's not about being entrepreneurs and engaging in solutions to homelessness is not about fame and fortune but in many ways it's the old expression I think came from Fannie Lou Hamer about of being sick and tired of being sick and tired and this are people who rather than fall into despair and depression actually see possibility and see solutions, and are willing to engage in solutions.
So for us, the heroes are the people that see possibilities, and are able to realize those possibilities in the face of some really daunting odds.
A lady here.
My name is Telle Whitney and I'm with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and I work with a lot of young students and we bring in role models. And if you've ever seen Sally Ride or Carol Bartz or Maria Kliver swarmed by these young women, you know how important heroes are to them. And many of them I've had the pleasure to meet year after year, these young women, and they talk--when times get tough, when they have to make those really tough choices, they think, "OK, so what would Maria do?" Thank you.
OK, it's interesting that you raise that women as role models, because I was wondering about the difference between men and women. And if you are a social entrepreneur, is it easier for a male social entrepreneur to display heroic qualities or not? Roshanieh, I wonder what you think. Do you think men and women lead change differently?
I think certainly there are masculine and feminine attributes to leadership per se, but, I think, if I look at it, there's a common thread that runs through both both genders. When I got into this field, it was more a sense of outrage that plummeted me into this particular arena. I trained as an economist and I went to business school thinking I would make wealthy people wealthier; that was my ultimate objective.
So a young man or a young women would have that in the 90s when they were graduating. But with time I realized that's not good enough, and I remember reading this book about misogyny, which was a science fiction, I'm an avid reader of science fiction, and that really, you know, it just took it to its extremes, saying that there was a substance where the X chromosome was being killed and the gender balance in society was changing very fast.
And that's exactly what we are doing in south Asia. And therefore, I you know, I got into this field and I work in the field of creating gender equity. So I don't personally think that it's really about male or female getting into this field, but it's really about the end objective and the end goal that we have in mind, which is to make a peaceful, prosperous and equitable society.
Larry, what do you think?
I had the privilege if sitting in front of Mother Teresa and Dalai Lama so I can use two uncommon examples in male and female social entrepreneur hero if you will. And what is common is siting in front either one of them you reach inside of yourself you try to find that which is the best in you, and you try to bring it out and make it the days work, everyday reflecting on it.
That's a tremendous kind of heroism, I think it's gender neutral. They both serve people. You might say the Dalai Lama serves people in a way that others might not consider masculine and Mother Teresa was more aggressive than you might consider. I don't think those are the issues. I think the issue is that a real hero, when you're sitting in in front of them or contemplating their life's work, you were inspired to be greater and better than you ever could be.
But Larry do you lead change in the same way as a woman would? Would you think you'd use a different way?
I 've been accused of leading change in a way a that a woman does. They usually call it, in my case because it's a man, they call it "Loose Management". Oh no. Really?
What does that mean? I take umbrage to that.
The mind boggles.
Well, it means that I really believe in empowering the people around me. I try to choose people who are smarter than me. I try to create the facility where I get out of their way. I learned to manage from a woman, Nicole Grasse of the United Nations, and when we were all together working as a team, you'd be hard pressed to find who actually had the title, the CEO or the boss.
And I quite like that form of management. It isn't the kind of management necessarily that's associated with a strong male archetype.
It's interesting though, because if you think about myths that go so deep into our psyches, in myths and fairy tales, it is the men who kill the dragon and it is the heroines who wait to be rescued.
Not if you've seen Shrek.
Someone said to me recently that behind every great man there is a surprised woman. I'm whenever we talk about the difference between Hero's and Heroins I always think of this extraordinary figure that I met in the Sudan, called Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha who was a person of the head of the republican brotherhood there, who was murdered, hanged in public for his belief in the equal rights of women, a new version of the Sharia, a second interpretation of the laws that came from Mecca.
I remember speaking with him on the desert outside of Omdurman, and he spoke about the impossibility of having a full life without the equal participation of men and women and the importance of that, And I remember thinking at that moment that there were so many things that so many of us as western men, or as a western man myself how much I had to learn in the developing world and there was so much I had to learn from Islam.
It was a very big moment for me and I looked around him, And around him were his closest advisors who were both men and women, but when it came time to kill the head of his movement, it was the man who was killed, because they perceived him to be the leader of it. Although he was sharing that leadership.
Let's get a bit more from the audience because this is about perceptions of leadership as well as leadership. Do men and women lead change differently? There is a hand right at the back.
Hi, I'm Kamran Elahian with Global Catalyst Foundation and I'm one of those lucky men who stands behind a amazing woman who is my hero my wife, and I challenge any man in this room or anywhere to go and do what she does.
She has been always on the front line in Afganistan, in Darfor, in Pakistan, in Iran, and everywhere there has been a disaster. I dont believe that you can really separate heroism it runs in all bloods.
So the message that you're giving us is that social entrepreneurs as a class, as a community, have managed to over turn old stereo types, and it definitely isn't men who just slay the dragon anymore.
Is that completely true? There is a lady up front here who wanted to say something.
She can certainly slay a dragon
I know that.
Hello my name is.
Ill get to you in a minute. sorry Thank you, it's a brilliant session and I'm so happy to be here. Can you tell us who you are? My name is Quratul Ain Bakhteari. I am from Pakistan I work in Balochistan with the communities and very traditional societies. As a women the question is there's definitely I see a difference.
A woman, as a woman, I can't make a distinction between personal and professional. And for me the experience I had to go through as a mother it has obviously divided me and it has put me in that situation, continuously, the priorities, all the time, and yet to make the things happen. I was put into a situation where I had to make a choice, that either the leave your home and your children, we'll keep your children, if you want to continue community work. One night I had to stay up to make that decision, and the next morning I said I have to leave the home and continue what I'm doing.
My youngest was six years old. And this is the kind of choices I have always been coming against to keep doing what I believe in doing. So, it's very complex, or maybe it is complex from where I come from.
But, if you're working in Balochistan, do you have a dilemma as a woman wanting to act as a social entrepreneur lead change about perception of leadership, perception that maybe it should be men who show more leadership.
No, I think it can be anyone. And anyone who can overcome his or her own internal fears and is able to detect fears in others as obstacles in others lives.
Thank you then. There is a lady behind you who had something to say too.
Hello, my name's Hilary Sutcliffe from a technology think tank called Matter. When--on the first day of the forum, we had this sort of speed dating session where there was about a line of 30 People and another line of thirty people parallel and we had three minutes to give our spiel. What's good about you?
What did you get into this arena for? And what was fascinating to me was that everybody really in someway or another said I thought somebody should do something about this. And in other areas of my life it's usually, and someone should, and and and whine whine whine, but everyone here said, and so I did, it was personally saying someone should do something.
So I'm going to do something about it. And I thought that was a distinctive and that was men and women and in that sort of forty people I think I met in that arena.
That 's great. Any men got anything to add here? Just say women are great. Men are okay? Okay, I agree.
Yes, My name is Raziq Fahim and I came from the same region, the Balochistan, from Pakistan, and I work with Quratul Ain for last fifteen years almost. And on the state of leadership I realize the People like me, men, who have grown up in an extremely conservative society, kills half of his being. The feminine being, the feminine part of ourselves.
So I think it is extremely essential to reclaim your humanity. You want we able to contribute in the lives of others. Until you need not reclaim your own being, the feminine being and while working with young people in the extremely difficult situation. I always remind that what Quratul Ain has doing in this kind of situation.
And when I realized her style, I just do the same and I I just observe the extreme breakthroughs that I made. Because of that, you know, whole sense of my being, I think that won't be able for men to make great breakthroughs until he reclaims the feminine attributes that got bestowed on him as human being. Thank you very much.
I realize I realize that I stand corrected here. I shouldn't have introduced the discussion as being about just heroes, but definitely heroine and heroes. Well we've got lots more to talk about, theres more of the program to come and you can join our discussion on Facebook.com/ bbcforum. But now a small break for the latest world news from the BBC.
We'll be back in a few minutes.
That's great everyone.
Of course there isn't really a summary of world news at the minute. It will be in a minute. We'll carry on with the program in a minute, but if you were to hear this on the radio, you would indeed have an up-some of what's happening in the world. Is this where we get our red noses for.
Well we should of had red noses shouldn't we, and Emily telling me to tell you all to misbehave a bit more. You're being far too well behaved up here on the platform. Who knows what will happen there? Okay, we're ready to carry on. Hello, I am Bridget Kendall, welcome back to our special forum program from the Skoll World Forum in Oxford University in front of a crowded hall entrepreneurs.
And with me here three
global leaders of change librarian supremer, Ken Brecher, social activist Roshaneh Zafar, and doctor and social entrepreneur, Larry Brilliant. We've been looking at the qualities of social entrepreneurs, and whether or not they're heroes and heroines.
What it means to stand out from the rest of us and push for new solutions to improve people's lives. Let's look a bit more at the challenges they face, and particularly the challenge of risk. Now Larry Brilliant, your president of the Skoll Global Threats Fund which gives money, hundreds of millions of dollars, to help counter the major threats of our age, and you - at least you hope so - and you argue, that to be able to live in this uncertain world, everyone include social entrepreneurs needs to be more risk-literate to become better at making decisions in uncertain conditions.
What does it mean to be more risk-literate? I think thirty, forty, years ago, the world faced almost a single existential risk, fifty-thousand nuclear weapons the Soviet Union and the U.S. had pointed at each other, the fear of nuclear holocaust. Now, with increasing population, decreasing resources, increasing climate change, which is a great exacerbator. Looking at shortages of water, continuing nuclear proliferation, regional conflicts, and increasing probability of pandemics And a whole long list of others humanity faces many existential risks.
They're complect, they're difficult to quantify, they're difficult to talk about, even when you list them as I just did, they're mind-numbing, and we do not have the global governments, the democracy, the form of economic theory to understand those risks. Most importantly, the people who vote for change, who vote for leaders, frequently vote against their own best interests because they are not all the risks.
So I think we do need a risk literacy. We need to change reading, writing, and arithmetic in our schools to reading, writing, and arithmetic in risk literacy. So, some of these risks are not in new. Some are in new and they're not all, but what you're saying is that in the globalized world, they all cascade, they multiply.
That's exactly correct.
And that's what we need to appreciate.
The risk
of water shortage is not new, but the risk that it can cause a global crisis has been brought about by increasing population and changes in technology, transportation and the media. You're exactly right, the change is that modernity and globalization, technology and population pressures have changed local risks into global risks.
So, social entrepreneurs, they're there to go out there and see new challenges. As one gentleman said to us be the ones who are out in front, not yet supported by others. So they see risk. Are they risk literate enough?
They are. In fact, risk literacy is one of their great qualities. They understand the risk of inaction, and that indeed I think is one of the hallmarks a social entrepreneur: they understand that the risk of them not taking an action is greater than the risk that they face themselves, and they're willing to put themselves in a heroic mode to do something about that.
So it's not that they need to introspective say we need to understand risk better. They need to be able to transfer to other people the understanding of this. It's about teaching risk. Rosheneh, do you think you can teach risk?
Well if I look at the recent bust, the financial crisis, we were supposed know financial risk but we didn't. So I'm one of those proponents who believes you can't teach risk. If I give you my example, I hadn't really thought that I would set up a microfinance institution in Pakistan and nationalize it and go scale.
If I had begun to think about it I would probably still be in my room thinking about it and not putting it into action. So I think the moment you begin to teach risk you can understand risk, you can plan and mitigate risk, you can try to address risk, but I am not sure if you can learn how to handle it.
Or to learn about risk literacy thats my take on it.
That's the dilemma then Larry, how do you learn about it?
I would disagree lovingly of course.
In retrospect if you look at the 2008 financial crisis and if you model it, we see that the derivatives that were produced were six times the global GDP; that was a greater amount of leverage than we knew about, but far more important, one firm, Lehman Brothers, was responsible for sixty percent of all the derivative tradings. If we had known that and seen that, we would have realized this is a risk that is not acceptable. But because we dont have the tools or the vocabulary or the skills or the inclination we didnt do that kind of a risk assessment. So I would disagree only in that I don't think we're there yet, I think risk is something that is so ephemeral and so difficult to capture that we have to find a way to make risk sexy.
Perhaps the answer is the Federal Reserve should have been headed by a woman and then we wouldn't...
I'm with
you
A friendly shake of hands on that one.
I wanted to bring you in Ken Brecher because he must be pretty used to juggling risk and challenging convention particularly in the film world. Massive risks. That people have to take there, but I'm also thinking about your role as president of the Library Foundation in Los Angeles, because Larry's been saying to us we're living in a time of cascading risk.
And surely this is a radical time, even a risky time for Libraries given the way that information is involving. Do you think librarians need to be more risk literate? I think they're extremely risk literate. I think the librarians are that unsung heroines and heroes. I was recently looking at like the history of the libraries.
As the head of the library foundation of Los Angeles. I don't run the public libraries, but I run a private foundation with a public purpose, which is the support of this large library system and what I have discovered learning about librarians over the last year or so and a large number of them is that the age of the librarian who going "Shh... You are in a library." That's over. They love technology. They are gamers. They love books. They love ideas, they love information and they're at the forefront of social justice. When the United States government asked the library association to provide them with information as to which book people were taking out and which websites they were looking at.
And I should just mention we had 155 million visits. To the website of the Los Angeles libraries last year. That's a lot of visits. When the government asked for that information, the librarian said no. Absolutely not. This is not the information that we'll ever provide. What a person reads online or in the book in their lap is their business.
And it's private. There is no censorship, and we will never reveal that. But the great risk though Bridget, the really great risk is that we will create a kind of information elite. A large portion of the population of this huge city that I live in, Los Angeles, doesn't own a computer. And those that do, have old-fashioned, many have old-fashioned Dial-up computers and they don't have the bandwidth to get the information; it's impossible in that kind of city to graduate from high school if you can't get online and do, so our thousands of free computers turn out to be the lifeline and the education line for so many students.
The risk is that we will separate the information. We'll link it to a certain kind of technology which will not be available to people who need that to prepare a resume or find a job. Or actually ask the questions that need to be asked at this moment if we're going to change or evolve our democracy.
I wanted to come to you in the audience about. I could see some hands going up already. As I said we think of social entrepreneurs as being big risk takers, but I wondered if Any of you had tough lessons to learn when it comes to dealing with risk? Yes, there's a lady there.
Hi my name is Janet Wasserstein.
I'm with MIT, the office of foundation relations and I'd just like people to remember the ideas inspiration that come from the great universities around the world and the new technologies that comes from universities at G lab, D lab programs at MIT and the students, the students themselves that just don't go to Paris or Florence to look at the museums, but they actually go into countries and put themselves at great risk.
Okay. There's a gentleman here who had his hand up.
I'm Ron Dembo from Zerofootprint.
I absolutely believe you can teach risk, and in fact, I absolutely believe that one of the big problems we have in the world, today, is that the people who run our government don't fundamentally understand how to make decisions under uncertainty.
There are so many glaring examples of this, whether it's nuclear power or security at airports, whatever. The simple, there are simple ideas that can be conveyed to audiences of any kind that tell you more or less how to interpret the solution to a problem, and that's about as important as it is. For example, in a very, very risky world an optimal solution is to hedge.
The question is not what the solution is, but how much to hedge. So for example in today's world you wouldn't say all nuclear, or all solar, or all wind, you would hedge. And in a world which all problems that are deterministic were known with certainty, the optimal solution is to execute. And that distinction is not made.
We treat all problems as if they were homogeneous. But the key is to separate out what is truly risky and what is truly known with certainty, and to treat them differently. The nature of the solution's different, and that's what you can actually teach.
Okay great. Gentleman here in the front.
I'm Carl Pope from the Sierra Club, and I think an important distinction about risk is, are you putting your own skin at risk or are you putting someone else's? Social entrepreneurs is one of the ways you know you're doing something virtuous is when the risk is on your shoulders. But we're taught to worship leaders who put other people at risk.
Whether they are politicians sending other people to fight wars or chief executives gambling with other people's money on Wall Street. And I think, it's a very important characteristic if, are you taking the risk or are you offloading the risk, and we don't pay attention to that distinction.
Can I comment a little bit on that because Carl and I had the wonderful experience of working at the same time in the seventies in Bihar India. In that time Carl there were almost zero NGOs. Go back to the nineteen seventies in India. These risk takers, social entrepreneur. This public sector, this private sector we talk about all the time, civil society, it didn't exist.
If you wanted a job you worked for government or a state supported organization. There were one or two very large family-owned corporations and that was it. This middle sector that now has five hundred thousand NGOs in India alone. This is five hundred thousand potential social entrepreneurs who are looking around, putting themselves at risk.
Putting their ideas at risk. It makes for a much different world and a much better world, when you have so many people who don't have a structured life, who have these opportunities for risk and reward. And I think we can celebrate that change since you and I, we're in Bihar.
But isn't it also the case that if you are a social entrepreneur, I mean look at us, here we all are in this lovely, very comfortable city of Oxford, coming from probably quite comfortable lives that as you mention that it's fair enough to take a risk if you have the luxury of being rich, but if you're poor living on a dollar a day, can you afford to?
That's what you're seeing in India, what you're seeing in Pakistan, that's what you just saw in Tahir Square, that's what so wonderful, is there's something changing in the world where people at every level society are taking risks because the world has become unsustainable. We all sense it's going in the wrong direction, and throughout society, at every level, people are willing to take risks and make change.
I think they're taking daily risks.
You know, every day is a risk for them. And the fact that they've managed it so well for centuries is something That we need to learn from and we need to acknowledge. The women that we work with our living at a dollar and dollar and a half a day and then they take out loans. The world of credit is taking out and risk you know undertaking a financial risk and the fact that they not only invest this in their businesses, they actually manage to pay it back, that in itself tells you how big a risk they're taking and how open they are to risk taking.
The whole idea of risk taking is about being prepared to do something where you might fail. I come back to the question I asked earlier. How many of you have had tough lessons to learn when it comes to risk? I think if we were to ask everyone to spend today only a dollar they wont be able to do it. I often do that with my students, I tell them here's a hundred rupees go and spend the day on this, and take care of five children, manage your household budget, make sure you run your business at the same time, if somebody falls sick you have to manage them. And if women can do that I think that's the major lesson we can derive from that.
I'm Mark Plotkin,
I'm with the Amazon Conservation Team. There's been a subtext here, which I want to highlight because I think it's important, social entrepreneurs not only do, they inspire. And I think the second is as important as the first, because the importance of a Desmond Tutu or a Thomas Jefferson, wasn't just that they freeded there people it's the inspiration they gave to people around the world, and tying this into this gender thing that you brought up, if you look at the early hero was in western culture, they're all men.
Ulysses, Leonidas, Hercules, that's all changed. So, for me, this gender thing is a non-issue. I don't think there's anybody there last night who looked at Desmond Tutu and said "Wow, a woman would have done a better job." Right? So we have created the space in our culture now where we have the right heroes.
It used to be just military guys. It used to be just athletes. You know, who do you want your son to grow up to be: Michael Vick Or Desmond Tutu? Who do you want your daughter to grow up to be: Madonna or Jane Goodall? So the fact that we don't think twice about having heroes who are men or women, for the most part, is a very, very positive thing. And many of the problems in the world I think come from the fact that we worshiped the wrong heroes for far to long and that's one of the good news pieces that comes out of meetings like this.
There's a gentleman at the back with his hand up.
I'm Lauren Walters. I'm the founder and CEO of Two Degrees food or one for one food company. As I listen to this, what strikes me is it's about tell stories about successful risk takers. That's the message of Tahrir Square, the message of Tunisia, that once it was successful that other people saw and felt that they could take risks.
And it's how those ripples go out from successful risk takers or a successful entrepreneur thats really the message. It's the entrepreneurs is really the vessel. They're the vehicle, we're all the vehicles, but it's the ripples that come out from us thats important So you will have to teach from your successes, and keep quiet about the failures, right?
No? There's someone
My name
is Kip from the Visayan Forum in the Philippines, and one basic lesson we've had about risk is when you risk there are often times that you will fail and in our case for instance we risk partnering with government in rescuing women and children against human trafficking. We risked lot of our eggs in one person who was part of immigration, and found out later that he was actually was booking chartered flights for trafficking victims, trafficking eighty women in chartered planes, and he was our champion.
So the reality is when you take a risk with people take a risk with different situations, it's possible that you're going to fail and the risk will not pay off. And I think that at that point two things have to be done. First, you have to have a plan B. Like okay, if this champion happens to be really corrupt, do we stick by this person or do you stick by your principles and I feel like its very important for you to know that whatever you risk that your principles are intact.
Second I feel like, when you fail, after risking a particular endeavor, then the next step really is to learn from the lessons of that risk and just find a better way and hope that it pay off. But the reality is it tends to fail sometimes.
Okay, Ken why don't you come in.
Hearing Kip speak and he
became a social entrepreneur at a very young age makes me think about this, the problem today for young people who are looking for role models. I think there's a big confusing and risk is a big part of that too. When the role model is not coming from literature, it's coming from a certain kind of media presentation, where the pre-processed hero has been given to you.
You have a certain amount of time to present that person. You're going to see it on the Internet, or you're going to see it on television, and that person doesn't have the fullness of their being. You see it in a segment, usually the media will choose that person if they can speak a bit of English, or if it's useful to interview them.
They don't very often will choose somebody who will immediately will be able to tell their story or to represent a certain idea, but the complexity of that, the complexity of the risk is almost always left out. I think an earlier generation found their heroes and heroines from literature, they read about people that they wanted to be like.
But now they're finding it in a very different kind of way, and my concern is that what's being presented to them is actually not what makes a hero a hero. Cartoon characters instead of three dimensions. Absolutely, and you don't have have to die to be a hero. In fact, the person who hangs in there, the mindfulness of the hero, the ability to hang in there and to do the work day after day in a sense This is the real definition, as opposed to the person who stands up and gives their life to it.
Very briefly, Larry. Well, I do want to say one thing about this moment here in Oxford at the Skoll World Forum. We're here celebrating not just the individual heroes. We're celebrating the field of heroism that is new on the stage at the scale that it is, so it a opportunity to all the people listening to know it now safe to be a hero its safe to be a social entrepreneur.
I just wanted to come back to the person Roshaneh who you said was your inspiring hero at the beginning of the program. Mohammed Yunus is the guru of micro-finance. Because this is an area where there's been an enormous amount of risk involved, hasn't there, and they've been developing ideas. Once it was seen as the Holy Grail of development giving people away to help themselves. And now, there is much more soul-searching about the way, some of the ways it hasn't worked, that it's actually turned out--produced risks for some of the people on the ground that weren't thought about.
I think a lot of social entrepreneurs have to take their responsibility very seriously. And one of the things that we're learning as a sector, and I had talked about that earlier as well--we have to talk about responsible finance, where we have transparent relationships with our clients, where the entire business or financial transactions is partnership based.
And we have to go back to the fundamentals of micro-finance, which is why--what is the end goal in mind? The end goal in mind is to empower individuals, is to allow them to live their dreams and to engage with their aspirations. And that's really what we need to do; that's what one has learned.
At the same time what's happening in Bangladesh with Dr. Yunus, I think that's an outrage. It really is unacceptable the way he is being treated. So, another perspective on this is: how do we treat our heroes? We are also a society, we also have ethics and values, and we also have beliefs and dreams that we need to stand by.
And there's certain people that embody that and we have to give them due respect. And I think that is something we need to really understand and stand up for.
Larry Brilliant you've been someone
who has been in position to give money, to fund projects as householder For Google and now in your position in Skool. Are you convinced by the power of microfinance to combat?
I'm convinced by the power of Muhammad Yunus. He's one of my heroes and I absolutely agree. He is being victimized in a way that is unprecedented, unfortunate and unfair. I think part of the problem is. We aren't free to have a discussion of the pros and cons of microfinance, micro credit, micro debt, all these different instruments and see "Where are they most applicable?
What's the best way to use them?" without that conversation becoming immediately ad hominem. And it's a very sad moment I think for me because this is one of the great leaders, not just of microfinance, but of economic development. We should be celebrating his life. He should be here on stage, not being pounded the way he is.
Do you fund microfinance?
Well, we're, our organization is pretty new. We're just getting started. We have not yet funded microfinance, but we're we're brand new, we're less than eighteen months old.
It's interesting thinking about Dr. Yunus, who
I also greatly admire, as a kind of mythic hero, if you look at the role of a hero, speaking as an anthropologist, it almost always happens that you have to be taken down.
You have to be removed from your position, you have to be demoralized, you have to be, in many ways, everything that's happening to him you can find in myth. Many of the origin figures, the great figures, and I did my field work in the Amazon in the Xingu region of the Amazon, so many of those great figures like Dr. Yunus who introduced new ideas, whether it's bringing light into the world or understanding the difference between men and women, which mythic heroes always help us do. Very often they have to pay the price for that, and if they survive or not is often the question of the myth. But what's happening to him seems to be directly out of the great classic myths of the world.
We should just explain here
that Mohammed Yunus, who more or less invented microfinance was given the Nobel Prize for it, has now found himself under fire in Bangladesh where it all started.
And an extraordinary turning of the circle from being put on a pedestal, to finding himself in legal problems, and I guess that brings us back to where you started us, Ken, with the idea that heroes need to be flawed, as well as inspiring.
Well I think that's what makes us, what makes them, actually in the end, it's what makes them heroes to us, because we can see ourselves in them, and nothing gives us greater, you know, was it La Rochefoucauld, who said that one of the great French maxims was that there is some pleasure in watching a friend fall off of a roof?
There is, there is some, there is, there is some, there is some, in French?
There is some part of us that sets these people up, and then get some pleasure that they're also having trouble with their wife, or they're also spoiling their son, or they're also human in the way that they can stand up and have a true moral and extraordinarily courageous life and at the same time deal with the issues that we all deal with.
How to sustain a relationship, how to put food on the table. how to be sure that our life actually ends up meaning something rather than has one moment that crashes down.
So, final question to you and the panel. If social entrepreneurs are partly there to lead and to inspire, how do they get their message across? Whether it's about or about empowering people who aren't such a good position, but being realistic about both the successes and the failures, Larry? I think transparency of what they do is the best lesson and if you only show the good without the struggle and without the mistakes You don't convey the entire lesson and how they get the message out I think is one of the beauties in this whole notion that this whole foundation does which is to celebrate not just to fund, to celebrate these leaders and these social entrepreneurs.
But "celebrate" suggests you just talk about the good bits.
But I don't think they do; I
think when you talk about the lives of our leaders. Just as we talk about our policies and our government. If you don't have transparency we lose more than half of the lesson.
Roshaneh.
I think I agree with what Larry said that you have to put your vulnerabilities out there.
We're not perfect; we don't intend to be perfect but on the other hand I also believe that we should never take no for an answer. We should always possess. There's always a solution out there that you can find and you have to push the frontiers and the envelopes as change. How do you communicate?
I think a lot of it comes from the ripple effect that somebody had mentioned earlier, how we share both our failures and our successes. In fact, I have learned more from failure than remember when I was starting out and I was, you know, 27 years old. Roughly the World Bank for four years, met Dr. Yunis.
Completely bold over by him. Went to Bangladesh. Came back and I didn't know where to start and I remember he said something to me and it's something that has helped, you know, stayed with me forever which was if you make a mistake. It's Ok. Tell the world it was Dr. Yunus' fault, not yours. And I think that kept me going.
And, I think that's what great heroes do.
Ken Brecher.
I think that the most important thing we need to think about in this whole range of who are our heroes and what is a heroine or a hero is that we have a responsibility to the next generations. They need to be our heroes. They are the ones are who actually, in many, many ways they have the answers already.
And very often it becomes we forget to listen to those answers. I dont know a single poor person who doesnt know what they need to get out poverty. Ask them. They dont need a multi-billion dollar program. They know exactly what they need. Sometimes it's just transportation. Sometimes it's someone to take care of their children so they can come home late from work.
I think young people see that very, very clearly and they'll be the first ones to tell us that we're making all sorts of mistakes, that we could do better.
OK. Well, what a great discussion and time to bring it to an end, I'm afraid. Many thanks to the three of you: Larry Brilliant, doctor and social entrepreneur, Ken Brecher, anthropologist and library champion and Roshaneh Zafar, social entrepreneur in Pakistan, and our wonderful audience. If you have more to add on heroes or anything else that you've heard on the program, or want to find out more about our guests, do contact us.
bbcworldservice.com/theforum, or tweet us at bbctheforum. But for now, from me, Bridget Kendall, the forum team, and everyone here in Oxford. Thank you for joining us.
These mavericks and risk takers, like all of you in front of me here in the audience I guess, take bold ideas from the world of business and look for ways to improve the lives of many. So that sounds quite heroic. But what does it mean to be a hero today? And is the way that social entrepreneurs lead change similar to what heroes do?
Well, to discuss all this with me is Larry Brilliant, doctor and social entrepreneur who helped eliminate smallpox; Ken Brecher, anthropologist, champion of libraries; and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh Zafar</span><span class="STtranscriptContent" name="58860" id="STtranscriptContent28" contenteditable="true" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); ">,
</span>social entrepreneur working in Pakistan. And to kick off, I wanted to ask all three of you As far as heroes go, who's your favorite hero, whether real or comic book or from the movies or mythical?
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh</span>, what about you? Well, when I was fourteen, it was Indiana Jones. But as I grew maturer I realized there was more to life than just a swashbuckling hero that I needed. So, I guess, in today's...you know, why I do what I do, it's because of Dr. Yunus. And I really learned humility from him.
And I think one of the attributes that heroes carry with them is the sense of knowing that they haven't got it all.
The guru of microfinance. We'll talk about that more in a minute. What about you, Larry Brilliant? It's a hard question to answer. There are so many heroes. But because I'm sitting next to <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh</span> Zafar, I will tell you about a young man named Zafar Hussein, who is the person who taught me about small pox eradication.
And he typifies heroism because he came from a poor village in Bhopal and he left everything, his family, his meager income, to take a risk to try to eradicate smallpox from India. He put it all at stake to try to reach a noble goal, and for me that's really an aspect of heroism that I most admire. Zafar by the way means means victory.
Very appropriate. And what about you Ken Brecher? I like those heroes who are full of human faults and hubris and problems. I think Iron Man is a wonderful Particularly in the films where he not only has to ability to do good but he's also a bit of a mess himself.
It's interesting you say that because know the film world very And I wonder, do you think it's easier for us to identify with mythical and movie heroes? I mean, both <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(81, 81, 81); ">Roshaneh and Larry</span><span class="STtranscriptContent" name="167430" id="STtranscriptContent83" contenteditable="true" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); "> talked about real life heroes. </span>What do you think? I think it's very easy to identify with and I think it's one of the unifying things in our world.
It's a positive thing that many people, I remember being with a group of colleagues and friends in the Middle East who are coming whole range of backgrounds and religions and we are having a very hard time finding a common ground, and finally I asked, "Is there anyone, has everyone has seen the film "Little Miss Sunshine?"" And they all had.
And I said "and did everyone find it funny?" And they all had. And that was the beginning of our conversation. We had one thing in common at moment. That we had all loved the same film.
I suppose I was thinking the heroes of the moment surely must be those Japanese engineers and workers who've been risking high radiation doses to save their country from who knows what, nuclear holocaust. The nuclear samurais, they've been called, but coming back to your three. Larry Brilliant, if you take a quick glance of what you've done, it 's pretty impressive.
You're one of the four doctors on the United Nations team that run a campaign to eradicate smallpox in South Asia. You launched the Seva Foundation which is helped to get nearly three million blind people their site back. You've run a host of successful companies include Google's philanthropy arm, and you've been personal doctor to the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia.
And now your president of the Skoll Global Threats Fund. Do you think that's enough to make you a hero?
No, it's enough to make me a mythological creature. A sort of Iron Man.
Every time I read my autobiography online always begins by a life with a movie that they have rejected from Hollywood and it didn't feel we are living it but reading it is quiet absurd. I think that the real heroes though are the ones who enter into something with something to lose and I have been lucky in my life in that I didn't have that much to lose and smallpox eradication, I was able to go to villages that had thousands of children dying, but I was immunized.
I had an American Passport, I could leave. The real heroes, the hundreds of thousands of Indians who couldn't leave weren't immunized, put their lives at risk every momment. So the term "heroism", we do ourselves I guess it's a human characteristic to want to bring it all together to one person, but heroism is a much more complex, much more noble concept I think.
I can tell the audience has got things to say about that. We will be coming to you in a minute, but Ken, I want to ask you, you have been an agent of change in many guises. You now run the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, the most diverse public library system in America. And for a decade you challenged the movie industry by running the Sundance Institute in California and you are an anthropologist so you can look at all this from on high and take a long view too of these questions.
But what do you think of the qualities of a hero and are they the same qualities that are need by social entrepreneur? Larry said a hero is people who've got something to lose. What do you think about that?
I think there are many social entrepreneurs who are actually the personification of heroes. By that I mean they enter into a very difficult situation without much reward in sight. They usually have a very hard time explaining it to their families, who find that they are away from home at the time they need them the most, because the people they are serving or hoping to serve, need them as well.
I find that the hero social entrepreneur is really the person who is thinking of the moral question. The integrity. The issues. Who doesn't sleep well at night because there are people who need opportunities that they don't have. And I think that's true in mythology too, you find people who rise to the occasion.
Who do something you couldn't do yourself. It's always the question, could I have done that? I have a young son who asked me the other day when I told him I was coming to speak with my colleagues here about heroes, he said to me, "Well there hasn't been a hero since the cavalry stopped riding horses," and this is a young man's view of a certain kind of heroism.
Yeah, it's not quite the same thing being in a 4x4 or a tank.
No, I don't think it is, I don't think it is.
But you're talking about leadership qualities, aren't you? Rising to the occasion. What do you think, Roshaneh, so far? Do you think that's, that heroes are leaders, or actually are they people who don't show leadership skills?
I think they're champions actually, champions of a cause, you know, giving voice to a cause and a lot of times when I think of social entrepreneurs I think of people who don't take no for an answer. For example, my hero in real life is a client of mine, Shaheen, who took on men in the field of making auto parts.
Her husband died and she had two options: either she could rely on the charity of her family members, or she could take on this business which was highly patriarchal and masculine in it's environment. And she actually became more successful than her husband. And if you really go and meet her she's a diminutive lady.
She's about 4 feet 11 inches, but my god is she a ball of fire. So, for me she is my hero because she's transforming society. She's changing lifestyles, and she's pushing the threshold of what is possible. And I think that's what a hero really embodies.
Yesterday, we had an award ceremony here to award Archbishop Desmond Tutu with an award, the treasure award, it's called treasure award and Mabel Van Oranje was sitting over there. I said to her--she was the moderator for the panel--and as she was talking to him, he made her cry. He made her cry because of his nobility, because of his character, because of the history of what he gave to South Africa emerging from Apartheid.
She tried to hide the fact that she was dabbing her eyes with Kleenex, but he made her cry because he's a hero. Later that evening he made us all cry. There are a few moral characteristics that heroes have, he has it, we know he is a hero. We feel it inside.
You know, I heard about this event with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And it's interesting, because I understand that he said to all of you that you were fantastic people, that you were the cat's whiskers, right? Yeah he did.
He did. He was also saying that you entrepreneurs are heroes and it's interesting this idea of whether social entrepreneurs are groundbreaking heroes because you gather at these conferences to inspire each other or maybe even feel a little bit good inside, but is it the case that social entrepreneurs to some extent self appointed heroes?
Could I come back to Desmond Tutu for just a moment, because he did something yesterday that I thought was truly the role of a hero When Peter Gabriel is singing a beautiful song about Biko, he stood up and danced. And I thought that it is! That is the key. We are able never lose the joint be able to see the truth of the world and not be stopped from dancing in the moment of both memory and joy, the loss of a great figure, a true hero who gave his life, but also to feel the joy of the moment and not miss that.
What about the praise that Desmond Tutu gave you?
I think a holy person, a saint, recognizes in her or his parishioners that aspiration and nobility in God, and I think that's what he was doing. He was recognizing in his fellow activists the aspiration for a better world, and no one could get more honor than Desmond Tutu, standing up in front of us and holding his arms in namaste and in greeting and saying that he saw something in each of us that could change the world.
And a true hero is inspirational, he inspires others she inspires others and then brings out the best and that is the exactly what Desmond Tutu was doing.
Okay, well lets come to you the audience to find out what you think so many social entrepreneurs and influential thinkers among the audience here today. Are social entrepreneurs self-appointed heroes? Are these people who want to set themselves up to inspire others? Wait for the microphone and please do say who you are and where you're from and what you do and we're looking for comments not questions.
And can you please keep it brief so hands up, anyone who's got something to say? Come on you're not that modest. There's a gentleman at the front here. Where's the microphone? It's just coming down.
Thank you Jim Burke from Participant Media.
There's a lot of focus so far on this concept of heroes on being this exalted higher level being and I think that for the people who are here of any other of this types of gatherings. They don't come here to celebrate and feel good. They come here to amplify and they come here to accelerate the work that they're doing. Because heroes don't think about what they are doing as an end game to a sub higher level and I think what Archbishop was doing yesterday as an audience member was acknowledging the commitment that these people have made, but not so much to place a crown on their head, or for a group to gather together and talk about how wonderful they are.
Everybody here is here to actually expand impact, at least from my perspective.
Sure.
Hi, I'm Jeff Skoll, and, you know, glad everybody's here at the forum.
Thank you for making us part of your event.
Thank you. At the Skoll Foundation we actually have a tagline called Uncommon Heroes, Common Good. And the reason we came up with this was we felt that in the world over time, many of the heroes that have been traditionally looked to for leadership have somewhat fallen, whether it's political leaders, or athletes who have been tainted by drug use, or so on, and we looked around in the world and thought, "Who are the people that are truly doing the work that's so important to the future of humanity?" And we found these incredible people social entrepreneurs who put their lives on the line every day, on the front lines, to make a difference for the thousands or millions of people that they actually serve, and to us that's the new form of hero in the world.
Can I just ask you Jeff Skoll, if you are funding people like this, who are they or you accountable to? Who is it who decides hides the priorities. I mean this is not an elected set of people who around are answerable to a large body of voters. Who decides which disease should be eradicated, which dragon to slay? About ten years ago, Sally Osberg, who is the CEO of the Skoll Foundation, and I had a meeting with a fellow named John Gardner and John Gardner was the architect of the Great Society programs in the US in the 1960's.
He was Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. And we asked him what we could do philanthropists to best ensure the future of humanity. And he said to bet on good people doing good things. And that translated to our mission of investing and connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs and their work.
But really what he was saying was that there were cracks in society that weren't solved by business or government or the church or other institutions and that somebody had to come in and find what these ills were in society and dedicated himself to solving them and that turn out to be the social entrepreneurs.
I just like to hear from other people. Jeff said it is about good people doing good things, but how do you decide if you are a good person, that you really are doing a good thing? Yes.
Thank you. Munqeth Mehyar, I am from Jordan, director of Friends of the Earth Middle East. In fact it's a very very good question, you mean, how to you define a real hero in your area or in your region. I think a real hero is the one who
find himself standing alone in the beginning. Maybe a few supporters, but who does not have enough courage to get out and say that "I support this person for this particular issue," and this is the pressure that he can - or she can - take from all the society. They stand firm to their cause, and they keep fighting for it.
And gradually after year two or three, people around him in the society, they find out that, "Hey, that guy is a real hero, he stood up to his beliefs, and his beliefs are right, and we really need to do the change." And, this is exactly what we need in the Middle East right now. And you see what's going on in the Middle East; it's the Middle East "under construction" I call it, because of a few heroes in a few countries that they get up and say I want to do a change.
And those guys, even the one who started the xx in Egypt and Indonesia and now in Siria, Bahrain and it is really going around They were inspired by heroes from before who stood up and said we do have an Isareli-Arab conflict, we need to stand up and talk about it and sit down on a table and discuss it.
And there's a lot of issues around that, that needs to be discussed by somebody who does not afraid of the consequences but the reality and what we put on the table. Thank you.
That's fantastic comment. There's several hands going up there's a gentlemen, couple of hands behind you.
Hi, I'm Alex Hoffman, founder of Changents, a play on "change agents". We run a web site called Changents.com, which is an open-source storytelling and team-building site for agents of social and environmental change, and we really focus on the charismatic individual and them telling their personal story on an on-going basis.
They are living an adventure, and we feel like revealing that story is the best way to reveal the heroism, and then allow the the intellectually curious public to follow these stories, do their own investigation; they can make their own decisions whether these people are heroes or not. We're not trying to determine We are just trying to make the stories available and let people decide.
So its mavericks who put ideas of there may be learners at the start and you get other people to join forces with them. Other comments? Yes, gentlemen there.
Thank you.
Michael Shapcott with the Wellesley Institute in Toronto, Canada. We work mainly in the area of housing and homelessness, and for us, the heroes that we with are the people that are very much of the front lines.
And for them it's not about being entrepreneurs and engaging in solutions to homelessness is not about fame and fortune but in many ways it's the old expression I think came from Fannie Lou Hamer about of being sick and tired of being sick and tired and this are people who rather than fall into despair and depression actually see possibility and see solutions, and are willing to engage in solutions.
So for us, the heroes are the people that see possibilities, and are able to realize those possibilities in the face of some really daunting odds.
A lady here.
My name is Telle Whitney and I'm with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and I work with a lot of young students and we bring in role models. And if you've ever seen Sally Ride or Carol Bartz or Maria Kliver swarmed by these young women, you know how important heroes are to them. And many of them I've had the pleasure to meet year after year, these young women, and they talk--when times get tough, when they have to make those really tough choices, they think, "OK, so what would Maria do?" Thank you.
OK, it's interesting that you raise that women as role models, because I was wondering about the difference between men and women. And if you are a social entrepreneur, is it easier for a male social entrepreneur to display heroic qualities or not? Roshanieh, I wonder what you think. Do you think men and women lead change differently?
I think certainly there are masculine and feminine attributes to leadership per se, but, I think, if I look at it, there's a common thread that runs through both both genders. When I got into this field, it was more a sense of outrage that plummeted me into this particular arena. I trained as an economist and I went to business school thinking I would make wealthy people wealthier; that was my ultimate objective.
So a young man or a young women would have that in the 90s when they were graduating. But with time I realized that's not good enough, and I remember reading this book about misogyny, which was a science fiction, I'm an avid reader of science fiction, and that really, you know, it just took it to its extremes, saying that there was a substance where the X chromosome was being killed and the gender balance in society was changing very fast.
And that's exactly what we are doing in south Asia. And therefore, I you know, I got into this field and I work in the field of creating gender equity. So I don't personally think that it's really about male or female getting into this field, but it's really about the end objective and the end goal that we have in mind, which is to make a peaceful, prosperous and equitable society.
Larry, what do you think?
I had the privilege if sitting in front of Mother Teresa and Dalai Lama so I can use two uncommon examples in male and female social entrepreneur hero if you will. And what is common is siting in front either one of them you reach inside of yourself you try to find that which is the best in you, and you try to bring it out and make it the days work, everyday reflecting on it.
That's a tremendous kind of heroism, I think it's gender neutral. They both serve people. You might say the Dalai Lama serves people in a way that others might not consider masculine and Mother Teresa was more aggressive than you might consider. I don't think those are the issues. I think the issue is that a real hero, when you're sitting in in front of them or contemplating their life's work, you were inspired to be greater and better than you ever could be.
But Larry do you lead change in the same way as a woman would? Would you think you'd use a different way?
I 've been accused of leading change in a way a that a woman does. They usually call it, in my case because it's a man, they call it "Loose Management". Oh no. Really?
What does that mean? I take umbrage to that.
The mind boggles.
Well, it means that I really believe in empowering the people around me. I try to choose people who are smarter than me. I try to create the facility where I get out of their way. I learned to manage from a woman, Nicole Grasse of the United Nations, and when we were all together working as a team, you'd be hard pressed to find who actually had the title, the CEO or the boss.
And I quite like that form of management. It isn't the kind of management necessarily that's associated with a strong male archetype.
It's interesting though, because if you think about myths that go so deep into our psyches, in myths and fairy tales, it is the men who kill the dragon and it is the heroines who wait to be rescued.
Not if you've seen Shrek.
Someone said to me recently that behind every great man there is a surprised woman. I'm whenever we talk about the difference between Hero's and Heroins I always think of this extraordinary figure that I met in the Sudan, called Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed Taha who was a person of the head of the republican brotherhood there, who was murdered, hanged in public for his belief in the equal rights of women, a new version of the Sharia, a second interpretation of the laws that came from Mecca.
I remember speaking with him on the desert outside of Omdurman, and he spoke about the impossibility of having a full life without the equal participation of men and women and the importance of that, And I remember thinking at that moment that there were so many things that so many of us as western men, or as a western man myself how much I had to learn in the developing world and there was so much I had to learn from Islam.
It was a very big moment for me and I looked around him, And around him were his closest advisors who were both men and women, but when it came time to kill the head of his movement, it was the man who was killed, because they perceived him to be the leader of it. Although he was sharing that leadership.
Let's get a bit more from the audience because this is about perceptions of leadership as well as leadership. Do men and women lead change differently? There is a hand right at the back.
Hi, I'm Kamran Elahian with Global Catalyst Foundation and I'm one of those lucky men who stands behind a amazing woman who is my hero my wife, and I challenge any man in this room or anywhere to go and do what she does.
She has been always on the front line in Afganistan, in Darfor, in Pakistan, in Iran, and everywhere there has been a disaster. I dont believe that you can really separate heroism it runs in all bloods.
So the message that you're giving us is that social entrepreneurs as a class, as a community, have managed to over turn old stereo types, and it definitely isn't men who just slay the dragon anymore.
Is that completely true? There is a lady up front here who wanted to say something.
She can certainly slay a dragon
I know that.
Hello my name is.
Ill get to you in a minute. sorry Thank you, it's a brilliant session and I'm so happy to be here. Can you tell us who you are? My name is Quratul Ain Bakhteari. I am from Pakistan I work in Balochistan with the communities and very traditional societies. As a women the question is there's definitely I see a difference.
A woman, as a woman, I can't make a distinction between personal and professional. And for me the experience I had to go through as a mother it has obviously divided me and it has put me in that situation, continuously, the priorities, all the time, and yet to make the things happen. I was put into a situation where I had to make a choice, that either the leave your home and your children, we'll keep your children, if you want to continue community work. One night I had to stay up to make that decision, and the next morning I said I have to leave the home and continue what I'm doing.
My youngest was six years old. And this is the kind of choices I have always been coming against to keep doing what I believe in doing. So, it's very complex, or maybe it is complex from where I come from.
But, if you're working in Balochistan, do you have a dilemma as a woman wanting to act as a social entrepreneur lead change about perception of leadership, perception that maybe it should be men who show more leadership.
No, I think it can be anyone. And anyone who can overcome his or her own internal fears and is able to detect fears in others as obstacles in others lives.
Thank you then. There is a lady behind you who had something to say too.
Hello, my name's Hilary Sutcliffe from a technology think tank called Matter. When--on the first day of the forum, we had this sort of speed dating session where there was about a line of 30 People and another line of thirty people parallel and we had three minutes to give our spiel. What's good about you?
What did you get into this arena for? And what was fascinating to me was that everybody really in someway or another said I thought somebody should do something about this. And in other areas of my life it's usually, and someone should, and and and whine whine whine, but everyone here said, and so I did, it was personally saying someone should do something.
So I'm going to do something about it. And I thought that was a distinctive and that was men and women and in that sort of forty people I think I met in that arena.
That 's great. Any men got anything to add here? Just say women are great. Men are okay? Okay, I agree.
Yes, My name is Raziq Fahim and I came from the same region, the Balochistan, from Pakistan, and I work with Quratul Ain for last fifteen years almost. And on the state of leadership I realize the People like me, men, who have grown up in an extremely conservative society, kills half of his being. The feminine being, the feminine part of ourselves.
So I think it is extremely essential to reclaim your humanity. You want we able to contribute in the lives of others. Until you need not reclaim your own being, the feminine being and while working with young people in the extremely difficult situation. I always remind that what Quratul Ain has doing in this kind of situation.
And when I realized her style, I just do the same and I I just observe the extreme breakthroughs that I made. Because of that, you know, whole sense of my being, I think that won't be able for men to make great breakthroughs until he reclaims the feminine attributes that got bestowed on him as human being. Thank you very much.
I realize I realize that I stand corrected here. I shouldn't have introduced the discussion as being about just heroes, but definitely heroine and heroes. Well we've got lots more to talk about, theres more of the program to come and you can join our discussion on Facebook.com/ bbcforum. But now a small break for the latest world news from the BBC.
We'll be back in a few minutes.
That's great everyone.
Of course there isn't really a summary of world news at the minute. It will be in a minute. We'll carry on with the program in a minute, but if you were to hear this on the radio, you would indeed have an up-some of what's happening in the world. Is this where we get our red noses for.
Well we should of had red noses shouldn't we, and Emily telling me to tell you all to misbehave a bit more. You're being far too well behaved up here on the platform. Who knows what will happen there? Okay, we're ready to carry on. Hello, I am Bridget Kendall, welcome back to our special forum program from the Skoll World Forum in Oxford University in front of a crowded hall entrepreneurs.
And with me here three
global leaders of change librarian supremer, Ken Brecher, social activist Roshaneh Zafar, and doctor and social entrepreneur, Larry Brilliant. We've been looking at the qualities of social entrepreneurs, and whether or not they're heroes and heroines.
What it means to stand out from the rest of us and push for new solutions to improve people's lives. Let's look a bit more at the challenges they face, and particularly the challenge of risk. Now Larry Brilliant, your president of the Skoll Global Threats Fund which gives money, hundreds of millions of dollars, to help counter the major threats of our age, and you - at least you hope so - and you argue, that to be able to live in this uncertain world, everyone include social entrepreneurs needs to be more risk-literate to become better at making decisions in uncertain conditions.
What does it mean to be more risk-literate? I think thirty, forty, years ago, the world faced almost a single existential risk, fifty-thousand nuclear weapons the Soviet Union and the U.S. had pointed at each other, the fear of nuclear holocaust. Now, with increasing population, decreasing resources, increasing climate change, which is a great exacerbator. Looking at shortages of water, continuing nuclear proliferation, regional conflicts, and increasing probability of pandemics And a whole long list of others humanity faces many existential risks.
They're complect, they're difficult to quantify, they're difficult to talk about, even when you list them as I just did, they're mind-numbing, and we do not have the global governments, the democracy, the form of economic theory to understand those risks. Most importantly, the people who vote for change, who vote for leaders, frequently vote against their own best interests because they are not all the risks.
So I think we do need a risk literacy. We need to change reading, writing, and arithmetic in our schools to reading, writing, and arithmetic in risk literacy. So, some of these risks are not in new. Some are in new and they're not all, but what you're saying is that in the globalized world, they all cascade, they multiply.
That's exactly correct.
And that's what we need to appreciate.
The risk
of water shortage is not new, but the risk that it can cause a global crisis has been brought about by increasing population and changes in technology, transportation and the media. You're exactly right, the change is that modernity and globalization, technology and population pressures have changed local risks into global risks.
So, social entrepreneurs, they're there to go out there and see new challenges. As one gentleman said to us be the ones who are out in front, not yet supported by others. So they see risk. Are they risk literate enough?
They are. In fact, risk literacy is one of their great qualities. They understand the risk of inaction, and that indeed I think is one of the hallmarks a social entrepreneur: they understand that the risk of them not taking an action is greater than the risk that they face themselves, and they're willing to put themselves in a heroic mode to do something about that.
So it's not that they need to introspective say we need to understand risk better. They need to be able to transfer to other people the understanding of this. It's about teaching risk. Rosheneh, do you think you can teach risk?
Well if I look at the recent bust, the financial crisis, we were supposed know financial risk but we didn't. So I'm one of those proponents who believes you can't teach risk. If I give you my example, I hadn't really thought that I would set up a microfinance institution in Pakistan and nationalize it and go scale.
If I had begun to think about it I would probably still be in my room thinking about it and not putting it into action. So I think the moment you begin to teach risk you can understand risk, you can plan and mitigate risk, you can try to address risk, but I am not sure if you can learn how to handle it.
Or to learn about risk literacy thats my take on it.
That's the dilemma then Larry, how do you learn about it?
I would disagree lovingly of course.
In retrospect if you look at the 2008 financial crisis and if you model it, we see that the derivatives that were produced were six times the global GDP; that was a greater amount of leverage than we knew about, but far more important, one firm, Lehman Brothers, was responsible for sixty percent of all the derivative tradings. If we had known that and seen that, we would have realized this is a risk that is not acceptable. But because we dont have the tools or the vocabulary or the skills or the inclination we didnt do that kind of a risk assessment. So I would disagree only in that I don't think we're there yet, I think risk is something that is so ephemeral and so difficult to capture that we have to find a way to make risk sexy.
Perhaps the answer is the Federal Reserve should have been headed by a woman and then we wouldn't...
I'm with
you
A friendly shake of hands on that one.
I wanted to bring you in Ken Brecher because he must be pretty used to juggling risk and challenging convention particularly in the film world. Massive risks. That people have to take there, but I'm also thinking about your role as president of the Library Foundation in Los Angeles, because Larry's been saying to us we're living in a time of cascading risk.
And surely this is a radical time, even a risky time for Libraries given the way that information is involving. Do you think librarians need to be more risk literate? I think they're extremely risk literate. I think the librarians are that unsung heroines and heroes. I was recently looking at like the history of the libraries.
As the head of the library foundation of Los Angeles. I don't run the public libraries, but I run a private foundation with a public purpose, which is the support of this large library system and what I have discovered learning about librarians over the last year or so and a large number of them is that the age of the librarian who going "Shh... You are in a library." That's over. They love technology. They are gamers. They love books. They love ideas, they love information and they're at the forefront of social justice. When the United States government asked the library association to provide them with information as to which book people were taking out and which websites they were looking at.
And I should just mention we had 155 million visits. To the website of the Los Angeles libraries last year. That's a lot of visits. When the government asked for that information, the librarian said no. Absolutely not. This is not the information that we'll ever provide. What a person reads online or in the book in their lap is their business.
And it's private. There is no censorship, and we will never reveal that. But the great risk though Bridget, the really great risk is that we will create a kind of information elite. A large portion of the population of this huge city that I live in, Los Angeles, doesn't own a computer. And those that do, have old-fashioned, many have old-fashioned Dial-up computers and they don't have the bandwidth to get the information; it's impossible in that kind of city to graduate from high school if you can't get online and do, so our thousands of free computers turn out to be the lifeline and the education line for so many students.
The risk is that we will separate the information. We'll link it to a certain kind of technology which will not be available to people who need that to prepare a resume or find a job. Or actually ask the questions that need to be asked at this moment if we're going to change or evolve our democracy.
I wanted to come to you in the audience about. I could see some hands going up already. As I said we think of social entrepreneurs as being big risk takers, but I wondered if Any of you had tough lessons to learn when it comes to dealing with risk? Yes, there's a lady there.
Hi my name is Janet Wasserstein.
I'm with MIT, the office of foundation relations and I'd just like people to remember the ideas inspiration that come from the great universities around the world and the new technologies that comes from universities at G lab, D lab programs at MIT and the students, the students themselves that just don't go to Paris or Florence to look at the museums, but they actually go into countries and put themselves at great risk.
Okay. There's a gentleman here who had his hand up.
I'm Ron Dembo from Zerofootprint.
I absolutely believe you can teach risk, and in fact, I absolutely believe that one of the big problems we have in the world, today, is that the people who run our government don't fundamentally understand how to make decisions under uncertainty.
There are so many glaring examples of this, whether it's nuclear power or security at airports, whatever. The simple, there are simple ideas that can be conveyed to audiences of any kind that tell you more or less how to interpret the solution to a problem, and that's about as important as it is. For example, in a very, very risky world an optimal solution is to hedge.
The question is not what the solution is, but how much to hedge. So for example in today's world you wouldn't say all nuclear, or all solar, or all wind, you would hedge. And in a world which all problems that are deterministic were known with certainty, the optimal solution is to execute. And that distinction is not made.
We treat all problems as if they were homogeneous. But the key is to separate out what is truly risky and what is truly known with certainty, and to treat them differently. The nature of the solution's different, and that's what you can actually teach.
Okay great. Gentleman here in the front.
I'm Carl Pope from the Sierra Club, and I think an important distinction about risk is, are you putting your own skin at risk or are you putting someone else's? Social entrepreneurs is one of the ways you know you're doing something virtuous is when the risk is on your shoulders. But we're taught to worship leaders who put other people at risk.
Whether they are politicians sending other people to fight wars or chief executives gambling with other people's money on Wall Street. And I think, it's a very important characteristic if, are you taking the risk or are you offloading the risk, and we don't pay attention to that distinction.
Can I comment a little bit on that because Carl and I had the wonderful experience of working at the same time in the seventies in Bihar India. In that time Carl there were almost zero NGOs. Go back to the nineteen seventies in India. These risk takers, social entrepreneur. This public sector, this private sector we talk about all the time, civil society, it didn't exist.
If you wanted a job you worked for government or a state supported organization. There were one or two very large family-owned corporations and that was it. This middle sector that now has five hundred thousand NGOs in India alone. This is five hundred thousand potential social entrepreneurs who are looking around, putting themselves at risk.
Putting their ideas at risk. It makes for a much different world and a much better world, when you have so many people who don't have a structured life, who have these opportunities for risk and reward. And I think we can celebrate that change since you and I, we're in Bihar.
But isn't it also the case that if you are a social entrepreneur, I mean look at us, here we all are in this lovely, very comfortable city of Oxford, coming from probably quite comfortable lives that as you mention that it's fair enough to take a risk if you have the luxury of being rich, but if you're poor living on a dollar a day, can you afford to?
That's what you're seeing in India, what you're seeing in Pakistan, that's what you just saw in Tahir Square, that's what so wonderful, is there's something changing in the world where people at every level society are taking risks because the world has become unsustainable. We all sense it's going in the wrong direction, and throughout society, at every level, people are willing to take risks and make change.
I think they're taking daily risks.
You know, every day is a risk for them. And the fact that they've managed it so well for centuries is something That we need to learn from and we need to acknowledge. The women that we work with our living at a dollar and dollar and a half a day and then they take out loans. The world of credit is taking out and risk you know undertaking a financial risk and the fact that they not only invest this in their businesses, they actually manage to pay it back, that in itself tells you how big a risk they're taking and how open they are to risk taking.
The whole idea of risk taking is about being prepared to do something where you might fail. I come back to the question I asked earlier. How many of you have had tough lessons to learn when it comes to risk? I think if we were to ask everyone to spend today only a dollar they wont be able to do it. I often do that with my students, I tell them here's a hundred rupees go and spend the day on this, and take care of five children, manage your household budget, make sure you run your business at the same time, if somebody falls sick you have to manage them. And if women can do that I think that's the major lesson we can derive from that.
I'm Mark Plotkin,
I'm with the Amazon Conservation Team. There's been a subtext here, which I want to highlight because I think it's important, social entrepreneurs not only do, they inspire. And I think the second is as important as the first, because the importance of a Desmond Tutu or a Thomas Jefferson, wasn't just that they freeded there people it's the inspiration they gave to people around the world, and tying this into this gender thing that you brought up, if you look at the early hero was in western culture, they're all men.
Ulysses, Leonidas, Hercules, that's all changed. So, for me, this gender thing is a non-issue. I don't think there's anybody there last night who looked at Desmond Tutu and said "Wow, a woman would have done a better job." Right? So we have created the space in our culture now where we have the right heroes.
It used to be just military guys. It used to be just athletes. You know, who do you want your son to grow up to be: Michael Vick Or Desmond Tutu? Who do you want your daughter to grow up to be: Madonna or Jane Goodall? So the fact that we don't think twice about having heroes who are men or women, for the most part, is a very, very positive thing. And many of the problems in the world I think come from the fact that we worshiped the wrong heroes for far to long and that's one of the good news pieces that comes out of meetings like this.
There's a gentleman at the back with his hand up.
I'm Lauren Walters. I'm the founder and CEO of Two Degrees food or one for one food company. As I listen to this, what strikes me is it's about tell stories about successful risk takers. That's the message of Tahrir Square, the message of Tunisia, that once it was successful that other people saw and felt that they could take risks.
And it's how those ripples go out from successful risk takers or a successful entrepreneur thats really the message. It's the entrepreneurs is really the vessel. They're the vehicle, we're all the vehicles, but it's the ripples that come out from us thats important So you will have to teach from your successes, and keep quiet about the failures, right?
No? There's someone
My name
is Kip from the Visayan Forum in the Philippines, and one basic lesson we've had about risk is when you risk there are often times that you will fail and in our case for instance we risk partnering with government in rescuing women and children against human trafficking. We risked lot of our eggs in one person who was part of immigration, and found out later that he was actually was booking chartered flights for trafficking victims, trafficking eighty women in chartered planes, and he was our champion.
So the reality is when you take a risk with people take a risk with different situations, it's possible that you're going to fail and the risk will not pay off. And I think that at that point two things have to be done. First, you have to have a plan B. Like okay, if this champion happens to be really corrupt, do we stick by this person or do you stick by your principles and I feel like its very important for you to know that whatever you risk that your principles are intact.
Second I feel like, when you fail, after risking a particular endeavor, then the next step really is to learn from the lessons of that risk and just find a better way and hope that it pay off. But the reality is it tends to fail sometimes.
Okay, Ken why don't you come in.
Hearing Kip speak and he
became a social entrepreneur at a very young age makes me think about this, the problem today for young people who are looking for role models. I think there's a big confusing and risk is a big part of that too. When the role model is not coming from literature, it's coming from a certain kind of media presentation, where the pre-processed hero has been given to you.
You have a certain amount of time to present that person. You're going to see it on the Internet, or you're going to see it on television, and that person doesn't have the fullness of their being. You see it in a segment, usually the media will choose that person if they can speak a bit of English, or if it's useful to interview them.
They don't very often will choose somebody who will immediately will be able to tell their story or to represent a certain idea, but the complexity of that, the complexity of the risk is almost always left out. I think an earlier generation found their heroes and heroines from literature, they read about people that they wanted to be like.
But now they're finding it in a very different kind of way, and my concern is that what's being presented to them is actually not what makes a hero a hero. Cartoon characters instead of three dimensions. Absolutely, and you don't have have to die to be a hero. In fact, the person who hangs in there, the mindfulness of the hero, the ability to hang in there and to do the work day after day in a sense This is the real definition, as opposed to the person who stands up and gives their life to it.
Very briefly, Larry. Well, I do want to say one thing about this moment here in Oxford at the Skoll World Forum. We're here celebrating not just the individual heroes. We're celebrating the field of heroism that is new on the stage at the scale that it is, so it a opportunity to all the people listening to know it now safe to be a hero its safe to be a social entrepreneur.
I just wanted to come back to the person Roshaneh who you said was your inspiring hero at the beginning of the program. Mohammed Yunus is the guru of micro-finance. Because this is an area where there's been an enormous amount of risk involved, hasn't there, and they've been developing ideas. Once it was seen as the Holy Grail of development giving people away to help themselves. And now, there is much more soul-searching about the way, some of the ways it hasn't worked, that it's actually turned out--produced risks for some of the people on the ground that weren't thought about.
I think a lot of social entrepreneurs have to take their responsibility very seriously. And one of the things that we're learning as a sector, and I had talked about that earlier as well--we have to talk about responsible finance, where we have transparent relationships with our clients, where the entire business or financial transactions is partnership based.
And we have to go back to the fundamentals of micro-finance, which is why--what is the end goal in mind? The end goal in mind is to empower individuals, is to allow them to live their dreams and to engage with their aspirations. And that's really what we need to do; that's what one has learned.
At the same time what's happening in Bangladesh with Dr. Yunus, I think that's an outrage. It really is unacceptable the way he is being treated. So, another perspective on this is: how do we treat our heroes? We are also a society, we also have ethics and values, and we also have beliefs and dreams that we need to stand by.
And there's certain people that embody that and we have to give them due respect. And I think that is something we need to really understand and stand up for.
Larry Brilliant you've been someone
who has been in position to give money, to fund projects as householder For Google and now in your position in Skool. Are you convinced by the power of microfinance to combat?
I'm convinced by the power of Muhammad Yunus. He's one of my heroes and I absolutely agree. He is being victimized in a way that is unprecedented, unfortunate and unfair. I think part of the problem is. We aren't free to have a discussion of the pros and cons of microfinance, micro credit, micro debt, all these different instruments and see "Where are they most applicable?
What's the best way to use them?" without that conversation becoming immediately ad hominem. And it's a very sad moment I think for me because this is one of the great leaders, not just of microfinance, but of economic development. We should be celebrating his life. He should be here on stage, not being pounded the way he is.
Do you fund microfinance?
Well, we're, our organization is pretty new. We're just getting started. We have not yet funded microfinance, but we're we're brand new, we're less than eighteen months old.
It's interesting thinking about Dr. Yunus, who
I also greatly admire, as a kind of mythic hero, if you look at the role of a hero, speaking as an anthropologist, it almost always happens that you have to be taken down.
You have to be removed from your position, you have to be demoralized, you have to be, in many ways, everything that's happening to him you can find in myth. Many of the origin figures, the great figures, and I did my field work in the Amazon in the Xingu region of the Amazon, so many of those great figures like Dr. Yunus who introduced new ideas, whether it's bringing light into the world or understanding the difference between men and women, which mythic heroes always help us do. Very often they have to pay the price for that, and if they survive or not is often the question of the myth. But what's happening to him seems to be directly out of the great classic myths of the world.
We should just explain here
that Mohammed Yunus, who more or less invented microfinance was given the Nobel Prize for it, has now found himself under fire in Bangladesh where it all started.
And an extraordinary turning of the circle from being put on a pedestal, to finding himself in legal problems, and I guess that brings us back to where you started us, Ken, with the idea that heroes need to be flawed, as well as inspiring.
Well I think that's what makes us, what makes them, actually in the end, it's what makes them heroes to us, because we can see ourselves in them, and nothing gives us greater, you know, was it La Rochefoucauld, who said that one of the great French maxims was that there is some pleasure in watching a friend fall off of a roof?
There is, there is some, there is, there is some, there is some, in French?
There is some part of us that sets these people up, and then get some pleasure that they're also having trouble with their wife, or they're also spoiling their son, or they're also human in the way that they can stand up and have a true moral and extraordinarily courageous life and at the same time deal with the issues that we all deal with.
How to sustain a relationship, how to put food on the table. how to be sure that our life actually ends up meaning something rather than has one moment that crashes down.
So, final question to you and the panel. If social entrepreneurs are partly there to lead and to inspire, how do they get their message across? Whether it's about or about empowering people who aren't such a good position, but being realistic about both the successes and the failures, Larry? I think transparency of what they do is the best lesson and if you only show the good without the struggle and without the mistakes You don't convey the entire lesson and how they get the message out I think is one of the beauties in this whole notion that this whole foundation does which is to celebrate not just to fund, to celebrate these leaders and these social entrepreneurs.
But "celebrate" suggests you just talk about the good bits.
But I don't think they do; I
think when you talk about the lives of our leaders. Just as we talk about our policies and our government. If you don't have transparency we lose more than half of the lesson.
Roshaneh.
I think I agree with what Larry said that you have to put your vulnerabilities out there.
We're not perfect; we don't intend to be perfect but on the other hand I also believe that we should never take no for an answer. We should always possess. There's always a solution out there that you can find and you have to push the frontiers and the envelopes as change. How do you communicate?
I think a lot of it comes from the ripple effect that somebody had mentioned earlier, how we share both our failures and our successes. In fact, I have learned more from failure than remember when I was starting out and I was, you know, 27 years old. Roughly the World Bank for four years, met Dr. Yunis.
Completely bold over by him. Went to Bangladesh. Came back and I didn't know where to start and I remember he said something to me and it's something that has helped, you know, stayed with me forever which was if you make a mistake. It's Ok. Tell the world it was Dr. Yunus' fault, not yours. And I think that kept me going.
And, I think that's what great heroes do.
Ken Brecher.
I think that the most important thing we need to think about in this whole range of who are our heroes and what is a heroine or a hero is that we have a responsibility to the next generations. They need to be our heroes. They are the ones are who actually, in many, many ways they have the answers already.
And very often it becomes we forget to listen to those answers. I dont know a single poor person who doesnt know what they need to get out poverty. Ask them. They dont need a multi-billion dollar program. They know exactly what they need. Sometimes it's just transportation. Sometimes it's someone to take care of their children so they can come home late from work.
I think young people see that very, very clearly and they'll be the first ones to tell us that we're making all sorts of mistakes, that we could do better.
OK. Well, what a great discussion and time to bring it to an end, I'm afraid. Many thanks to the three of you: Larry Brilliant, doctor and social entrepreneur, Ken Brecher, anthropologist and library champion and Roshaneh Zafar, social entrepreneur in Pakistan, and our wonderful audience. If you have more to add on heroes or anything else that you've heard on the program, or want to find out more about our guests, do contact us.
bbcworldservice.com/theforum, or tweet us at bbctheforum. But for now, from me, Bridget Kendall, the forum team, and everyone here in Oxford. Thank you for joining us.
