Skills vs. Passion: The Challenges for Corporate Professionals Who Move into the Social Sector

Professionals “are very impatient to scale, and don’t realize that in the social sector, what to scale is more critical than how to scale,” says Rohini Nilekani, philanthropist and founder of Arghyam, a Bangalore-based NGO. Corporate professionals, Nilekani adds, tend to have a strong and mistaken belief in the power of the markets to solve social problems. “But both the market and the state have failed, and that is why the philanthropic and the social sectors are there in the ?rst place,” she points out.