How hope can drive purposeful leadership

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey’s Yekaterina Vander chats with Jim Bildner, CEO of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation (DRK), a global venture philanthropy firm that supports early stage, high-impact social enterprises, about A Matter of Hope: Lessons Learned from Leaders, Changemakers, and Visionaries on Making a Difference in the World (Matt Holt Books/BenBella Books, September 2026). Drawing on lessons from social entrepreneurs tackling some of the world’s most difficult problems and deeply personal experiences from his own life, Bildner reflects on the possibilities we can miss when challenges seem insurmountable. He also explores the importance of noticing what others might overlook, embracing vulnerability, and finding purpose in the time we have. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Why write a book about hope today?

The book is about my life. And more importantly, it’s about the entrepreneurs whom I’ve had the privilege of seeing do amazing work in spaces that are incredibly complicated and often fraught with danger.

What I’ve learned over time, and the reason that I wanted to write the book particularly now, when many people feel like hope is in short supply, is to let them know the counterfactual. Hope is not in short supply. More importantly, everyone has the ability to harness hope, turn it to action, and make a difference in the lives of others.

In the book, with each of the entrepreneurs I write about, I intentionally spend time trying to understand where and how they grew up and what the motivating forces were. Not surprisingly, in each case, someone significant in their life framed for them a unique way of looking at the world.

Hope is not in short supply. More importantly, everyone has the ability to harness hope, turn it to action, and make a difference in the lives of others.

What sets social entrepreneurs apart?

The 270 entrepreneurs in our portfolio are very different people. They’ve come from different places in life, different backgrounds, and are trying to address different things.

And yet, they have a common attribute: the basis of hope. That’s the idea that when they see inequity—and there is significant inequity in the world—they actually lean in, as opposed to walking by it. Many people who see inequity in front of them just ignore it. They’re not ignoring it because they don’t care. They’re ignoring it because they feel powerless to change it. The difference in that attribute—the ability to see something and be very sad about its existence but not conclude it’s too big a problem for me to fix—is significant. One of the most fundamental lessons for me was in 2005 when my son died from a drug overdose at the age of 21.

I remember that the sheriff who found him was trying to comfort me. He said, “Don’t worry about this, Mr. Bildner. It’s too big a problem. No one can fix it.” As you can imagine, I thought about his words for a really long time.

That experience changed my view that things that happen in our lives don’t have to define us. I learned, and these entrepreneurs know it and show it, that when you see something and you begin to address it firsthand, that does a couple of things.

First, the service is fantastic for the people being served. But more importantly, that service really adds to someone’s life. It adds to the sense of purpose based on delivering real change. That is an unbelievable asset and a privilege that you get when you do that work.

How do social entrepreneurs turn hope into action?

They have hope to start with. That hope comes from someone close to them who has shown them what hope looks like.

In my own family, my parents questioned, “What can we do for others?” That was embedded in me. But that’s not enough. Everyone needs to find their own calling. People mentioned in the book find a path that is uniquely theirs.

The ability to take hope, which is typically more like a noun, and move it into a verb, is the understanding that everything is actually very important.

I teach a class at Harvard where a lot of our entrepreneurs come in for case studies. And the common thread among all of them is that the problem found them. They did not find the problem. Jared was working as a bartender when he received two calls—one from his wife’s family, one from his family—that there had been a medical emergency. They weren’t worried about the healthcare. They were worried about the medical bills. The difference is they don’t ignore when the problem hits them in the head. They are able to say, “Oh my gosh. It’s me. If not me, then who?”

All of us think of our time on this planet as finite, that we’re going to truly prioritize every second, every minute. The ability to take hope, which is typically more like a noun, and move it into a verb, is the understanding that everything is actually very important.

What does listening help us see?

I’ve probably spoken with 3,000 people in various groups, ranging in age from 18 to 25 to 70. What’s striking is they all give the same answer to this question.

In 2025, I was flying back from Norfolk, Virginia, and landed at Boston’s Logan Airport. As I walked down a busy terminal, everyone had ear pods and was busy looking at their phones or tablets. They were completely consumed by what they put in front of their eyes. I saw an anomaly in the corner. I saw what appeared to be a 28-year-old in blue scrubs sitting near three white boxes.

Curious, I moved closer, because the scene didn’t seem to fit the visual narrative. Then I saw black Sharpie scribble on a box that read, “MGH Cardiac Surgical Unit.”

When I looked at the boxes, they contained highly technical gauges that were monitoring temperature. And then I realized that there was a live heart there for a heart transplant. And then I saw what I see all the time: Life is binary in that respect.

Everything that we see has two sides of the story. One side is a grieving family at Mass General in Boston who has just lost somebody. And the other side is somebody who’s about to get a new heart and have a new life. And so, with the help of our communications team, we created a slide depicting that visually.

We showed people that visual depiction, and I asked them what they saw. And they say, “I see all these people with their tablets and phones in front of their eyes.” And then we show them a close-up of the same photo that shows again what I saw, which is somebody in blue scrubs sitting by three white boxes that are obviously a heart transplant.

It’s not that I can uniquely see something that no one else can. It’s that I’m looking for it. And that is the big thing that can make a difference in the lives of others.

Don’t be uncomfortable with uncertainty. We are living, as we always have lived, in a world full of it.

How can leaders respond to uncertainty?

I grew up in the supermarket business in New Jersey. I ended up working in the stores much of my life until I graduated from college. Anyone who knows a supermarket is used to hearing over the intercom, “Spill in aisle nine.”

Too many leaders think that everything has a spill-in-aisle-nine urgency to it. They also feel incredibly uncomfortable with uncertainty. What I found over and over again is when people try to fill uncertainty with their own narrative about what’s certain, it’s nearly 95 percent wrong.

What does that do in today’s world? It diminishes the most important attribute of leading in the world we’re living in today, which is authenticity. Our leaders need to be honest in saying, “This is what I know. And by the way, I don’t know the answer to this.”

Vulnerability matters. Even though I’m the CEO of DRK, I am definitely known as the chief vulnerability officer. Everyone understands that when I cry, it’s OK for them to cry. And when people ask me, “How’s this going to work out?” I tell them the truth. “I don’t know, but I think if we do these things, we’re going to tilt the arc in the favor of making a change.”

And so if there’s one piece of advice I can give everyone, it’s don’t be uncomfortable with uncertainty. We are living, as we always have lived, in a world full of it. Don’t try to fill the narrative with something that’s not true because underneath hope and resilience and change is trust.

Why make the book so personal?

That’s the most important part. It is the core belief. When I think about me at ages 30 and 40, the things I valued then were profoundly different than the things I cherish today. The most important lesson I’ve learned over the last 15 years is the vulnerability aspect.

You can’t really lead anyone in any way if they don’t see you as a whole person. I could have written this book about our DRK entrepreneurs, who are unbelievable. But then it would just be another business book.

At a summit, someone gave me a long introduction. And, of course, I thought as most people do, “Oh, I want to meet that guy.”

But then I said, “By the way, I’m also the father of a 21-year-old son who died from a drug overdose. I’m also the husband of my wife of 45 years who has stage four metastatic cancer,” because I wanted these folks to know that I know that they also have similar situations. And even though there was a group of 300 people, there is still a need to truly be authentic in the time we’re living in.

A book that didn’t include those real aspects would not have served the purpose. I want people to look at me and see me in a total sense and know that it’s OK for bad things to happen. But again, that doesn’t have to define you.

The other thing I want people to know is what I’ve learned after speaking with other parents who’ve lost sons and with numerous cancer patients. The gravitational pull when you’re experiencing a tragedy is really strong to put you down in a rabbit hole.

When I have seen that happen to people, I really want them to understand that we only have one life to live. And you can really make a difference. So spending time in that rabbit hole beyond the amount of time it takes to recover is a waste of your own life. I miss my son every day, and I can’t bring him back. But in some respects, the sense of purpose that I have in doing the work that I’m doing honors him.

What have flying and sailing taught you about perspective?

I’ve always wanted to live life to its fullest. I think about my flying experience that began in the late 1980s when a hot air balloon flew over my head in New Hampshire. It just seemed incredible, like The Wizard of Oz. I chased down the balloon to the Post Mills Airport in Vermont. There I found the legendary Brian Boland, the man who was operating the hot air balloon. It took me months to convince him I wasn’t going to compete against him, but he agreed to teach me.

There is nothing like flying a hot air balloon. There’s 30 minutes of agony getting it inflated. There’s 30 minutes of pure pleasure because you feel no turbulence. And then there’s 30 minutes of pure fear as you’re trying to figure out where you’re going to land it.

And that’s true in sailing. It’s also true in flying other devices. As technology has increased both in sailing and in flying, one thing is really important: We have a lot of instruments that repeat data.

It’s very important for people to stop looking at that data and start looking with their own eyes. The idea is that I know what it’s like to be on the water just being powered by wind or being in the air powered by wind again, and everything has a different vantage point.

When you’re in a hot air balloon, you’re flying at roughly 2,000 feet—sometimes 500 feet—and looking down and seeing the world differently.