One Size Fits None: Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution

by Alejandro Juárez Crawford

Existing innovation and funding models will not work to fight the effects of climate change – people cannot rely on top-down global initiatives to save us. One Size Fits None provides both an analysis and a path forward, advocating for collaborative, bottom-up solutions as indispensable for navigating today’s “comorbid” crises effectively. It argues that only by breaking open obstacles to broad-based entrepreneurship, both within and outside of existing organizations, can we break free from fossil fuel dependency and mitigate the spread of grievance culture and deepening global inequality.


The book’s aim is to spur discussions and conversations among leaders of governments, businesses, NGOs, and universities about the systemic connections in a set of separate crises we’re all facing. By introducing case studies and real-world alternatives, the authors aim to generate practical experiments that depart from top-down approaches that have been failing to address these crises.


One Size Fits None is for everyone asking what’s keeping our institutions from addressing the demand for opportunities to innovate our ways out of the present debacle—and what can be done about it.

184 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2025

Reviews

[Christy Baldyga]

Not only a timely offering, but also a practical and hopeful one. Open minded and future leaders of all industries should consider this book a must read, delivering as it does, the most logical of solutions to our shared Earth's greatest problems. Putting the power and resources to assess, address and solve into the hands of the local communities who live with the damages of the 'one size fits all' approach may be the most revolutionarily hopeful chance we have to heal this precious world..from the inside out.
Expertly researched, sensibly written, enjoyably read!

[Steve Brookstein]

I have been a colleague of one of the authors, Alejandro Crawford, for over 12 years. Both being college level teachers of entrepreneurship, we have often collaborated. When Alejandro told me about the book he co-wrote with Miriam Plavin-Masterman, I immediately purchased a copy. I thought it might be a useful resource for the graduate course I teach at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Management of Innovation.

I read the book in one sitting, and with each chapter I kept thinking, “Aha.” That reaction came from realizing that while I was teaching my students the “how” and “what” of innovation and touching on the “why,” something was missing: inspiration. One Size Fits None is inspirational because it is fundamentally about empowerment. It challenges the idea that breakthrough ideas come only from the top or from so-called geniuses. The book encourages students to see themselves as change makers who can help change the world.

Two student quotes best summarize my embrace of One Size Fits None.

“I’ve always imagined starting a business someday, and at the same time, I want to grow in
the HR industry and move into management roles where I can make an impact on how people work and grow. This book really made me think about what kind of manager I want to be, and I know it’s not the “follow the rules, fit the mold” type. I realized that if I want to lead well, I need to make space for experimentation, creativity, and the unexpected… exactly what the book calls the Kitty Hawk Principle. I’m glad I know what to call that principle now!”

“I find this book to be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks innovation only comes from
the usual individuals. I think the best part of this book is the focus on the experimental mindset, the Kitty Hawk Principle, and real stories of people creating meaningful solutions without traditional resources.”

I have assigned One Size Fits None to students in my Fall 2026 class and I have every expectation that the book will remain required reading for all subsequent semesters.

Steve Brookstein
Adjunct Professor/Innovation Coach
Rochester Institute of Technology

[Michael Shuman]

Alejandro Crawford teaches entrepreneurship and innovation for Bard College's Green MBA Program, where he is adored as a professor and mentor. His style is to mix business advice with science, policy, philosophy, and even poetry. Through his program RebelBase, he motivates students worldwide to think about business as a way of fulfilling their personal dreams and becoming the change they want to see in the planet.

"One Size Fits None" captures this pedagogical style. It's a fun, easy read.

We've all been victimized by the 'doom loop, ' where no well-informed human can ever answer our urgent questions about our bills, our 103 degree fever, our blue-screen computer, the climate crisis, you name it. One Size Fits None explains how we got here, how much damage these loops are causing, and--most importantly--how we can escape them. The simple solution, the authors argue, is to scale down our businesses and unleash millions of small-scale enterprises capable of delivering personalized and localized goods and services, which is exactly what Crawford has been doing through Bard and through RebelBase.

The book shows that we have the right tools-of design, ingenuity, and capital-to create these personalized and localized solutions, if we're smart enough to use them. And there's no better book to explain what these tools should be, and no better time to deploy them than now.

--Michael Shuman, publisher, Main Street Journal

[Vishal Parkash]

I first came across this book in one of Ale's classes at Bard, and honestly it changed how I think about why so many everyday systems feel broken. The starting point isn't complicated — banks, hospitals, airlines, all of it — but it's not the explanation I expected. It's not that these institutions are badly run. It's that somewhere along the way, "efficient" and "responsive" stopped meaning the same thing, and we've all just adjusted to living with the gap. Crawford and Plavin-Masterman call it life in "cattle class," and it's one of those phrases that's hard to un-notice once you've read it.

What kept me reading past the diagnosis was the last third of the book, where they actually try to answer their own question. They built a platform, RebelBase, to test whether people close to a problem — not people with the most capital or the right degree — could build real solutions if given structure and feedback, and they tracked what happened over four years. The examples are what stayed with me: a team in Bangladesh turning fruit peel waste into leather to get around a polluting tannery industry, a founder in the Philippines building a staffing agency for people with disabilities, a startup in Bulgaria engineering soil bacteria to cut fertilizer dependence. None of it came out of a VC pitch deck.

Given the work I do around financial inclusion, it gave me language for something I already believed but hadn't seen laid out this clearly. Thanks Ale et al.

[Sebastian Groh]

The antidote to what your average VC tells you is true

A must-read for anyone grappling with the systemic breakdowns that seem to define our era: whether it's crumbling infrastructure, institutions, deepening climate crises, or increasing alienation in customer service. Instead of searching for a single, scalable fix (Go Big or Go Home), Crawford & Plavin-Masterman challenge us to rethink problem-solving itself: How might we empower a generation hungry to make a change, the way Apple and Microsoft once empowered hundreds of millions through personal computing? What if we empowered local innovators to develop solutions tailored to their communities while learning from each other in real-time? The real challenge, the book argues, is redefining who we believe has the power to innovate. Backed by original research, this book makes a compelling case that such a shift is not only possible but necessary within the decade. A revolution isn't sparked by one person alone, but by countless people experimenting, sharing, and building change together.