SSIR’s 2023 Social Innovation Reading List

(Photo by iStock/Ilija Erceg)

A collection of some of Stanford Social Innovation Review's most popular book reviews and excerpts published in 2023:

1. The Future of the Responsible Company: What We've Learned from Patagonia's First 50 Years by Vincent Stanley with Yvon Chouinard

“Patagonia remains a for-profit business, but its single shareholder is now the Earth or, to be precise, the benefit of the Earth. Patagonia will continue to reinvest a significant share of its profits back into the company each year and distribute another significant share of profits as bonuses to employees. The company will continue, through its Grants Council, to give its 1 percent of sales to grassroots environmental organizations. None of this will change.”

2. Becoming a Public Benefit Corporation: Express Your Values, Energize Stakeholders, Make the World a Better Place by Michael B. Dorff, reviewed by J. S. Liptrap

“While Dorff admits he is ‘inspired’ by the social-entrepreneurship movement, he has no illusions about the benefit corporation. In Dorff’s words, the organizational form is a supportive ‘reinforcement tool’ for those who genuinely care about creating social value; yet, at the same time, it is not an effective ‘enforcement tool’ for ‘forcing companies that lack sincere goals to prioritize purpose.’ Being honest with readers about the benefit corporation’s duality gives the book a credibility that distinguishes it from many previous studies.” (Open to nonsubscribers for a limited time. Subscribe here.)

3. Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time by Seth D. Kaplan

“In neighborhoods across our country, weakening social bonds have left our communities much more fragile than they should be. We need a call to action—but not any action will do. Americans are enterprising people. We want to help those most affected by social disintegration and breakdown, but despite the best of intentions, too many initiatives actually end up weakening local social systems—undermining local institutions and norms, concentrating economic disadvantage in certain areas, and encouraging businesses, investors, the talented, and the young to flee, making recovery more difficult, and anyone left behind worse off. What is needed is not more top-down action, but sideways action, neighborhood by neighborhood across the nation.”

4. Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom by Marcie Bianco

“The freedom to move is about more than just individual mobility and access; it’s about the ability to create movements: deliberate, constructive actions that catalyze and generate new relationships, alliances, collaborations, and coalitions that can do the work of changing our institutions. The power of movements is based in the ideas that fuel them, that inspire people to come together and work toward the realization of a shared goal or values.”

5. The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times by Robert McLean & Charles Conn

“As Bill Joy put it, ‘It’s better to create an ecology that gets all the world’s smartest people toiling in your garden for your own goals. If you rely on your own employees, you’ll never solve all your customer’s needs.’ For some it comes as a shock to have to see the world this way. We spent a lot of our careers trying to get the smartest people in the room, and linking ourselves to other experts outside the room. The implications for how organizations solve problems are huge. How does our recruiting need to change if we are drawing more on others in the ecosystem? Do we know how to put together really diverse teams? What role should so-called experts play when innovation demands new competence? How do we organize to put Joy’s Law, and more broadly collective intelligence, to work?”

6. The Slow Lane: Why Quick Fixes Fail and How to Achieve Real Change by Sascha Haselmayer, reviewed by Sophie Bacq

“In the past couple of decades, we have witnessed slowness informing a variety of movements such as slow food, slow fashion, and slow living—all of which aim to reconnect people with cultures, traditions, and more local modes of exchange. Based on his research of more than 100 slow-lane movements, Haselmayer identifies five principles of the slow-lane approach: hold the urgency, or have patience for the time necessary to solve for complex issues; listen broadly, or listen deeply, with intention, and without preconception or judgment; share the agency, by empowering and giving space to marginalized people to contribute their ideas; nurture curiosity to unlearn dominant patterns of thinking so that new and creative ideas have the space to emerge; and embrace technology as an enabler of growth-mindset values and behaviors rather than as a tool to dominate and silence others. According to Haselmayer, these principles can be practiced universally; there is space for everyone in the slow lane.” (Open to nonsubscribers for a limited time. Subscribe here.)

7. Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

“I’ve come to think of the life-​changing impact that occurs when unearned advantages intervene at key moments in our lives as ‘compounding unearned advantage.’ Similar to compound interest, the unearned advantages people inherit gild their paths and shut other people out. When those with advantaged identity markers receive better treatment from teachers, police officers, doctors, professors, hiring managers, bosses, sponsors, politicians, and others who have power to bend their trajectories, even small unearned advantages can swell into great advantages.”

8. Understanding Organizations … Finally! by Henry Mintzberg, reviewed by Bob Hinings

“Mintzberg believes, and I agree with him, that much of the advice we get about how to manage and change organizations does not properly recognize the critical differences between organizations, which is why he begins with organizational types. But these differences do not mean that ideas, practices, and techniques can’t be transferred between them. They do mean, however, that managers must account for these differences to ensure that such transfers are effective, which necessitates that managers have a deep knowledge of not only their own organization but the organization from which they are transferring knowledge. Again, governments are not businesses, and universities are not automobile manufacturers. The resounding message for managers is to become cognizant of structural differences before making any change.” (Open to nonsubscribers for a limited time. Subscribe here.)

9. Beyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs by W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

“While disruption inextricably links market creation and market destruction, nondisruptive creation effectively ruptures that link. Nondisruptive creation can universally be defined as the creation of a brand-new market outside or beyond the boundaries of existing industries. It is precisely because the new industry is created outside the bounds of existing industries that there is no existing market or established players to be disrupted and fail. You can think of it as a positive-sum approach to innovation—as opposed to the win-lose nature of disruptive creation—which we find not only promising but a much-needed complement to disruption in the world of innovation. Let’s explore the similarities and the differences.”

10. From Generosity to Justice: A New Gospel of Wealth by Darren Walker

“As I see it, ‘comforting the afflicted’ is about our charity, our kindness, our magnanimity—about providing relief and recovery. But ‘afflicting the comfortable’ is about our pursuit of justice—how we reimagine and reform. One asks that we ‘give something back,’ but the other insists that we ‘give something up.’ Afflicting the comfortable compels us to recognize the inequalities that make relief both necessary and possible: caste, as Isabel Wilkerson perfectly phrases it; decades of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, greed-is-good excess; the conscious choices that aggregate into a conscienceless capitalism. Afflicting the comfortable demands that we reckon with the ways in which we, ourselves, benefit from vast disparities in access and agency, voice, and value. And afflicting the comfortable obligates us to rectify to repair the deep inequalities that deceive us into ignoring how and why we put ourselves first and others second, resetting the cycles of privilege built into our laws, norms, customs, and behaviors.”

Read more stories by SSIR Editors.