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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Idea cast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with William D. Eggers and Paul McMillan,

authors of The Solution Revolution, how business, government,

and social enterprises are teaming up to solve society's toughest

problems.

Thanks to both of you for joining us today.

It's great to be with you today, Sarah.

Thanks, Sarah.

Glad to be here.

So let's start with part of the problem here.

There are lots of big hairy problems that we like to solve and that we usually expect government

to help us solve, and yet we seem really unable to do so.

What is stopping government from being able to really work on some of those big problems?

Well, Sarah, we have the probably here in Washington, D.C. where I'm sitting today. It's probably the most polarized

gridlock atmosphere that we've seen in our lifetime. Members of Congress can't even agree on what

their problems are, never mind how to solve them. And similar problems exist elsewhere. And so we're seeing this sort of unprecedented paralysis. But the other problem is that there's very little we haven't asked from government in modern times. We ask it to keep us safe from terrorists to protect her privacy, to stop the contagion of failing states, to bill out the banks, and so forth and so on.

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