Dai Powell, Chief Executive, HCT Group

I started at HCT as a volunteer and then when I became Chief Executive it was because I wanted to work for an organisation that was providing a lot of good and I saw the potential for it to provide a lot more. I hadn’t been a Chief Exec before so I didn’t really know what to do, but within a very short period of time, I realised I had to basically turn the organisation completely around, change the whole way it works, so change it from a benevolent charity doing what it’s told by the authority, to what is now termed a social enterprise.

The one difficulty if you’re an entrepreneur is you’re never quite fulfilled, so there’s an impatience… You always want it to be bigger and better and have greater impact.

To change one thing in the world, it would be to move people towards cooperation instead of individualism… We’ll look back on it as a cycle, where developed countries will become more cooperative first; many developing countries are cooperative, then they become individualistic, and then hopefully they’ll become more cooperative again.

Dai Powell, Chief Executive, HCT Group