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Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism | 
 enlarge | Author: Muhammad Yunus
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $9.44
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Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 3649
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 296
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 1586484931
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.7
EAN: 9781586484934
ASIN: 1586484931
Publication Date: January 7, 2008
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Condition: SATISFACTION GUARANTEED! NEW Book! May have remainder mark. Most orders ship within 1 BUSINESS DAY with ORDER CONFIRMATION.
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Product Description
In the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe, bringing with them enormous potential for positive change. But traditional capitalism cannot solve problems like inequality and poverty, because it is hampered by a narrow view of human nature in which people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit.
In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including the spiritual, the social, and the altruistic. Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet.
Creating a World Without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social businesses, including Yunus's own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already under way—and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
Social Business, a concept that can save this world August 16, 2008
When I bought this book, my expectations were primarily to get a deeper insight into micro credit, since Prof Yunus is best known for this powerful means for empowering the poor to free themselves from the shackles of poverty. However, from the first chapter itself, it was abundantly cleat that this book is about the novel concept of Social Business, a paradigm shift in the way we look at business. We have all along assumed that Business and profits inseparable Siamese twins, and the "aim of all business is to produce a surplus" and that the surplus is always assumed to be in the form of profits for the shareholders. On the other hand when we think of social welfare, we assume that this sector that includes Health Care, Sanitation, Primary Education, Eradication of communicable diseases etc are ideal cases for Government to take care, and if it falls short, NGOs and charitable organizations step in. These activities by definition need investments with no returns at least in tangible terms. Tax collections and charities from individuals and trusts are spent with no expectation of financial returns.
Between these two extremes, and mutually exclusive zones, lies the concept of a Social Business as propounded by Prof Yunus, and I am amazed by the enormous potential that this form of Organization can unleash to transform this planet, especially for half of the world's population that lives on less than a couple of dollars a day.
The Grameen Danone venture in Bangladesh is a classic example of a Social Business as explained in most chapters of the book. The objective of this organization is to maximize distribution of nutritious yoghurt to poor children in Bangladesh, who otherwise do not receive essential nutrition from their regular diet of carbohydrates. The product "Shokti Doi" is a highly affordable, tasty and nutritious product, packaged in 80 gram units. In order to be acceptable to the children, it has to be tasty- a little sweet. It competes with all other popular branded yoghurts in the market in terms of texture and taste, yet is far superior in terms of nutritious value and vitamins and has to be very affordably priced. While the conventional producers aim at maximizing consumption of their product with the aim of maximizing revenue and profits, the Grameen Danone venture aims at maximizing the reach of this product to the target segment with the aim of improving the health of poor children through this nutritional input. While conventional manufacturers aim at economies of scale by erecting large scale plants and linking the national distribution through automation of supply chain and cold chains, the focus of the Grameen Danone venture is to set up small scale local plants, with local inputs and produce just enough to meet local needs. Surprisingly the latter approach proves to be cost effective, and with the help of local Grameen women, the product is distributed to the target segment within 48 hours of its manufacture, eliminating the need for expensive cold chains.
Investors in a social business are not giving away money as in the case of a charity, where they forget their money once it is donated. The Social Business is self sustainable financially, and gives back the original investments to the investors over a period of time, and nothing more. The investors do not receive any profits or dividends from the Social Business. The profits are retained for further growth and not distributed as dividends.
The Social business executes the laudable social objectives with the missionary zeal of a charity, with the efficiency and speed of a profit maximizing business. Hence, we have a unique business model to solve substantial social problems, as demonstrated by Grameen Danone in maximizing nutrition and health in poor children through affordable yoghurt.
The argument that social objectives and business goals are two different criteria that cannot go together (or that social welfare is at best a byproduct of a commercial business) is challenged and Prof Yunus makes out a very compelling case for a new form of business that can address global problems. It is amply demonstrated that free markets fail to address social issues that need large scale investments while government spending and initiatives of charities are inefficient and many times financially and economically unviable to achieve sustainable results.
It is time that we pay serious attention to the concept of Social Business through social MBA programs, public and private sector cooperation and necessary legislation to define this form of business so as to ensure that the governance structures, business processes and accounting standards emerge to establish the new form of organization that can play a major role the solving global problems, especially in relation to elimination of poverty from the face of his earth.
A well deserved five star rating for this classic that has the power to change this world, forever and for the better.
A noble dream August 11, 2008
Poverty is a threat to peace, hence the Nobel Peace Prize.
But his arguments for social business are also a contribution to modern economic theory.
I first read the epilogue ( the lecture for the Nobel Prize), which summarizes the ideas.
Recommended for anyone interested in human development , in particular the situation of the "bottom billion".
Excellent primer for the emerging field of social businesses July 9, 2008
As someone in the midst of trying to make a small business run within the lines of corporate social responsibility, I've really wrestled with the inherent problems with the whole "triple-bottom-line" movement. Primarily, I've wrestled with how one chooses which of the many bottom lines as they compete over and against each other. Yunus tackles this issue head on with his idea of the "social business" that is a single-bottom-line business: the bottom line of social transformation. I particularly like that he builds his case around the remarkable example of the Grameen-Danone social business partnership in Bangladesh. Time will tell if that experiment proves sustainable, but nonetheless, it's super helpful to have something tangible to point to rather than just a series of ideas or arguments. Because Muhammad Yunus' work with the Grameen Bank has won him the right to preach without real data, it's all the more inspiring to hear his examples from the dozens of other social businesses within the Grameen family. I should mention that the last 1/3rd of the book veers into some potentially "wishful-thinking" territory, I'd nevertheless heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in the field, and was glad to give it 5 stars.
"the missing piece of capitalism" May 21, 2008
"No one who cares about humanity," writes Muhammad Yunus, "is satisfied with a world in which a few hundred million people enjoy access to all the resources of the planet, while billions more struggle to survive." But that's our world. Yunus cites one study that concluded that in the year 2000, "the richest 1 percent owned 40 percent of the world's assets, and the richest 10 percent owned 85 percent. By contrast, the bottom half of the world's population owned barely 1 percent of the planet's assets."
This disparity of resource distribution is wrong in practice, says Yunus. With globalized capitalism devouring diminishing resources, it's unsustainable; it also threatens global security. But extreme poverty is wrong in principle, too, because it deprives billions of human beings of the most basic of all human rights, the right to live a decent life. For over thirty years, Muhammad Yunus has worked with remarkable creativity, perseverance and vision to rectify these stubborn inequities. Most people know him as the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Today the Grameen Bank gives collateral free micro-loans to 7 million of the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh (97% of whom are women). Since its inception they have made loans totaling $6 billion, with a repayment rate of 99%. Yunus tells this story in his autobiographical bestseller Banker to the Poor; Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (1999, 2003).
His newest book continues the story of the many and latest permutations of the Grameen vision to eradicate poverty. This includes a stable of twenty-five Grameen replicants that specialize in everything from solar energy and internet kiosks to fish ponds, textiles, cell phone ladies, and livestock breeding. But all these are mere "stepping stones" in Yunus's fertile imagination. The focus of his newest book is what he calls "social business." While normal businesses must focus on profit-maximization, and can even be sued by shareholders if they don't, a "social business" is what Yunus calls a "non loss, non-dividend" business whose primary objective is some social benefit. A social business competes in the market place with every other business, it must cover its costs, and it reinvests profits back into the company. This is a far more radical idea than mere corporate social responsibility, which in his mind tends to window-dressing and has an inherent conflict of interest between the requirement to maximize profit and the intention to do good.
Sound crazy? Well, read this book and its extended case study of how Grameen partnered with Groupe Danone of France to create what Yunus calls "the world's very first consciously designed multinational social business," launched in 2006. This was followed by Grameen's eye care hospitals. He thus envisions in social businesses a "giant leap" forward for addressing poverty in a scalable, replicable way. "Social business," he argues, "is the missing piece of the capitalist system." They do what government, NGOs, charity, and multi-lateral organizations like the World Bank can never do. Yunus is the quintessential dreamer--his wish list for the world of 2050 has nineteen bullet points; but read this book and his previous one and you'll also see that he's the consummate doer.
Someone rewrite the Capitalist Textbooks May 17, 2008
Yunus has refined the problems of the current capitalist structure by divulging common sense and promoting the new idea of a social business. Here is a book loaded with optimistic ideals for a brighter future that anyone will doubtlessly enjoy, though many may also be skeptical. One looks for meaning in life, a desire unsatisfied by the PMBs (profit-maximizing business) of today. Everyday, citizens of the developed world are bombarded with the onslaught of advertising promoting products, whereas Yunus suggests for the new social businesses to serve a similar function to public service announcements, promoting healthy lifestyles. In a world where the poor are shunned and poverty deemed an inevitable problem, nothing can be done. However, Yunus suggests that we rid society of the ills of poverty by rejecting this idea and striving towards a goal to end poverty. "Creating a World Without Poverty" is an engaging journey from front to back that serves as a beacon providing aspiring entrepreneurs with a chivalrous goal to solve the problems that too often are left for the next generation.
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