The word undercurrents refers to deep and mighty tides invisible to a person navigating on the surface of an ocean. Undercurrents do not always flow in the same direction as the waves on top of the water; indeed, sometimes these underwater channels can pull us backward. But often, they surge forward, propelling the way water drifts, or landscapes form, or social change moves. For the purposes of this book, I am talking about undercurrents that are creating energy and positive momentum to push us forward; macrotrends that will shape the work of activists through this decade and beyond. While these forces have rhythms that are sometimes inconsistent—or possess the potential for negative consequences—each of the undercurrents discussed in this book represents a macrotrend that I believe is vigorous, intractable, and generally positive for our collective pursuit of improving the world we live in.
The five undercurrents are:
1 Pyramid to diamond: Global economies are moving away from the old model of a pyramid, with mainly low‐income people and countries at the bottom and a few wealthy ones at the top, toward a fat diamond with vastly more people joining the middle class and living better, realizing powerful new possibilities to link entrepreneurialism with improved well‐being.
2 Communities are the customers: Communities are increasingly becoming customers with agency and voice, rather than passive recipients of aid and social change, increasingly playing more of a role in shaping their own futures with community‐ and human‐centered activism.
3 Leveling the playing field: Improving equity—whether based around gender, ethnicity, or sexuality—is radically reshaping the field of social activism.
4 Digital disruption: Data and digital tools will continue to bring valuable new capabilities to our world, revolutionizing everything from health care to education to conservation—even as they present daunting new challenges for activists to navigate.
5 The surprisingly sexy middle: Adapting and scaling innovations for widespread impact, the complex middleware that has often been ignored as one of the less glamorous aspects of social change is becoming more important and, surprisingly, more sexy.
Understanding and exploiting these five undercurrents at work in our world will help practical‐minded activists everywhere turn their outrage into action—maybe even optimism.
So why write this book now, when the world seems convulsed with such immense challenges? How can I possibly be hopeful in the face of growing global unrest, alarming patterns of inequality, shockwaves from a global pandemic, and potentially catastrophic climate change? Actually, I have never been more encouraged. Despite daily headlines, which are frightening indeed, a practical activist focuses on the overarching trendlines, most of which are pretty great. Thanks to some amazing innovations and extraordinary commitments from citizens, leaders, governments, and institutions across the globe, this planet is making undeniable progress toward becoming a place where greater numbers of people live longer, healthier, and more productive lives than ever before. In fact, we live within reach of realities that were once unimaginable: a world where abject poverty is rare, few die of preventable diseases, and everyone has a chance to be healthy. Despite some persistent challenges, this is becoming true for more and more communities. Even the COVID‐19 global pandemic, while laying bare vulnerabilities in our global health and economic systems and potentially setting us back on many fronts, has demonstrated a renewed spirit of collaboration around solutions, innovations, and strengthened communities. If nothing else, the pandemic has illuminated exactly how the five undercurrents in this book can be harnessed to keep bending the curve of history toward progress.
This book is for a lot of people: anyone who is concerned about inequities in health, economic opportunity, and education, but gets overwhelmed by the scale of these problems. Anyone who would like to work toward bettering lives across the planet but feels paralyzed by cynicism or confused about where to begin. Anyone who is looking for ways to channel their outrage into practical action. Anyone who wants a better world.
I've framed my ideas as a business leader and practitioner to help the interested become educated, the committed become activated, and the engaged become more effective.
Many such people sit before me in the class I teach on social innovation at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Others, like my former consulting clients at McKinsey & Company, lead corporations or philanthropic organizations and are trying to figure out how to engage more meaningfully with social issues. And some are people like many of my mom's neighbors in rural Montana—interested, but often underinformed; stymied by doomsday headlines but unaware that if you take a longer view, many trendlines bode well. I am talking to all these potential activists who want to roll up their sleeves and contribute, but don't know where to start.
The class I've taught at Stanford for the past six years is one slice of this audience. Consistently, these smart young adults pepper me with questions about the role of business in society and the effectiveness of our approaches to alleviating poverty. They want to know how to engage with a world that seems broken or, at best, rigged. And they want to see proof of progress.
When I shut my eyes and picture these students, I see three rows. In the first sit young people fired up with idealism. They ask lots of questions and some already have on‐the‐ground experience inventing environmentally friendly toilets or other products designed to help the planet. Many are not even business majors. But they're ready, intellectually and emotionally, to charge out the door and take on the world.
In the second row are standard business school students. They're attentive, and they work hard. They want to be financially successful, but they also want to feel that their lives have meaning and purpose beyond earning gobs of money. They want to know how to achieve both ends, simultaneously.
Then there's the metaphorical back row, full of people who remind me of myself as a young man. Sometimes they're distracted, other times snarky. They seem to bring little passion or commitment to this topic, believing that a class on social innovation is “soft,” an easy A. Not long ago, one of these students—his name is Michael—approached me after class. He was tall and athletic, with a tidy career path all laid out. Michael was already working as an investment analyst, and he struck me as largely indifferent to what I was teaching. Over the term, he'd lobbed a few questions from the back of the room, most of them suggesting to me that Michael thought social innovation wasn't really business and needed much harder metrics to claim success.
I'd formed all kinds of unflattering opinions about this student and what his life post‐Stanford would look like. But over the summer, Michael emailed me. He was working for a presidential candidate—someone I'd describe as a centrist—and he was collaborating on a book about values‐based business practices, the importance of business in society and how it could be used to advance social innovation. This blew up all of my preconceptions. It also reminded me that today's young executives view the world very differently from those of previous generations. They appreciate that we need to reengineer our approach to global problems if we are going to sustain ourselves as a species. That group inspires me.
This book is also written for seasoned business leaders like the executives at French insurance giant AXA. Though it is among the oldest and largest corporations in the world, AXA's top managers are determined to reinvent their company for the twenty‐first century. Its board regularly solicits advice from social innovation experts in health, environmental science, digital transformation, and inclusive economics. I leaped at the chance to be part of this advisory team because bringing business into the work of social change is essential. And because helping a corporation think through how to divest from tobacco or coal, invest in disease prevention, and support gender inclusion actually helps their bottom line, ultimately benefiting employees, the communities they serve, and the globe overall.
Beyond corporate titans and the young people who aspire to join them, there are other types of readers I am speaking to very directly: policymakers and donors who influence trends in global development; people who have little