I’ve been asked what makes a great leader. The first quality is a moral compass, an ethical direction of knowing right from wrong. Second is belief that you can accomplish something and rally people earnestly around what you are trying to accomplish. So you are not putting on an act, you believe in something and it’s profoundly impactful on you, and you can naturally discuss this and get other people involved. Great leaders are great leaders because they know what their purpose is and they are dedicated to it.
I believe we are all interconnected. I believe there is a force that’s greater than all of us. There are so many wonderful people doing great things in the world and I feel inspired. Connecting to that energy, knowing there is this greater force we can connect to, through whatever religion it may be, is incredibly powerful. I think there are many ways to connect to that belief. There are different belief systems; the only belief system that is wrong is the one that says that it is the only way to connect to that greater being.
As a kid, growing up, I read a lot of books, like Brave New World and Animal Farm. I remember thinking by the time I was older, the world might not be as pleasant a place.
When I graduated college, I was 20 years old and had never been on a plane. I decided to backpack around the world. I remember making my way and of all places, Sudan and Pakistan most stand out. I saw people living in the most desperate circumstances. This is going back 20 plus years, but people didn’t have healthcare and there was air so thick you couldn’t breathe. I remember thinking, the world can’t have something like this exist.
From that moment on, I wanted to make the world a better place so that everyone could have access to peace and prosperity. I’d gone from reading it in books to seeing it in real life, and that really set me on a mission.
People are basically good. If you give good people the opportunity, they will do good things. I remember when Pierre Omidyar and I first got together and Pierre had this idea for eBay. In the early days, somebody had to trust that somebody would have an item they described online and someone would send that item and it would arrive as described. Some said, “You cant trust people.” We said, “You can, people are trustworthy.”
Here it is, many years later, and eBay is still around.
I remember when our first employee at the Skoll Foundation, our CEO Sally Osberg, took me to meet her mentor John Gardner and we asked John what could we do to best ensure the survival of humanity into the future and he said, “Bet on good people doing good things.”
When we talked about it more, he felt there are always going to be problems, but there are people who dedicate their lives to making a difference. Just around that time, the term “social entrepreneurship” began to be known and we felt there was an incredible opportunity to help them get going.
Excerpted from a conversation with Mabel van Oranje at the 2015 Skoll World Forum
