Shai Agassi, Software Executive ; Electric Car Pioneer. Photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times.

The right time to launch an encore career sometimes depends more on the urgency of the social challenge than on the arrival at a particular age or stage of life.

Shai Agassi was not yet 40 when the question was put to him three years ago: What are you going to do to make the world a better place by 2020?

I knew Agassi then as the heir-apparent for the top job at SAP AG, one of the world’s largest software companies. But as he applied his considerable complex-systems thinking skills to the challenge of climate change, he realized he could make a bigger contribution replacing the gasoline-powered cars we drive with electric cars charged with renewable energy.

He quit SAP and launched Better Place, a Palo Alto, Calif., startup that has audacious plans to green the global car industry by changing the way cars are designed, serviced and paid for – and already has more than a dozen deals around the world to do just that.

“There is something meaningful that can be done in the next 15 years with electric vehicles,” Agassi told Bill Vlasic of The New York Times. “It’s about what are you going to do to make the world a better place by 2020?”

In his office at Better Place recently, Agassi told me he feels liberated to be working on a big solution to a huge problem.

Agassi’s journey from Israeli software wonder boy to top global software executive to pioneer of the Car 2.0 industry is well-told in last summer’s cover story in Wired magazine.

Agassi made his better-place pledge at a four-day meeting of Young Global Leaders in Switzerland. Back home, he turned himself into an expert on the carbon economy.

The solution, he decided, was electric cars, and Agassi set about overcoming the technology’s long-standing limitations, notably limited range. You can read about the details at the company’s web site, but the quick way to think about it is that Agassi sees electric cars as part of a “mobility system,” rather than as a standalone product. Better Place is more like AT&T than GM – just as a mobile phone carrier can give away cell phones as part of a service contract, Agassi wants to sell you mobility services, and will be happy to subsidize the cost of your car.

Such a network approach is an example of how thinking and skills from one career – SAP’s software is intended to turn complex corporate processes into strategic systems – can be deployed in an encore career tackling urgent social challenges.

“Once you have a mission,” he told Roth, “you can’t go back to having a job.”

Agassi has already started to put his complex-system skills to other issues, including the opportunity to leverage experienced mentors to increase the supply of younger engineers and scientists in his native Israel with innovative encore career incentives.

Indeed, his approach to marketing electric cars holds valuable lessons for the emerging phenomena of encore careers. As Roth describes a marketing strategy meeting last year at Better Place:

“Agassi, in a black leather jacket, a stiff blue-and-white button-down, and faded jeans, stops the moderator. ‘We still think we’re selling to them,’ he says, after one of his long, drawn-out pauses. ‘We’re not.’

“‘It’s not us to them. It’s them to us. You see, people want this to happen; we just happen to be in the way of their getting what they want. We can’t give them the car fast enough. That’s something we need to capture: ‘We’re here to serve you,’ not ‘We’re here to sell to you.’ We’re a facilitator, not the creator. This is going to be a community. We just need to get out of their way. They’re going to push for policy, they’re going to sell the cars, they’re going to be zealots.’”