Wisdom from Pamela Hartigan director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University's Said Business School. Her closing words at the Skoll forum are shared with her permission from Katherine Fulton's blog.

I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on an oft-repeated comment that has followed me over the last decade or more – and it questions the focus on the heroic entrepreneur. Is that not misguided – I am frequently asked? Certainly it takes more than the visionary individual for his or her initiative to be successful – what about the people in the organizations they set up who are often instrumental to its success? And as we have emphasized throughout this Forum, a fact underscored by our Catalysing Collaboration theme, social entrepreneurs cannot hope to scale their solutions without the essential support of other public and private sector stakeholders – and most importantly, of the communities in which they work.

So why continue this hero worship, I am asked? I would like to look at this question differently. We are all human, and we know that people and their institutions – whether government, business or nonprofit – strongly resist new ideas, however great or lousy they might be. It takes extraordinary persistence and creativity to sell the idea to others. The entrepreneur is incredibly inventive in that regard, working day and night to find a way to motivate, persuade, to engage others in believing in that change. In fact, that ability to overcome these barriers turns out more important than the original idea. An idea in itself is often so simple – giving credit to the poor, involving communities in the protection of their ecosystems, revolutionizing access to quality health care and education and the like – such simple ideas... but making them happen takes years of persistent seduction.

So while these individuals will always be heroes – and slightly mad, much to humanity's great good fortune – celebrating these social entrepreneurs should not lead us into the trap of assuming that they single-handedly achieve their results. Nothing could be further from the truth. And much of what they achieve despite severe resource constraints is due to the type of leadership they exercise. Kouzes and Posner, gurus on the subject, define leadership as "... the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations. All leadership involves inspiration, vision, competence and interpersonal skills." And that is exactly what social entrepreneurs possess. It takes courage, imagination and persistence to drive through the kinds of fundamental changes needed to respond to new challenges and opportunities. And that can only be done through a more open style of leadership that combines intellectual humility and personal confidence which doesn't confuse ambition with omniscience.

Finally, one of the messages I continuously reiterate to MBA students at Oxford and at Columbia Business School is the following: It is okay NOT to be a maverick. It's okay NOT to be a social entrepreneur and have a system-changing idea that you doggedly pursue at all costs and every waking minute. Most of us are NOT change-makers or entrepreneurs. And thank heavens for that, having done nothing but live and breathe with entrepreneurs for over a decade and found them wholly wonderful and exciting but completely unreasonable. But, for the majority of us who are not entrepreneurs, wherever our careers take us, we can and should be instrumental in facilitating, supporting and strengthening the work of these pragmatic visionaries because they are coming up with many of the solutions we so desperately need.