100 books like Building Social Business

This short book hits the nail on the head over and over about what social entrepreneurship is, what it isn’t, why it matters, and how it differs from other approaches to causing social change.  I have given it to countless people over the years, especially those seeking their own place in the “do good” ecosystem.  On virtually every page, I found multiple insights about the realities of leading social change that I found not only true but also extremely helpful to me as I reflected on my own journey and its highs and lows as well as its more mundane elements and its many absurdities.

This guidebook in the form of a memoir, or memoir in the form of a guidebook, is both highly entertaining and profoundly useful.  Through brutally honest stories from his years leading FINCA, the global microfinance network, Scofield shows how social change happens: one mistake, one insight, and one breakthrough at a time.  By laying them out so clearly and in such a reader-friendly format, he has provided a valuable gift to a new generation of changemakers.

Daley-Harris chronicles his experience founding and leading RESULTS, a scrappy and highly effective anti-poverty advocacy organization, and later his work to embed his insights into other organizations working on other crucial issues such as climate change.  His stories of citizens studying issues and then acting in concert with others to drive desperately-needed policy changes and divert hundreds of millions of dollars to effective programs are instructive as well as inspirational.  In this edition, he helpfully breaks down his tactics for spurring unprecedented and highly successful citizen advocacy into bite-sized steps that any organization can adapt.

Jacqueline Novogratz was a successful young woman with a promising career in banking who wanted to truly understand global poverty and find ways to tackle it.

This book tells not only the remarkable story of a favorite hand-knit blue sweater she donated in Virginia and saw again in Rwanda, but her own sometimes fumbling ways to connect her experiences to women living in poverty.

I love this book for its honesty and how the author shares her own mistakes as well as understandings.

This short book explores the potential for individual and community empowerment through impact investing. It explores the drawbacks of foreign aid and offers a powerful alternative by providing numerous examples of the potential of social enterprise to truly make a difference in people’s lives.

I know the first author, Kim Tan, and have the utmost respect for his knowledge, his humility, and his passion to change the world for the better. I also value his perspective as Malaysian-born rather than Western-born. We, as Americans and Westerners, tend to be quite isolated from other perspectives about the problems in our world and how to solve them. 

This is a great guide for people considering embarking on a social enterprise journey, a kind of pump primer that canvasses many people in the field for their advice and imparts a lot from the author himself who is in as good a position as anyone to offer it, having "walked the walk "from acolyte/novitiate to investor, to professor and to convener of the like-minded in one of the most enjoyable conferences I have ever attended, chocked full of social entrepreneurs and other interesting people, and happily keynote-free. I think the most valuable advice Jonathan imparts, and it plays like a lite motif throughout this breezily-paced book is that the best way to be effective in this multi-variegated field is to learn the language of your beneficiaries, not so much to be able to speak to them, but rather to listen to them and understand their plight and what they… show more.

I like this book because it takes a giant step back and asks what “the economy” means. What we measure, and what we choose to classify as “economic activity”, is a choice, not a given. By opting to classify some things as true economic activity (e.g. finance) but others as not (e.g. raising kids) we implicitly make choices about economic policy, as it can only deal with what it can count. It opens up the idea that we could stop and think about what should matter to the economy, and what may not.

This book argues that Christianity provided the foundation for reason which led to the beginnings of science. It makes the case that Christianity alone embraced logic and deductive thinking as the basis for freedom and progress and is responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium.

Additionally, it is a very well-written book, which is usually not the case for academic works. 

If we want to reimagine capitalism as a system that does not destroy the planet and destabilize society, this must be enabled by corporations changing the way that they operate. Henderson’s Reimagining Capitalism gives us some principles for thinking about how to do this. A long-time innovation scholar, Henderson draws on her knowledge about how to succeed at organizational change to propose a more purpose-driven model of corporate action. Using numerous case studies of companies that have (partially) succeeded and those that have failed, she animates a number of principles for change. To start, such a model will require new metrics for social and environmental impact. This would involve more collaborative engagement amongst stakeholders to grow the economic pie and amongst companies to self-regulate in a more sustainable manner.

Particularly refreshing, at the end of the book, Henderson connects the macro conversation about economic and corporate change with a discussion… show more.

This is one of the defining books that has helped a generation of researchers name an important tendency – that capitalism isn’t all-dominant and there are always alternatives to it.

I use this book often with campaigners and city policymakers to help them understand that if you really take a closer look at our modern-day economy you will see all sorts of activity – co-operatives, family labour, barter, gift exchange.

I love the idea of postcapitalism as it really asks us to think about what should, or ought to, come next. This broader understanding of our economies as diverse entities opens up the possibility of supercharging more community-focused economies.